The Mozambican Miner: Collective and interdisciplinary research; past and present

Marc Wuyts spoke about the famous 1977 study called the Mozambican Miner (published later as Black Gold). He focused on its importance as an early example of collective interdisciplinary research at the new Centre of African Studies (CAS, CEA). The applied research project was requested by Mozambique’s Frelimo government to analyse and make policy proposals concerning a big early independence issue – apartheid South Africa’s secret decision to dramatically cut the Mozambican migrant mine labour force and thus seriously weaken the Mozambican economy. The mine labour programme was a major source of government funds in the late colonial and early independence period. Ruth First, later assassinated in her Maputo office, by the apartheid South African security forces, was asked by Frelimo to do a short piece of applied policy-oriented research. When Ruth said that a rapid piece of research could be done in seven months, the university Rector was horrified – ‘can’t it be much quicker’ he said! Eventually, Ruth was given the seven months, that she had estimated as the shortest possible time for a serious study. Ruth had thought she could do the work herself with a few colleagues she knew well – including Marc Wuyts and Dave Wield. But Marc and Dave, keen to continue more collective research to train young Mozambican and other ‘cooperante’ researchers, from a variety of disciplines, persuaded Ruth to set up a collective project. The summary below contains parts of Marc’s talk, together with more details taken from Marc’s 2014 article in the Review of African Political Economy.

Aquino de Bragança, the Director of the CEA, provided the initial impulse that would change the direction of research at the CEA when - at the end of 1976 - he initiated a small research project (or, more accurately, a desk study) on the Rhodesian Question in the run-up to the Geneva Conference on Zimbabwe. Aquino was then deeply involved with the process of decolonisation in Zimbabwe as advisor to the Frelimo leadership. President Samora Machel requested Aquino to prepare a background paper on the socioeconomic situation in Zimbabwe, since Frelimo wanted a better understanding of what kind of issues, tensions and contradictions were likely to emerge in the process of decolonisation. The report itself was a rather modest undertaking, although it was well received and subsequently published as a book in Portuguese and in English (CEA 1977a, 1980) and as an article in the Revue Tiers Monde in January 1979. But the experience itself - an intense process of team-based researching, writing and editing, spiced with fascinating group discussions chaired by Aquino, all at breakneck speed within about five weeks - was highly significant. It had an effect akin to giving the CEA an electric jolt. It was the research project on the Mozambican miner, however, that turned this jolt into a novel research practice. This project acted as a catalyst in changing the practice of research at the CEA by introducing three innovations: (1) a focus on the 'actual' (while taking account of its historical roots) rather than on history; (2) a switch from individual-based towards predominantly team-based research rooted in fieldwork; and (3) the introduction of a sense of (political) urgency in research to respond to immediate challenges of transition.

Ruth arrived in early 1977 to undertake the study, on the export of mine labour - an inherited colonial structure par excellence. Initially, she was minded to do this project jointly with only a few researchers - three or four at most - but she was open to suggestions. Based on our prior experience of the study on the Rhodesian Question, Dave Wield and I suggested a collective endeavour involving all researchers affiliated with the CEA. Ruth accepted this, although hesitantly at first because she well aware of the risks involved: on the one hand, the risky trade-off between potentially richer output versus heightened uncertainty of outcome and, on the other, an inevitable increase in organisational work. She was also particularly aware that if we did not produce a finished report at the end of it the space for this type of research would be severely restricted or closed down altogether. Failure was not an option she was willing to risk, but the decisive factor for her was that this process would benefit Mozambican researchers through a collective process of learning by doing research.

The study on mine labour thus became the first collective interdisciplinary field-based CEA research project. The problem was that none of us had experience with organising a collective research project of this nature, particularly not on this time scale. The core team consisted of a heterogeneous group of 12 CEA researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds - history, anthropology, sociology, politics, law, engineering and economics - and varied levels of research experience. This was a challenging task, eventually with more than 40 researchers, most doing at least two jobs at the same time, with low social science research skills, diverse skills and disciplines, and very low fieldwork experience! There was no readily available model so that the process followed could only be described as thoughtful trial-and-error improvisation.

The first problem was how to mould this group of researchers into a reasonably coherent team. Ruth’s answer was to set up a weekly seminar. This initially functioned as a study group, subsequently turning into a discussion seminar with presentations by members of the research team and, finally, ending up as a practical workshop to develop questionnaires, organise the collection of secondary data and discuss preliminary findings prior to rural fieldwork (which took place in July 1977). The study group was to forge a common theoretical understanding of migrant labour in southern Africa and of the specificity of Mozambican inherited colonial structures and processes, particularly (but not exclusively) in relation to the export of labour power from southern Mozambique. We started by discussing the broader literature on the development of migrant labour systems in southern Africa, but focused in particular on the study of the theoretical contributions by South African Marxist scholars like Harold Wolpe (1972) and Martin Legassick (1974) amongst others. The study group became a seminar when we turned to the Mozambican context with a series of presentations given by team members. Antonio Nogueira da Costa and Luis de Brito gave a seminar on the periodisation of the colonial economy and its impact on the regional diversification of rural colonial structures in Mozambique. Luis de Brito and Antonio Pacheco talked about how the state-to state agreements between Portugal and South Africa limited the export of labour to southern Mozambique and institutionalised a system in which payment of part of the miners' wages was deferred until their return to Mozambique, and paid out in gold (at the prevailing official price of gold) to the colonial government. David Wield presented a seminar comparing his own work on the periodisation of industrial development in Mozambique with similar work done by Joaquim Brum in the economics department.

The seminar subsequently turned into a practical workshop when we focused our attention on the collection and preliminary analysis of secondary data on the flow of migrant labour to South Africa, and formulated questionnaires - on work histories and on rural household composition, agricultural production and employment. In this context, one important contribution of Dave in this phase was an ‘at a distance’ study of the mine labour process and Mozambican migrants generic labour skills. He gave a very useful presentation on the minimum we needed to know about mining as a production process and about the terminology used in the South African mines to denote different categories of workers. I thought it was fascinating, to discover what work in a mine actually entails and what the terms were for each category of labour, like the boss boy and the field boy, and the plumbers boy, and the this that and the other, and what it was to work on the face. That fascinated me so much that the first time I went to Zimbabwe I asked to go down the mine and see it for myself, to actually see what it was like to be in a mine deep underground.

The preliminary analysis of data collected was fed back into the seminar, thus gradually turning it into a forum to discuss work in progress, which rendered our discussions more focused and concrete. Through this process, the group developed into a more cohesive research team. We started building a common way of looking at things, trying to come to terms with coming from very different disciplinary backgrounds, but had to forge a common view. For me, the key was to build a relationship between not abandoning your discipline, but strengthening your discipline in the process of thinking and doing, thinking differently about the way your discipline is useful.

Initially, data collection focused on coming to grips with the system of recruitment and employment of Mozambican mine labour. Recruitment of migrant (mine) labour in southern Africa was monopolised by WENELA (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association), the labour recruitment organisation of the Chamber of Mines, representing the collective interests of its affiliate members (which included most of the major mining companies in South Africa). WENELA had a head office in Maputo and a number of compounds across southern Mozambique where recruited workers were assembled and subsequently dispatched to the mines. The head office was the place to get historical data on mine labour recruitment and to find out about the strategies and tactics of the Chamber of Mines in relation to the recruitment of mine labour from Mozambique. The compounds provided us with venues to collect work histories from workers going to or returning from the mines. From the first trips to the labour compounds in Maputo and near the border with South Africa it quickly became clear to us that we were in the midst of a very volatile situation. Workers were nervous and uncertain about their future since there had been serious cut backs in the recruitment of labour from 1976 onwards. Confusion ran high among mine workers about who was behind these cutbacks: the South African Chamber of Mines or the Mozambican government? Most believed that it was the Mozambican government that was clamping down on mine labour. That workers held this view was not surprising since the attitude of most local state and party cadres to miners was at best ambiguous, if not hostile. Going to the mines was treated as a moral vice or reflective of a lack of patriotism.

Ruth was very scrupulous when it came to dealing with mine workers at the WENELA compounds and with local Mozambican cadres. She insisted that during each visit a clear explanation should be given as to who we were and what we wanted to know from the miners. For this purpose, Antonio Pacheco prepared a standard speech - carefully crafted, no promises, no agitation - which he would deliver in a public gathering before any interviews were held. When it came to dealing with the South African management of the WENELA office, the approach was very different. Here Ruth fell back on her skills as an investigative journalist. The manager of the WENELA office was enchanted with Ruth's frequent visits and enjoyed talking to her, which made him much less cautious than he should have been. Ruth was exceptionally good at prying confidential information out of people. She would usually do these interviews jointly with David Wield, who could read text upside-down with remarkable ease. While Ruth kept the manager occupied, Dave would quietly read the messages on his desk top. Alternatively, Ruth would ask whether she could have another look at a fairly innocent telex the manager had shown her before and, while perusing the file with telexes in search of this particular telex, she would quickly scan the contents of other much more important texts. From these visits, and from parallel visits to the Mozambican Ministry of Labour, it became clear that, contrary to what mine workers believed, the initiative to cut back labour came from the South African Chamber of Mines. Numbers were reduced dramatically from 1976 onwards and recruitment was restricted to experienced workers (those with a valid re-employment certificate). It became clear that this was not a temporary measure, but a definite rupture with past trends.

In the seminar we speculated on the reasons behind this new trend: whether the Chamber of Mines aimed to internalise labour recruitment within South Africa in the wake of the rise in mine wages and the rising levels of unemployment in South Africa during the early 1970s, or whether it was a deliberate move against Mozambique to pre-empt the threat of an abrupt withdrawal of labour instigated by the Mozambican authorities or to deprive Mozambique of an important source of foreign exchange and rural income. This question of cutbacks in recruitment imbued our research with an increased sense of urgency. The situation was changing rapidly, which, for Ruth, reinforced the imperative to focus the attention of our research on the direction in which the migrant labour system was moving and not just on how it worked (or, more accurately, used to work). It also placed the research squarely within the domain of policy, particularly since there appeared to be little awareness within the Mozambican party and state structures of the potential economic and social consequences of this dramatic fall in labour recruitment. The prevailing position on mine labour tended to be passive but ambivalent: mine labour was tolerated as a remnant of the past without much consideration of the depth of its roots in existing economic structures and processes. The question of how to transform this deep-rooted system of migrant labour and what this implied for the nature of economic policies to be pursued was never seriously considered.

It became clear to me that the receipts from mine labour were absolutely massively important to late colonial and early independence Mozambique. 60% of miners’ income was paid in gold to the Portuguese (after independence Mozambican) authorities who would then pay the miner in the local currency. This government income was paid in gold at the official price of gold but traded at the much higher market rate. We estimated that the income from mine labour was about two and a half times the size of exports of Mozambique.

It also made me realise why Mozambique was going through the initial post-independence production crisis without paying a financial price. The remarkable thing about Mozambique in the first years was that production collapsed but Mozambique government finances did not suffer dramatically. But I realised that if suddenly South Africa took measures to significantly reduce recruitment from Mozambique, you could predict that two years on there would be a major crisis in Mozambique. It was like a puzzle coming together, clicking together, which both helped me see as an economist what was happening, and at the same time learn from those distinctive interdisciplinary contributions.

The month of July was a period of recess during which students (and staff) were required to do extra-curricular activities, usually involving fieldwork across Mozambique. Ruth's original idea had been to cover both Gaza and Inhambane provinces as a challenging contrast between the more fertile lands in the Limpopo valley and the dryer lands of Inhambane but floods in Gaza made that impossible. The logistics of rural field research were daunting. After a brief preparatory workshop to train the students for fieldwork, the team was dispatched to Inhambane and divided into five brigades located at different sites, and a mobile brigade (including myself and Ruth First). At least two members of the CEA core team provided direction to each brigade, Dave being in Pembe, near Homoine. By the time the dust settled, the total size of the research team had grown to slightly more than 40, with the addition of cadres from the local labour and agricultural offices. A major problem we encountered was the widespread ambivalence towards migrant labour among government and party cadres. The brief of the brigades was to explore the interdependencies between the inflow of remittances from wage labour, the large-scale withdrawal of male labour from agriculture, and the dynamics of rural production and accumulation. The household questionnaire was designed to collect data on household composition, its dependence on wage labour, the level of its agricultural production and other local off-farm activities, and its sources of money income. The fieldwork was not organised around any inflexible prior hypothesis about the nature of these interrelations.

We were, of course, familiar with the analytical literature on migrant labour by South African Marxist scholars who argued that - as Ruth later would phrase it - 'the access of the migrant labourer and his family to domestic production provides part of the means of subsistence from which the capitalist sector benefits, and the means, thus, by which capitalism derives cheap labour power' (First 1983, 7). This thesis implied that the 'means of subsistence acquired by a worker are thus divided into two parts: the direct wages paid to him in and during employment, and the indirect wages which he receives in the form of social support derived from family agriculture - that is, care for the women, children and the aged, and care for himself during sickness and in between spells of employment' (Ibid.). We took this as a guiding premise but not as a rigid hypothesis.

For example, we did not take it for granted that this workforce, in the periods of its dispersal to the rural areas from which it had been recruited, was merely or entirely a reserve army of labour (Ibid., 8). Our approach was distinctly more eclectic and, hence, considerable space was left for further hypothesis searching though case studies, thus allowing for diversity in emphasis and approach of research across brigades. This was, of course, a risky strategy, but it also had a greater potential to get richer insights.

The mobile brigade experienced a fascinating adventure: days of travel on rural roads and tracks to visit and discuss with the different brigades about the progress of their work, give suggestions and transmit ideas between brigades, participate in meetings, bring food, carry letters to and fro and, occasionally, transport those who fell ill to town and back. One of the brigades got lost, having stayed at its assigned location (Sitila) for only four or five days and then moved on far into the sparsely populated interior of Inhambane province, stopping at each village for a few days before moving on to the next. Since they moved faster than the mobile brigade, we failed to catch up with them, each time being told that they had moved further on. Only after two weeks did a desperate continuous 10-hour search manage to locate them. By pure accident we happened to stop at the same roadside restaurant (one of very few in the area). They looked happy enough, but were a terrible sight - they had never stopped long enough to wash their clothes, shave or even cook properly. They saw research as covering the widest area in the shortest time and definitely established a record of sorts (some kind of early variant of rapid rural appraisal). As a result, they had not made much use of the questionnaires, but relied mainly on participating in village meetings, holding group discussions and, interestingly, visiting primary schools and asking children what their aspirations were for the future. Notwithstanding the major changes that were taking place in Mozambique at time, the boys almost invariably answered that they would go to the mines.

Fortunately, the other brigades stayed put and carried out their research in their assigned locations. In our earlier seminar discussions, we had thought that a good starting point would be for brigades to distinguish between peasant households that had a history of mine labour and those that had not, and then find out what differentiated them. In practice, it took most brigades only a day or two to discard this idea. It quickly became clear that all able-bodied men (with the exception of teachers, shop keepers or state functionaries) had a history of mine labour. Dave’s brigade in Pembe had been told by the Grupo Dinamizador (local political group) to explain the research to the population. The team of five explained their research to the local community in an open air mass meeting of several hundred people: men and women. As the crowd grew, the team had to strip back its talk which had been designed for a small group. But we need not have worried about whether the crowd would understand our research approach – at the end of our explanation a voice at the back of the crowd shouted ‘Who built Johannesburg?’ and the crowd roared back ‘We built Johannesburg’.

Realising that there was an opportunity to gather data, the team began asking questions of the gathering. It was here that the full impact of mine work became clear. They asked who had worked in the mines and a sea of hands went up. So, they asked the men who had not worked in the mines. Only six hands went up. Later, the team checked and three of these were local school teachers, the other three were disabled. Every other man had worked in the mines.

The brigade in Pembe zoomed in on the question of wage labour and peasant differentiation in agricultural production. They noted that, while almost all able bodied men had a history of mine labour, some did so throughout the whole of their working lives while others relied on mine labour only at the beginning of their working life, using wage remittances to invest in agriculture, trade or local crafts (carpentry, tailoring etc.). Other brigades pursued different angles, but a common theme that emerged across all the brigades was the wage-dependent nature of agricultural production and accumulation. For a young man to establish himself in agriculture he first needed to pay lobolo, financed from mine wages, to get married. Remittances from mine wages were not used just for consumption, but also to acquire land, to pay for bricks or roofing to build a house or water reservoir, to buy a plough and oxen (for own use and for sale as a service to plough the land of others) or to buy tools for various crafts like tailoring, carpentry, brickmaking and so on.

The end phase of the project combined data analysis, writing up and editing, done in a mad rush before Ruth returned to England. The task of bringing together the disparate contributions of different authors with different traditions and very varied levels of expertise and experience into a coherent and quality piece of work would have been an enormous challenge, even under more favourable time constraints. Ruth did all the coordination and the bulk of the editing, as well as writing a considerable part of the report herself. Her flat turned into an editing house: drafts, books and papers scattered all over the table or floor, half-written chapters piled up next to the typewriter, and a huge map with the names of all involved with specifications of who had what to be handed in when to whom. In between spells of writing or editing, Ruth raced all over town to collect drafts from authors and take them for translation (when required) and collect scripts from typists (mostly volunteers). Ruth  was an excellent, but also ruthless, editor. It would not take long before a draft she was reading would be rendered unrecognisable, cut up into multiple snippets of paper scattered all over the table, which she then managed to assemble back into a coherent collage with handwritten text in between. It was only a few days before Ruth left that the final draft materialised. Printing took a bit longer and, hence, Ruth received the first English edition of The Mozambican Miner only after she had returned to the University of Durham in November.

But the major success of the project was probably to show government that collective applied interdisciplinary research was possible and could produce quality results in relatively short periods. Later collective research continued for several years until, and beyond, Ruth’s assassination in 1982.

The lessons I drew from working with Ruth, Dave and all those committed researchers at the Centre of African Studies, were twofold. First, that  doing interdisciplinary research was not about abandoning your discipline, but about learning how to use it with others to collectively build new meanings and solutions. This required looking at what my own discipline could contribute in creating synergy with other disciplinary approaches and, hence, a willingness to venture outside my own discipline to understand other disciplinary perspectives, not with the purpose of seeking the least common denominator between disciplines, but to arrive at an analysis of a problem where the whole is more than an addition of its different parts (disciplines). To create this kind of synergy in interdisciplinary work requires a certain degree of in-built redundancy: that is, a willingness to open up to and transgress into other disciplines, not to become expert in these approaches, but to create an arena where each can gain perspective on how one’s own disciplinary strength and skills can connect with and complement the strengths of other disciplinary approaches. It made me more aware of both the strength and the limits of my own disciplinary training. Later, I found that my own institution had a much less comprehensive approach to interdisciplinarity.  The approach to teaching often gravitated towards opting for the least common denominator: ‘Oh, you can’t teach that because it’s too difficult for them, you can’t teach these methods, you can’t do that’. From working with Ruth First, I learned that interdisciplinarity means something different to lowering disciplinary horizons in order to build a broader but hazier gaze.

The second lesson I learned was about the relation between macro context and micro processes. Before going to Mozambique my own work had always been macro in orientation, and particularly concerned with macroeconomic models of economic development. Working at the Centre of African Studies was my first encounter with fieldwork in rural areas. I was interested to participate but initially it felt as an excursion away from my own focus with macro analysis.  The research on the Mozambican miner taught me that the general (macro context and processes) resides in the particular (micro processes and outcomes). Doing fieldwork enriches the way one looks at macro processes and renders macro analysis more concrete, contextual and historically specific.   

References

CEA (Centro de Estudos Africanos). 1977a. A Questäo Rodesiana. Lisbon: Iniciativas Editoriais.

CEA (Centro de Estudos Africanos). 1977b. The Mozambican Miner: A Study in the Export of Labour. Maputo: Author (mimeo).

CEA (Centro de Estudos Africanos). 1980. Zimbabwe - The Rhodesian Question. Maputo: INLD.

First, R. 1983. Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Legassick, M. 1974. "South African Capital Accumulation and Violence." Economy and Society 3 (3): 253-291.

Wölpe, H. 1972. "Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid." Economy and Society 1 (4): 425-456.

Wuyts, M. 1981a. Camponeses e Economia Rural em Moçambique. Maputo: Imprensa National.

Wuyts, M. 1989. Money and Planning for Socialist Transition: The Mozambican Experience

Wuyts, M (2014) ‘Ruth First and the Mozambican miner’ Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 41, No. 139.