Bagagešu (Those of My Home): Women Migrants, Ethnicity, and Performance in South Africa

Abstract

The efforts of southern African women migrant workers to gain control of resources in the linked spheres of urban workplace and rural base have rarely been characterized —by anthropologists or local communities—as ethnic in nature. This suggests the truth of the southern African Tswana proverb that "women have no tribe." It is puzzling, though, that women are seen in other contexts as quintessentially traditional. I discuss this paradox, referring to the mobilization of a sotho identity centered on the ideas of "family" and "home" by groups of migrant women performers from South Africa's Northern Province. Both ideas are expressed and symbolized in emotive terms that make them appear intrinsic or primordial in nature, but both on closer examination emerge as complex combinations of ascription and achievement. Women migrants' claim to be sotho gives them a right to a voice in the public arena. The right to a voice derives in part from the proximity with male migrants' ethnic identity, but it also speaks of a new and autonomous identity that selects and interweaves elements from the shifting terrains of sotho man‐ and womanhood. It is through an ideal of moral and musical goodness, played out in the practices of musical performance, that elements of gender and ethnic identity converge and are negotiated, [performance, ethnicity, labor migration, home, family, gender]

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