Keywords

Introduction

Overall, there is an individualist thrust in migration studies, whether in the earlier theories of functionalism and historical materialism or the current aspiration–capability framework. Aside from differences in nuances, these theories take individuals as the primary unit of analysis and most engage with the collective dimensions of migration either tangentially or instrumentally. Seeking to redress a knowledge gap, this chapter discusses Hadiya migration to South Africa as a collective project, its changing contours towards individualisation, and the implications of this for the viability of the Hadiya migration project.

We provide ethnographic examples to substantiate our arguments. These relate to four moments in the migration process: the onset of Hadiya migration to South Africa as a collective project through a prophecy and the associated sacred imagination of South Africa as the promised land; the intensification of migration as a collective project expressed in the form of an elite-managed historical project of catching up; the role of social networks in building not only individual but also collective capabilities and the erosion of the collective nature and increasing individualisation of the Hadiya migration project under the influence of success in accumulating material wealth and associated greed. We argue that exclusive categorisation of migration as either individualist or collective at any given moment in time is a simplification of reality, suggesting that we should instead conceptualise migration as being located on a continuum with the two options taking extreme ends.

Moreover, the nature of migration could oscillate from one end to the other (and back) across time due to the influence of different factors. Migration should be viewed as a complex social change process during which the nature of the migration experience itself changes. In making this argument, we want to highlight the collectivist side of migration as a better approach to understand southern realities. However, while arguing for a greater engagement with migration as a collective project we reject a dichotomy between the individual and collective dimensions of the migration process and argue for a continuum within which the relative dominance of one or the other component varies over time.

This chapter is based on the findings of research undertaken as part of the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Hub1 focusing on the Ethiopia–South Africa corridor. Various qualitative research methods were used to generate the data used in this chapter: from key informant and in-depth interviews to life histories, focus group discussions, and document analysis. Fieldwork was carried out at various times from 2019 to 2022 in Addis Ababa, and Hadiya Administrative Zone in southern Ethiopia focusing on four emigration localities: Hosanna, Jajura, Fonqo and Shashogo. The chapter is also based on limited phone interviews with Hadiya migrants in South Africa and online sources of information.

The chapter is organised in five major sections. The first section situates the chapter within the main theoretical frameworks in migration studies, making a case for the need to go beyond the prevailing individualist thrust. Section two discusses the genesis of Hadiya migration to South Africa, which is part of the wider Ethiopia–South Africa migration corridor. Section three examines how Hadiya migration to South Africa as a collective project. It consists of two sub-sections. The first of these focuses on how the Hadiya have built collective capabilities by drawing on religious resources—from sacred imagination of South Africa as a promised land to spiritual negotiation of risks throughout the journey, to place making at destinations. Second, is the role of social networks in creating collective migration capabilities, evident in covering the cost of migration and mutual support mechanisms throughout the journey and in the process of settlement and adaptation at the destination. Section four discusses shifts in Hadiya migration project from collective to increasingly individualist orientation, abetted by greed and the capitalist logic that underpins material accumulation, and leading to the unravelling of the supportive social institutions as free riding and competition set in. As greed is taking precedence over the public good, Hadiya society is now going through a reflexive moment as migration is increasingly turning from a “blessing” into a “curse”. We conclude by making a case for a greater engagement with migration as a collective project especially in the context of the Global South. However, in doing so, we should take the collective and the individualist in migration processes as a continuum, not as binaries.

Conceptual Framework—Beyond the Individualist Thrust in Migration Studies

The existing literature on migration can be grouped into two three main approaches, all with an emphasis on individuals as their unit of analysis albeit with some differences in terms of how far they engage with migration as a collective project. These are functionalism, historical structuralism and the aspiration-capability framework (ACF). Functionalism conceptualises migration as a rational choice that an individual makes after evaluating its socio-economic costs and benefits in order to access more secure sources of income and a wider pool of opportunities (see Hagen-Zanker, 2008; de Haas, 2021). It has the merit of bringing migrants’ agency forward but provides an oversimplified version of the messiness of human nature (Feyissa et al., forthcoming; Mazzilli et al., this volume). Not only does this approach describe human beings as rational actors, but also locates them in an environment where all choices are equally possible, individuals have access to perfect information and are not embedded in structures of power other than the market (Arango, 2000; Massey et al., 1998). Functionalism acknowledges migrants’ agency, but looks at just a narrow portion of the dynamics at play in the world, including how migrants’ agency is situated within a collective imagination of the good life; creation of aspiration and construction of capabilities.

Historical-structuralism, by contrast, focuses on structure rather than agency, depicting migration as the result of socio-economic inequalities between individuals and states (de Haas, 2021). De Haas (2021) highlights how historical-structuralism conceives migration as an irrational process that migrants get into because of distorted information or because they are drawn into it by an exploitative macro-structure. Although this approach pays attention to the power structures individuals are embedded in—be they economic, political, class or gender—historical-structuralism conceptualises migrants as responding as these forces dictate, leaving little space for agency. For instance, it does not explain either why migrants retain agency even under difficult conditions, nor why individuals facing the same structural constraints react to them in different ways. Overall, historical-structuralism acknowledges that migrants can be constrained by multiple powers but portrays them as reacting to overbearing structures rather than agents. Like functionalism, it does not pay attention to the “collective self” which individual migrants tap into and mobilise to negotiate and muddle through the multiple constraints they face throughout the migration process.

Building on the works of Carling, de Haas (2021 but see also his earlier works) developed the ACF, which is widely considered as the state of the art in migration studies. Although ACF engages with the collective dimension of migration much more than functionalism and historical-structuralism, and it has a stronger liberal-individualist thrust as well in its understanding of both aspiration and capability. The individualist thrust in ASF’s understanding of aspiration is very much reflected in the choice of agency as a central concept, while the conception of capability by Amartya Sen, whose work de Haas builds on, is also critiqued for similar biases (Gore, 1997; Robeyns, 2007; Uyan-Semerci, 2007). A liberal individualist orientation, in its atomic sense, often avows that “people are autonomous and self-contained individuals, whose rights are prior to and independent of any conception of the common good” (Howlowchak, 2006, 20). An individual liberalist framing accents that an individual is autonomous and hence cannot and shouldn’t be harried by community interests. When community interests are highlighted, they are often relegated as instrumental, non-intrinsic positions (see various sources cited in Ibrahim, 2021). The ACF takes the aspiration as well as capability to migrate as a personal trait, ignoring that sending communities could aspire and collaborate in designing and effecting migration decisions over a certain period. When it comes to human rights discourse in relation to mobility, the ACF adopts Berlin’s (1969) understanding of negative and positive freedoms as a “structure”.

While de Hass (2021) essentially views migration as an individual project with aspirations and capabilities built by the individual and the returns being primarily individual too, he does not ignore the need to pay attention to the role of other factors such as culture, education and exposure to media in shaping people’s preferences and notions of the “good life”, personal life aspirations and more. These other collective factors however are not viewed as having intrinsic value. This chapter challenges the exclusive individualist thrust in migration studies from a Southern perspective and asks if migration-related decisions are really only individual. Through a case study of Hadiya migration to South Africa, we argue that relationships mattered more prominently in earlier phases of the migration processes, with later increasing importance of individualism.

As will be shown through our case study of Hadiya migrants to South Africa, the decision-making process is highly informed by local Hadiya values of communalism. Communalism in African values is partly centred on the “duties” of the individual to the “community” (Nagengast, 2015), in contrast to Berlin’s position. Cobbah (1987) alludes that in the African worldview, individual rights are often balanced against the requirements of the group and individual group solidarity and collective responsibility. The African notion of family seeks a vindication of the communal well-being. In other words, the starting point is not the individual but the whole group. Such a “holist approach starts with social relationships and sees the individuals as not an independent being but rather as a one whose whole nature is constituted by the character of the social relationships in which he stands: African communalism is more than a mere life style. It is a worldview” (Cobbah, 1987, 324).

The Making of the Ethiopia–South Africa Migration Corridor

As one of the strongest economies on the continent, South Africa is among the major destination countries for migrants moving within Africa. Close to three million migrants resided in South Africa in 2020 (UN DESA, 2020). Ethiopians are among the most significant of these migrant populations, with estimates varying between 250,000 by Cooper and Esser (2018) and Yordanos (2018), and IOM (2021) stating that between 200,000 and 300,000 new Ethiopians arriving in South Africa between 2016 and 2018 alone. According to a report by the South African Department of Home Affairs (2015), Ethiopia is ranked as the second of the top 15 migrant sending countries. These Ethiopians make a smaller share of the estimated more than three million Ethiopians living abroad (Girmachew, 2019). Ethiopian migration to southern destinations has primarily been directed to the Gulf, Kenya and the Sudan. Starting from the 1990s and increasing since the 2000s, South Africa has emerged as another major southern destination.

Ethiopian migrants’ journey to South Africa is perilous, involving the crossing of state borders of as many as six countries covering close to 5000 km.2 The journey follows different routes involving different modes of transport: air, water and land. The few migrants affording the high-priced means of migration take a direct flight from Addis Ababa to Johannesburg but most combine bus, boat and foot to cross-transit countries. Typically, the land route from Ethiopia to South Africa starts in Kenya and then passes through Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique/Zimbabwe to South Africa. Many migrants have perished in transit countries. A recent IOM study (2021) notes that more than 7000 Ethiopian migrants have died or gone missing on irregular migration routes between 2012 and 2020.

Most Ethiopian migrants in South Africa are engaged in the informal retail trade running shops predominantly in Jeppe, the Ethiopian commercial enclave in Johannesburg, and in the nearby townships, popularly known as “locations” (Zack & Yordanos, 2016). Some of the migrants are well established, evident in the growing remittances they send to support families and the investments they have made in small and large-scale businesses. Successful migrants send collective remittances to Ethiopia supporting churches and local and national development projects.

Although the Ethiopian migrants in South Africa come from all over the country, most are from southern Ethiopia, particularly from the Hadiya–Kembata area. A report of Hadiya Zone Human Resource and Social Affairs department (quoted in Fikreab & Asrat, 2020, 10) estimated that 61,148 Hadiya youth migrated to South Africa between 2013 and 2018. A survey by Tsedeke and Ayele (2017, 3) found that nearly 40% of households in Hadiya–Kembata have at least one international migrant. Hadiya migration to South Africa is barely over two decades old but it has already left major imprints on the social fabric greatly defining the conception of the good life. This migration trajectory has been enabled by collective efforts throughout the various stages of the migration process—from the making of aspiration, decision-making, the journey, in the process of settlement and the decision to come back as well as in the pattern of migrants’ investment.

Hadiya Migration to South Africa as a Collective Project

Hadiya Migration to South Africa as an Enactment of a Divine Script

One of the central social events which is deeply implicated in the process of Hadiya migration to South Africa, especially during the formative stage, is a prophecy delivered by a Canadian pastor, Peter Youngrin, who came to Hosanna in 2001. Below is the excerpt of the prophecy as told by many research participants which is intimately implicated in migration processes:

I have a message from God to deliver to you. I saw God opening a new southern route for Hadiya. From now onwards you will see a constant flow of people; people work hard and prosper; that they will bring blessing to Hosanna and to Ethiopia more broadly. Hosanna town will be transformed beyond recognition; the time will come when three wheeled cars will fill the streets of Hosanna …. God will allow movement of people; one which will bring prosperity. (Focus group discussion with church leaders, Hosanna, December 2019)

The key message of the prophecy is how God opened a “southern door” for the Hadiya through which prosperity would come. In effect this is a prophecy which “sacralises” and endorses migration as God-sanctioned and as God’s redemptive plan for the Hadiya. Pastor Youngrin did not directly say “go to South Africa”, he rather prophesised the onset of a large-scale migration of Hadiya and their socioeconomic transformation. For the Hadiya, God used the Pastor as a conduit to bless them as a people and their journey. To lend the prophecy plausibility, Pastor Youngrin said “you would soon see signs”. For the Hadiya, it did not take long before they started seeing the signs of the prophecy working, i.e., the onset of a massive migration of Hadiya to South Africa, which is to the South of Ethiopia anyway.

Large-scale Hadiya migration to South Africa has a strong spiritual dimension situated within the prophetic tradition of evangelical Christianity. This is linked with migration processes at various levels—from decision-making, migratory agency, and pre-departure farewells, to sense making at destinations. The prophecy operates collectively. For one thing, it is a prophecy for the Hadiya as people, not individual Hadiya. The Hadiya also claim a collective agency for the prophecy, that it is God answering Hadiya’s mothers’ intense prayer to help them overcome the social and economic deprivations and lack of peace, as the prophecy coincided with a major drought and political persecution of the Hadiya youth by the ruling party for supporting an opposition party. It is also construed as an affirmation of God’s favour of the Hadiya as “committed” Christians, which aligns well with Hadiya’s self-understanding as an avant guard of Protestantism in Southern Ethiopia, and Ethiopia more broadly. The following narrative by a Hadiya migrant indicates how aspiration is shaped by the prophecy and its invocation to negotiate and mitigate the risks of the journey to South Africa:

Imagine, the journey from Hadiya to South Africa involves crossing more than five or six countries and is perilous in which many people might die. Notwithstanding the risks, the main news in Hadiya became “geba” [he has entered South Africa without much difficulty]. Not long after someone announced that he would travel to South Africa, we would hear geba. The blessing made the journey a lot easier than one would have expected. I left in 2004, three years after Peter came. I was a student at that time. I talked to my friends about the idea of going to South Africa. They all readily agreed. When we decided to travel it felt as if we were already in South Africa. I remember the enthusiasm and the confidence we had. We never thought of the risks we might encounter during the journey and the language difficulties we might encounter. In fact, it felt like as if we were moving from one house to another within Hadiya”. (Pastor Birhanu, Wengel Amagnoch Church based in Johannesburg, interviewed in Addis Ababa, November 8, 2020)

The spiritual aspect of Hadiya migration to South Africa is very instructive. It plays out in decision-making and motivation, instancing “confidence without caution” as one of the problems of “believing” and the lack of even hesitation, as mentioned in the aforementioned narrative. Of course, the spiritual aspect also affects and fosters such things as resilience: when things are not going well, people feel the strength to persevere and are arguably better placed to cope with adversity. As Levitt (2007) alludes, the transnational lives of migrants are inextricably linked to spirituality whereby religious leaders and centres of worship are part of the multi-layered webs of connections.

In a video message that they sent to friends and relatives in Hosanna, a group of Hadiya migrants detained in transit by Tanzanian authorities and returned by IOM appeared joyful, singing loud Gospel songs with a mood of defiance mentioning it is not a question of if but when they will go back to South Africa with the help of God. Prospective migrants in Hosanna on the other hand were busy buying gospel songs with strong migration content. An example of this would be one which explicitly mentions major hurdles on transit countries such as the Tete bridge on the Zambezi River (also called Samora Michel bridge) along the border between Mozambique and South Africa where hundreds of Ethiopian migrants perished while trying to cross through suffocating containers and other hazardous means. Here we see belief or the prophecy helping migrants manage the risks involved during migration.

More recently, this prophetic tradition has given way to more individualised prophecies. Hadiya evangelical prophets now divine the future for prospective migrants featuring as migration counsellors—further delivering God’s favour at a more individual level for the service for which they get material rewards. These local prophets not only tell prospective migrants when to migrate and how, but they also persuade the parents of prospective migrants who are in the family to have a better prospect of success both during the journey as well as in the process of settlement. They also communicate with the relatives of prospective migrants in South Africa convincing them that it is worth investing in sponsoring a particular prospective migrant whose migration project is ordained by God, hence ensuring “value for money”. In some instances, the prophets cum migration counsellors advise prospective migrants to drop their plan to migrate. The following story from a stayee in Hosanna throws light onto how decision-making is shaped by a prophetic tradition:

I contemplated to migrate to South Africa when I reached grade 10, when most Hadiya youth consider it to be the right migration age. I was good at school but not sure whether I would pass the national examination. Like many of my peers I visited a local prophet in Shashogo who divined my future. She told me that my future lies here in Ethiopia, not South Africa. I went to South Africa in case I would not score a good grade. I was a bit skeptical about the prophecy but my uncle who brought me to South Africa insisted that I should go back home concerned that I might not succeed in South Africa as this would be against the will of God. It turned out that I scored the highest grade, came back and joined university. With a privilege of hindsight, I now say that her prophecy is a correct prediction of my future and good that I heeded her advice (interviewed in May 2021).

This suggests that the role the local prophets play goes beyond a mere “counselling” service and spiritual providence as they also act as spiritual entrepreneurs/mediators between migrant family members and the prospective migrants. A major dimension of the flow in the Ethiopia–South Africa corridor is also pastors and their transnational spiritual engagement with the migrants. Their sermons are increasingly filled with migration-related content, including conveying the good news for some, mentioning that they are here in South Africa to stay while advising others to go back home as soon as possible. In so doing they are being conduits of a divine message. As such, decision-making in the process of Hadiya migration to South Africa is not fully comprehensible unless we thoroughly engage with the spirituality of migration, which is above all communal. The decision to migrate or to stay operates at the collective level, in this case within the cultural repertoire of a community such as belief systems. The spiritual frame of reference for Hadiya migration to South Africa goes even deeper, as migrants and their families reflect on Hadiya migration to South Africa in relational terms situating it within the broader historically shaped regional inequality between the “core North” and “peripheral South” in the context of state formation in Ethiopia both in political representation and national wealth allocation. Historically, Hadiya belong to Ethiopia’s periphery and migration to South Africa is understood as a means to renegotiate this regional inequality (see the following sub-section). In so doing the Hadiya attribute an “inherent link” between peoples of the periphery and their greater representation in South–South migration:

How come that Amharas, Tigres and Oromos [people of the core regions] are not migrating to South Africa as much as the Hadiya and other Southerners do [people of the periphery]? Their oversight is not accidental. God has blinded them of this opportunity protecting it for us. Had they known about the opportunities in South Africa they would have taken up all the opportunities. They are everywhere. Many Ethiopians in Europe, the US and Canada are Amharas, Tigreans and Oromos. They have money, knowledge, and wider social network. And yet we [the Hadiya and other peoples from Southern Ethiopia] managed to make it to South Africa despite our apparent lack of skill and political networks. This is because God awakened us (aberalin). (Interview with a returnee businessman, Hosanna, February 4, 2021)

The word aberalin used here refers to a collective self, that God is now engaging Hadiya as a people, not individually, by opening a southern route through which prosperity comes. In this sacred narrative, Hadiya migration to South Africa features as a quintessential future-making project at the societal level displacing other avenues of socio-economic mobility.

Social Networks and Collective Capability

Hadiya migration to South Africa has been enabled by various forms of social networks and institutions both in places of origin and at destination. Although there are cases of individuals entirely paying for the cost of their migration, in most cases fundraising involves not only the nuclear but also the extended family, friends and neighbours. In fact, in some instances, families decide and prioritise who in the family should migrate and when. This depends on comparative advantages prioritising children who are more enterprising. In other instances, parents impose the migration agenda on a recalcitrant child counting on the life transformational role of migration, an instance of the intrinsic value of migration. The following story of Simba and Solomon from Queenstown, Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, demonstrates how friendship networks contribute to the building of migrants’ capability, informed by the ethic of reciprocity:

Solomon and I are not blood relatives but close friends from the same village. …. We both failed the national school leaving examination [and] felt so ashamed that we did not dare to go home that day. Instead, we wept and slept on the street. That was the day I decided to migrate to South Africa. I had a good prospect of migrating to South Africa because I had relatives there. I promised my friend that if and when I migrate to South Africa, he would be the first person that I will take. The hope of going to South Africa made us forget our sorrow. My relatives pledged to contribute 25 cows to help me pay for the migration. But none of it was materialised. Instead, Solomon’s father stepped in. He sold his only ox and gave it to me hoping that I would take his son to South Africa. As I promised, Solomon was the first person I brought to South Africa, even before my brothers”. (Queenstown, August 2022)3

The collective nature of Hadiya migration continues throughout the journey. In most cases, Hadiya migrate to South Africa in a group so that they support each other in times of needs. By contrast, most Ethiopian migrants, especially those from Addis Ababa, migrate individually and the exigencies of the journey rather force them to construct social relatedness impromptu, which is much more fragile than Hadiya migrants who travel in groups with a robust social relatedness. A returnee migrant from Addis Ababa recounted his experience during the journey as follows:

I was alone during the journey. The day I bid farewell to my younger brother to the US I was on the move to South Africa. In Moyale I met another migrant from Addis who was also alone. We made an oath to support each other until we reach South Africa and even there. Although we parted company in South Africa, the mutual support was critical in sustaining us throughout the journey. (interviewed in Addis Ababa, December 2022)

Apart from migrants themselves as networks, there are various intermediate, self-sustaining structures. This includes the “migration industry”, which involves brokers and smugglers who have an interest in, and tend to facilitate, the continuation of migration (see also Hones et al., this volume). The migration industry in the Ethiopia–South Africa corridor is based on access to information and trust given the higher risks associated with the journey. The Hadiya are fairly represented in the brokerage industry who closely cooperate with the Somali, Kenyan and Eritrean smugglers further linked with various intermediaries in southern African countries. The movement is typically organised directly from Hosanna or Nairobi. Access to the quality (effective) brokerage is very important in the Ethiopia–South Africa migration corridor which is increasingly securitised by the Ethiopian government because many of the migrants are “irregular migrants” vulnerable to manipulation by “human traffickers”. Aspirant migrants have a clear preference for transnationally connected local brokers who are more trusted. Fekadu, Deshingkar and Tekalign have noted that migration brokers in Hadiya are positively signified (affectionately called beri kefach/door openers) and brokerage is considered as socio-culturally embedded business because:

Migration brokers live among the community, they worship with the community, and their children go to the same school as the children from the local community. Migration to South Africa is a long journey with a high risk of being intercepted and deported. Thus, for potential migrants using the services of a broker with whom they share multiple relationships, and whom they believe will respect the local values and norms, is a strategy to reduce risks. Brokers will work hard and use their own money to mitigate migration failures as these impacts on their reputation (Adugna et al., 2019, 17).

This is very different from the view of brokers as “human traffickers” by government and international development actors. There are many cases in which brokers paid back the brokerage fee for a failed migration project. Being Hadiya is thus already a social capital allowing differential access to effective and “responsible” brokerage service. Using a religious analogy, some research participants even recast the brokers as Moses who would guide the journey to “the promised land”, i.e., South Africa: “As the Prophet Muse transitioned the Israelites from wandering in the wilderness to the Promised Land, so did the brokers bring us to South Africa”.4 That many of Hadiya migrants have little or no formal education make it difficult for them to comprehend how brokerage really works imbuing it with a mystic dimension: “We didn’t know anything about where South Africa is and how to get there. I was a kind of person who would get lost even from one village to another in Hadiya. Tell me, isn’t it then a miracle that I managed to reach South Africa. And that was possible thanks to the brokers”.5 Reflecting this, a female broker based in Kenya was considered as a matron, reputed for her brokerage service with a humane face. Her migrants’ shelter in the border town of Gambo in Kenya had a place for worship, clean accommodation and good food to migrants, at times even slaughtering ox to make the migrants feel comfortable and prepare for the strenuous journey.

Hadiya have also adapted their cultural institutions and established new ones at destination places to build their individual and collective capabilities. Iqub and idir are some of these institutions which play an important role in the process of adaptation and in running their businesses. Iqub is a traditional rotating saving association and idir is a funeral association. Although these associations are used by most Ethiopian migrants, it is the Hadiya and other migrants from southern Ethiopia who use them most extensively, partly because of their wider social networks. They share not only a “southern” identity, collectively referred to by Ethiopian migrants from other parts of Ethiopia as ye Hosanna lijoch (“sons of Hosanna”), particularly referring to Hadiya and migrants from the neighbouring Kembatta. The Hadiya and Kembatta have managed to transcend their traditional hostility in Ethiopia,6 and instead expanded the mutually beneficial social network that partly enabled them to carve out a particular business niche. The Hosanna lijoch focused on the location business, initially delivering commodities from door to door in townships and villages currently upgraded into Tuck Shops and Spazas. Hadiya migrants have also immersed in other types of social relationships and obligations, some are newly minted in response to the imperatives of life at destination. Social occasions such as wedding, birth, migrants’ welcoming (qibela) and sending off (shignit) parties are also fund-raising moments; part of which is used to pay for the migration to relatives. A striking feature of Hadiya migrants in South Africa, as corroborated by migrants from other parts of Ethiopia, is how a Hadiya would drive thousands of kilometres to attend a wedding or funeral. On average for a social occasion that cost 40,000 Rand the host would gather up to 40,000 Rand. So far, the highest contribution for a Hadiya migrant sending-off party was 450,000 Rand. The returnee migrant used this money to set up a business upon return to Hosanna.

A new social institution that has been invented by Ethiopian migrants in South Africa is a labour arrangement between established migrants (called boss) and new arrivals (borders). As he expands his business, a boss would need a partner to open additional shops in remote places. A border is given the goods on credit with an agreed upon amount of profit for the boss. A boss is usually based in bigger cities such as Joburg but smaller bosses operate from smaller towns. A boss supplies the border through truck. Usually, a boss hires a driver but when the transaction is higher himself distributes the goods. This contractual relation works entirely based on trust. Thus, a Hadiya boss prefers to work with a Hadiya border. A returnee migrant from Addis Ababa laments the competitive advantage of ye Hosanna lijoch border as compared with other Ethiopian migrants as follows:

Ye Hosanna lijoch get to work soon after their arrival because a Hadiya or Kembatta boss want to work with people from their regions. They trust them and give them goods worth 30,000 Rand. This is a lot of money for a starter. It will take a longer time for migrants from Addis to reach that level. Hadiya migrants know each other or know their clans and families. This allows them to trust each other. The boss/border arrangement works if people are related as it is based on a high level of trust. The boss also does not consider this as a competition because the more their business expand the more trusted people they need. (interviewed in Addis Ababa, December 17, 2022)

As these examples demonstrate, individual Hadiya migrants’ agency is situated within these self-help associations and symbiotic labour relations, shedding light on how migration capability is built through a collective effort.

Processes of Individualisation of the Hadiya Migration Project

Hadiya migrants in South Africa have benefitted from the high profit margins of the businesses they engage in, the social support and financial saving schemes which help new arrivals to stand on their feet, and the higher value of the Rand in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This newly acquired wealth was re-invested in changing business lines from door-to-door selling of commodities (i.e., “location” business) to spaza shops.

The same period also witnessed increasing financial remittances sent back home from South Africa. What started as remittances for household consumption evolved towards heavy investment in the transport sector (public, as well as freight) before the land speculation bonanza. This speculative land market since 2015 was free riding the local economy, to the detriment of many peri-urban farmers and increasing corruption in the governance structure. In South Africa, increasing wealth also led to higher involvement of Hadiya migrants in criminal activities, often by tipping information to others who will do the actual robbing and at times joining the gang groups in South Africa.

Thus, material success in South Africa came at the cost of eroding the very basis for the success of Hadiya migrants, i.e., the collective conception of the whole migration enterprise. Perhaps the absence of an institutional setup to direct the newfound wealth into more productive and socially useful ends led to the spiralling of dispossessive engagements with peri-urban farmers, which primarily benefits land speculators (mainly migrants), politicians, and land brokers. The zonal administration is represented as more of a bureaucratic hurdle to migrant investors than facilitators, among others the demand for bribes at different stages. We now have many cases of siblings quarrelling and fighting over wealth, and elders resolving such disputes with payments of handsome service fees. The trust in pastors and individual prayers and prophecies is dwindling also, as religious officials are suspected of being corrupt and becoming more oriented towards material success than deeper religious teachings.

The blessing inscribed in the prophecy is now also considered as a curse in the context of increasing violence that involves homicide in the destination country and rising living costs and corruption in places of origin. While commenting on these processes of excessive individualisation, a research participant surmised: “migration has mutated from being a bereket [blessing]’ into mergemt [curse]”. Still, the individualisation of the migration project and its social cost is interpreted through the overarching spiritual scheme of interpretation, i.e., how individuals “abused” the blessing to individually advance at the expense of the collective good, leading to God withdrawing his favour from the Hadiya, as noted by a research participant from the Mekaneyesus Church in Hosanna:

Not all migrants have responded to God’s gift in a responsible manner. Some have behaved and made good use of the blessing – they changed themselves and their family, as prophesised by Peter. However, some abused the blessing – engaged in violence, extra marital affairs, divorce etc. It seems as if God has withdrawn His favour so much so that brothers started killing each other in South Africa”. (interviewed in Hosanna, December 2019)

The emergence of predatory local prophets called ye festal agelgayoch, i.e., amateur door-to-door spiritual service providers, throws further light onto the moral decay that surrounds the migration project. Unlike in earlier times when the blessing of church leaders was sought after, ye festal agelgayoch are now operating more as schemers than interpreters of God’s will. Emboldened by the claim to a privileged access to divine knowledge, they extort money from the families of prospective migrants making the journey appear risk-free as long as it is endorsed by them and without adequate preparation by families.

The shift from the collective to unilateral migration decision-making by the youth is yet another instance of the individualisation of the migration project. Previously migration was a consultative process—who was prioritised to migrate was decided based on who is in a better position to contribute to the family good. There were even instances where parents would impose migration on an unruly child. Now, the material success of some of the migrants has fuelled an aspiration with a sense of immediacy—children putting pressure on parents and even blackmailing them to sell their assets and pay for their migration. There is also an increase in unilateral decisions: the youth steal initial capital that takes them up to the border with Kenya and then inform parents—changing the facts on the ground leaving and their parents with no option than paying for the migration regardless of their economic conditions.

The greed and the individualisation of the Hadiya migration project have had a corrosive impact on their collective capabilities. Brokers have become more exploitative, no longer operating under a moral framework as they did previously. In fact, some of the brokers extort money from migrant families twice: to send them to South Africa and from detention camps especially in Tanzania. Detained migrants have two options: either accept a three or four-year prison sentence or to pay 200,000 birr to be deported back to Ethiopia. Migrant families who can afford to pay brokers to bring them back home. Meanwhile, the supportive institutions that the Hadiya either elaborated on and built responding to the imperatives of migration are currently unravelling. The boss–border relations, for example, are turning more exploitative; the borders increasingly resent the much higher profit margin of their respective bosses. Conniving with South African brokers, some of the bosses are also involved in abducting borders (especially new arrivals without sponsors). A boss demands the money that he pays to the brokers once the border starts earning. Or he demands work for free until the service amounts to the money he paid (a form of indentured labour). The feeling of being exploited, and working under dangerous working conditions in shops in the townships has generated social tension, not just between a boss and a border in South Africa but also in places of origin as bosses and borders are caught in webs of transnational social relations. This tension in some instances resulted in the form of violence, a boss or a border conniving with South African criminal groups involving robbing or even killing. The competition over business turfs between bosses is also turning violent. This has a spillover effect on the viability of the mutual support institutions such as iqub. Resenting the business success of a fellow iqub member, some migrants would tip information to criminals when he receives and where he hides the iqub money. As undocumented migrants, the Hadiya put their money at home or in the shops until they remit it to families in Ethiopia through the hawala system. This has turned what was previously an asset into a liability, i.e., receiving iqub money creates a moment of vulnerability. There are also now free riders faking deaths in places of origin in order to collect the idir money.

Overall, there is an increase in migrants involvement in crime and migrant-on-migrant violence ranging from robbery to homicide. This has severely affected the quality of inter-personal relations. An example of this would be the souring of the bond between Simba and Solomon that we cited in the previous section. Solomon got involved in crime, robbing his fellowmen in concert with South African criminal elements. In a migrant community trial in Queenstown, Simba testified against his close friend for violating community norms in the following manner:

The bible says “Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them”. I am very much disappointed to find out that Solomon is involved in crime. I was also robbed of my newly bought shop for 150,000 Rand. I do not know the identity of my robbers. I asked Solomon to work with me as a shareholder. He refused. I did not know that he was a thief. It was the Kunusten [sic Queenstown ] community which helped me raise 450,000 Rand and helped me get back to business and bring my wife. Solomon borrowed from three persons and finally he took a thief with him to rob them. He ate iqub and run away. We need to name and shame people like Solomon regardless of our close relationships. (Queenstown, August 2022, https://fb.watch/iZWte1lcQX/)

During our research, many Hadiya returnee migrants mentioned that in fact robbing migrant businesses in South Africa was first started and encouraged by Ethiopian migrants. This is evident in the language South African robbers used to justify their act as a matter of entitlement. Initially, they would say “give me my coca” while demanding money from a shop owner but now they say “give me my iqub money”; adding that South Africans would not know about iqub money if they were not told by Ethiopians themselves. The capitalist logic and the greed that it underpins have currently undermined migration as a collective project among the Hadiya; one of the critical factors for their thriving and flourishing in South Africa despite the multiple challenges they have faced.

The changing contours of migration away from the positives and more towards the negative has induced a collective reflexive moment, around whether Hadiya migration to South Africa could ultimately become a liability given the pervasive and fragile rentier local economy, negative educational and agricultural outcomes and a looming social conflict engendered by the speculative land market unless these problems are mitigated by a visionary leadership that enhance the developmental potential of migration.

However, despite increasing individualisation and the dangers with which it is associated, all is not lost. There are some migrants and returnees who are still committed and are working towards the collective project of improving the lot of the Hadiya. This is primarily expressed in the form of investment in productive sectors in Hadiya Zone (e.g., commercial farms or dairy farms), despite the lack of cooperation and bureaucratic hurdles, risks the business model comes with, and the lower profit margins compared to speculative land investments. Moreover, there are attempts to bring in technology and insights from South Africa to improve productivity as well. All this is to ensure food security, restore Hadiya pride as self-sufficient and demonstrate to others that agriculture is a profitable sector to engage in.

Conclusion

An important factor for the success of South–South migration (as well as South–North migration in some cases) is the collective nature of migration. This collective worldview is not merely instrumental, but intrinsic to local cultures and social life. As we have argued in this chapter, this is ignored by the three dominant theories in migration studies: functionalism, historical structuralism and the aspiration—capability framework. As developed by de Haas, ACF very much takes an ahistorical assessment of migration, while the reality is that, as the Hadiya case study demonstrated, the nature of migration (i.e., location on the individual-collective continuum) changes across time with differing consequences to the migration process and its outcome.

As demonstrated in the discussion in the various sections of the chapter, the secret of Hadiya migrants’ success in South Africa is large because of their collective imagination, imbued with a sense of social responsibility and mutual support as well as the urge to catch up with neighbours through the new affordances of migration. Now, their collective wellbeing is being undermined by the growing individualisation of the migration process, both in place of origin and at destination. In place of origin, this includes the emergence of a robust rentier local economy in Hadiya Zone at the top of which we find local government officials who live off the migration rent resulting in a very weak and corrupt public sector juxtaposed with a thriving private sector, a unique case in the context of Ethiopia. This rentier economy is undermining the viability of Hadiya society, not least the private sector from which its rents come in the first place. A key component of the private sector are migrants and their businesses. While the local political leadership, and the public sector more broadly, is responsive to the demands of private businesses which themselves are rent seekers it is very obstructive of the businesses set up by some visionary migrants who go out of their way to serve the public good. The Hadiya need to regain their collective imagination of migration as a public good going forward, otherwise to use their religious language, the blessing of migration will rapidly turn into a curse in which migration is increasingly devoid of its developmental potential.

At the place of destination, the increasing individualisation of the Hadiya migration project has weakened the hitherto mutual support of social institutions while labour relations between senior and more recent migrants have become more exploitative. Combined with the stiff competition over migrants’ commercial spaces, the material turn in the Hadiya migration project has generated tension and conflict, including a rising homicide rate among Hadiya migrants in South Africa. The individualisation of the collective Hadiya migration project is resulting from a multitude of factors including, but not limited to, material gain and success. While paying attention to the changing nature of the “individualist-collectivist continuum” across time and space, we underscore two key points. First, one should not in any way over essentialise the trend as a complete shift from collective to individualistic one. Secondly, we need to clearly indicate that we approach the shift as an ongoing process and that we will not rule out the possibility of a return to a collective outlook.

Notes

  1. 1.

    This work has been undertaken as part of the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Hub, which unpacks the complex and multi-dimensional relationships between migration and inequality in the context of the Global South. More at www.mideq.org.

  2. 2.

    Countries typically crossed during the journey include Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

  3. 3.

    Available at https://fb.watch/iZWte1lcQX/.

  4. 4.

    Interview with a returnee migrant, Hosanna, June 14, 2021.

  5. 5.

    Interview with a returnee migrant, Jajura, May 5, 2021.

  6. 6.

    This hostility was deepened by two massacres that occurred in the 1970s—the Ajura massacre where many Hadiya were killed by the Kembatta, followed by a retaliatory measure by the Hadiya in Wachemo where many Kembatta were killed. The Kembatta administrator Petros Gebre was implicated in this strained relation between the two communities.