'A great deal of discrimination is necessary in administering the law': Frontier Guards and Migration Control in early twentieth century South Africa

Abstract

This article provides a corrective to recent scholarship surrounding modern migration control, which have emphasised the shared origins of the legal systems created to control migration in the US, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Instead, this article demonstrates how the implementation of migration controls in British colonies, unlike in the US, was deliberately arbitrary, to give discriminatory power to individual border officials to decide who could migrate. It uses the personal papers of Clarence Wilfred Cousins, the Chief Immigration Officer in the Cape, then South Africa (1905-1922), to demonstrate the role of frontier guards in shaping migration experiences. His papers allow a micro-history of a border official’s views and experiences concerning gender, race and class, and a macro-history of migration control in modern history. This source material also highlights the uses and limitations of using ‘ritual’ to understand migration control and how border spaces are experienced.