Migrant labour, the marriage valve and fertility in Southern Africa: some conceptual issues

The paper argues that population is a endogeneous variable the dynamics of which depend on the social context in which production and reproduction is organised. Marriage and family structure play a pivotal role in this analysis if at all it is to reach down to micro level behaviour as conditioned by macro processes of development and change. Historically, in Southern Africa, the timing and incidence of marriage came to depend on the prior accumulation of savings out of migrant labour, and so did rural production. The demise in the migrant labour system in recent decades, however, severely limited this by now traditional route towards marriage and investment in household production. This has major consequences for family formation and perhaps also for fertility behaviour, as households become more matricentral out of poverty as income from migrant labour declines without newly emerging avenues of employment.