It is well known that migrant labour to South Africa has been an important factor of integration in the southern African economy for the last 150 years. In some of South Africa's neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, migrancy is amongst the most important foreign sources of income. In Mozambique the dependence on wage labour income is dramatically noticeable in the rural economy of the three southern provinces, namely Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane (see Figures 3.1; 3.2).

In recent years there has been considerable debate about the implications of migrant labour for both the sending countries as well as for South Africa. Concern within South Africa has focused on the continuation of the system or on introducing changes into it. Government departments and research institutions have looked very carefully at the influx of migrant workers into the newly democratic South Africa. This relates to the expectation of positive social and economic transformation under the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), recently restructured into the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Programme (GEAR), in areas such as housing, employment, better working conditions, health-care facilities, and education. Ongoing immigration is seen to reflect increasing numbers of people competing for these resources.

Under apartheid, migrant labour from the neighbouring countries to the mines and plantations in South Africa had both political and economic implications. I am not going to deal with this aspect, or with the history of migrant labour to South Africa, as they have been extensively researched and a vast literature is available on these issues. Current debates have tended to underemphasise or overlook crucially important matters, which lent a complex economic and social dimension to migrancy during the colonial and post-colonial period (1928-78). These matters include contracts and compulsory repatriation, the deferred pay system, compensation and indemnity procedures. For Mozambique, all these procedures were a result of complicated negotiations between Portugal and South Africa in the1920s. To some extent they represented a victory for Portuguese rural commercial interests, and for African families. It is not my intention to analyse those negotiations, but I would argue that compulsory repatriation after completion of a twelve- or eighteen-month contract, and deferred pay, were but two sides of the same coin.