Gendering the Migrant Labor Body: A Comparative Study of the Punishment of Namibia's Migrant Labor Force, 1915-1975

As the predominant mode of labor organization during South Africa’s rule in Namibia, the territory’s migrant labor system revolutionized the economic, political and social lives of the thousands of young men who migrated from northern Namibia into work on the white-owned farms and mines in the south. As my paper argues, these journeys were intimately gendered, not only through the labor recruitment process, which classified men based on physical characteristics that determined the amount of money they would earn, but also in the disciplining of the labor force by the white judicial system. In labor centers throughout the country, thousands of migrant workers were fined, imprisoned, and whipped for violating the central provisions of the infamous 1920 Masters & Servants Act. Based on my research into the criminal records of the towns of Keetmanshoop and Tsumeb, I demonstrate that farm workers were whipped much more frequently than miners, even though the latter constituted a more dangerous opposition to white economic domination. Such discrepancies in punitive practice not only shaped the experience of migrant workers in the southern labor centers, they also informed understandings of masculinity that would impact gendered constructions of power back home in the north.