Adamastor’s Mighty Shade

Abstract

The black migrant worker bestrides the perceptual field of the urban white South African like a colossus. The urban white, preoccupied by this massive figure, has engaged in a macabre relationship with it over the historically relatively short period of their acquaintance; actually, this relationship has been almost entirely reflexive. The migrant has no characteristics other than those allocated to him by the white imagination. In the documents of the white imagination, the novels and to some extent poems and plays, the newspaper reports and other forms in which the urban white community has spoken to itself and, less effectively, others in the years spanning the industrialisation of South Africa, the giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the whites’ deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matt black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an understanding of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago.