Migrant Labor in Southern Rhodesia

Abstract

S INCE World War II, Southem Rhodesia has been undergoing an economic revolution. Throughout its previous history, gold mining had remained the basis of its economy, but in the postwar years this has been overshadowed by an agricultural expansion that has brought new wealth to the Colony. Still more significant have been the postwar rise of secondary industry and the striking growth of industrial centers. Since 1945 the European population has nearly doubled; for immigration has been at a rate exceeding i per cent of the population a month a rate probably unparalleled in the history of the British Commonwealth.' Expansion has been greatest in the twin cities of Salisbury and Bulawayo, now overcrowded with more than half the Colony's white population. Within a decade Southern Rhodesia will almost certainly become the industrial hub of Central Africa. A disquieting feature of this expansion, in industry and agriculture alike, is its dependence on migrant African labor. Southern Rhodesia at present employs about half a million Africans, of whom half are indigenous and half are migrants from neighboring territories. Alien migrants include Africans from Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia to the extent of one-quarter and one-sixth respectively of their able-bodied male populations-evidence, incidentally, of the economic iinterdependence, as well as of the human interrelationships, of the territories comprising the Central African Federation. These migrants constitute nearly two-thirds of all African emigrants from the two northern territories. In addition, Southern Rhodesia employs about one-tenth of all African emigrants from Mozambique. Yet, except for the Mozambique flow, interterritorial migration is waning. Increasingly, labor migration, hitherto regarded by most African