From Circular Migrants in the Mines to Transnational Polygynists in the Townships: A Century of Transformation in Central Mozambican Male Migration Regimes (1900‐1999)

Abstract This article tracks the most significant transformations in the international migration regime between central Mozambique and South Africa throughout the twentieth century as the product of complex and continuous interactions between the broader political‐economic environment and local forms of gendered and inter‐generational social struggle. A century of perspective brings into resolution the complex linkages between forms of migrancy such as labour migration and refugee displacement that are usually treated as categorically distinct, but which are be demonstrated here to significantly inform each other. As a result of its deployment as a strategy for coping with various forms of political duress, seizing new economic opportunity, and negotiating local social relations, the meaning and practice of migration has been transformed throughout the twentieth century from a strategy for ensuring social reproduction back in Mozambique into the indispensable mechanism for enacting transnational lives that presume and pursue simultaneous social and economic investment and involvement in both South Africa and in Mozambique.