There are several key moments in the history of Greek and Cypriot migration into Southern Africa, most of which correspond to periods of economic and political strife in areas of origin. These include, amongst others, the nationalisation of Greek businesses and related exchange controls in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s; the famine and conflict associated with world war two and its aftermath in Greece and the rise in conflict in Cyprus in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless Greek migration in the region is uniformly treated as a form of economic migration rather than the wide array of factors that almost always inform the routes taken by migrants of any kind throughout history. This is particularly interesting in the Southern African case when read in the context of the majority of the 20th century historiography on international migration in Southern Africa. This tends to focus on three key elements: regional African labour migration, especially mine labour; intra-imperial Indian migration, including indenture; and white imperial settler migration. All of these are treated as forms of “economic migration”, though often not responding to personal preference.
Each of these categories of mobile people have quite clearly defined, if not always comfortable, roles in the imperial system of government.
Under this system, African mobility was to be the by-product of colonial “development” and the responsibility of colonial “custodianship”.
Settlers were citizens of the metropole and also a key element in “development” and thus often represented the core constituency of colonial government.
Indian immigrants were more ambiguous, they were subjects of empire and thus conceptualise under the same notions of “custodianship” as Africans but were at the same time fundamentally out of place and thus treated as largely undesirable. This is especially true where they were not indentured and thus “under control” but rather engaged in free trade and labour.
Again, most of these migrations responded to conditions of war or economic pressure but are treated, nevertheless, as elements only of the local economic and governmental system.
Greek migrants, however, did not conform to any of these categories – they were not imperial, not metropolitan and not native, nor was it obvious to colonial officials if they were white. The result is that the story of the immigration and settlement of these “swarthy not-quite types”, as Mark Gevisser calls them, become an excellent tool for studying how ideas about governing global migration, race and the social status of transnational diaspora developed in the 20th century.
I would argue, through this analysis, that the distinction between the local economic role of migrants and the conditions which caused their migration emerges, at least in part, out of this imperial ideas about the function and governance of migration.
Territories of Migration 