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PARTISAN REVIEW
foolproof or leakproof; of preventing the silt of a permanent black
population from accumulating and thickening around the cities.
On one thing, however, both opponents and upholders of
the system were agreed. That was in their conviction of its singu–
larity. Nowhere else in the world were there to be found the racial,
economic, and cultural conditions that had produced it. Of course,
groups of migrant laborers performing specialized functions had
been a familiar feature of many societies at different times: fruit
pickers, for example, or corn harvesters, or sheep shearers, or plate
layers, or gangs of navvies. There was even a tradition in some
countries of groups of miners moving about from one seam or site
to another. But the sporadic if recurrent appearance of such
groups was not to be confused with what was to be found in South
Africa. The patterns of race and labor relations, the economy and
the law, even the geography of the country, were both factors in
and functions of the migratory labor system; in one way or another
it affected not just the consciousness of but the very selfhood of
everyone who lived there.
All analogies are misleading; yet we could hardly understand
anything that happens to us if we did not constantly try to draw
them.
It
would be surprising if the reader in Europe or the United
States did not feel that at least some important aspects of the South
African system have become all too familiar to him. Forty or fifty
years ago no one in South Africa could have known that within a
single country, over relatively small distances, and in terms of
relatively small numbers, his countrymen were pioneering a form
of labor which was eventually to have parallels all over the world,
and that was to involve the movement of peoples not within
countries but between them, and not just between countries but
between continents. Nobody, least of all those earnestly liberal
or Marxist sociologists and economists in South Africa who
opposed the migratory labor system, and who demonstrated con–
clusively (to one another) how backward it was, could have ima–
gined that some of the most highly developed countries of the
Western world would themselves come to depend on their own
version of that system.
It
is not on railway stations but in airports that one is perhaps
most likely to see today's breed of migrant laborers actually on the
move; one can see them not only in the developed countries but
also in some which are merely moneyed. One group I saw about a
