The “fear” of being swamped by foreigners is easy to
mobilise on the social or political agenda as a social and security issue.
Often, this fear fuels public perceptions in host countries that migrants
increase employment competition, challenge religious, cultural or ethnic
homogeneity, increase crime or threaten national security. This may result in
xenophobic attacks, as seen by the unfortunate situation playing out in Soweto.
Are these fears justified? If all the migrants in Soweto were to vacate, will
the socio-economic problems of that community’s problems depart with them? Are
these migrants not an easy target and temporary catharsis for a community
frustrated and disenchanted with lack of state delivery and opportunities?
We still come across figures and estimates which state that
for example the number of Zimbabweans living in South Africa is between a one
million and four million. Zimbabwe has a population of about 14.15 million. At
the high end of these estimates, it means at least a third of Zimbabweans live
in South Africa, a dubious claim. According to Chiumia 2013, a report published
on the website of SW Radio Africa, it stated that there are between two and
three million Zimbabweans living and working in South Africa. Interviews
conducted by the Inter Press Service news agency stated that the number of
Zimbabwean nationals crossing the border have almost doubled since elections in
Zimbabwe. What is often missed by these studies is that “crossing the border”
is not a single event but a continuous process. By far, the vast number of
people who cross the border into South Africa are also those who cross it back
to Zimbabwe and other regional countries within days, weeks and at most a few
months. Contemporary cross-border migration within southern Africa, better
understood as transnationalism is not premised on permanent settlement in the
receiving country but is highly circular comprising of migrants having a
foothold in both sending and receiving countries and constantly shuttling
between the two.
It takes its cue from historical intensive intra-regional
migration dating back to the mid-nineteenth century when new industries were
introduced that generated sustained interdependence between labour-supplying
and labour-receiving countries in the region. The story of social
transformations in the region, therefore, is fundamentally the story of
migration; it is the story of human movements that continue to pervade the
entire region unhindered by colonial boundaries. No wonder southern Africa has
been described as a region on the move. Most cross-border practices by
Zimbabweans have occurred in Botswana and South Africa and by Zambians and
Mozambicans in Zimbabwe and by Malawians in Zambia and Tanzania. Despite the
Southern African Development Community’s rhetoric of free movement in southern
Africa, cross-border migrants continue to highlight the tension between the
tendency of states to define space as “territory’-accentuating control, order,
and security and the tendency of individuals to associate space with
“soil”-emphasising free movement, shelter, and subsistence. To migrants,
southern African borders are not barriers but windows of opportunities.
These opportunities require migrants to live their lives
across various locations. Hence transnationalism is composed of a growing
number of persons who live dual lives, sometimes speaking two languages and
making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders.
Leading transnational, multi-sited lives means that exchanges and interactions
across borders are a regular and sustained part of migrants’ realities and
activities. This means South Africa is but one of many regular destinations in
the transnational migrant portfolios, a regular pit-stop in a nomadic life that
might include Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Dubai and China in the
destinations portfolio. These migrants make a living by exploiting the
differentials in supply and demand of merchandise, products, seasonal labour
among other goods and services across regional and international borders.
Thus migrant-owned spaza shops are not only in Soweto but
scattered throughout the region together with flea markets, various import and
export enterprises, buying and re-selling businesses among other ventures that
feed into the regional informal trade and social network. Transnationalism
speaks to a “condition of being”, a condition of constantly shuttling to and
from sending and receiving nodes. As such, this movement is so encompassing as
to virtually erase the distinction between “here” (home) and “there” (host
state). Consequently, transmigrants cannot be neatly placed, they are neither
for example, in Zimbabwe nor in South Africa, they are a moving target. This
makes home and host society a single arena of social action, a third space
between and across state borders. Such “third spaces” or migrant “imagined’
communities represent a theatre where kinship, social networks, cultural
trends, and visions of individual and familial futures are enacted. A
semi-autonomous space, isolated from the national order of things and populated
by increasingly “sovereignty free” individuals whose only link back to the
state is a passport.
What does this mean for identity in southern Africa? For
traditional citizenship based on continuous residence in a given territory, a
shared collective identity and participation in and subjection to a common
jurisdiction? What does this mean for migrant identities traditionally
associated with settlement in host states? What does this mean for outdated
policies and approaches obsessed with quantifying migrants in host countries
and inflaming fears of “migrant tsunamis”? We ought to re-think our approaches
to migration and realise that permanent settlement and inclusion in host
societies are no longer the outcomes of much contemporary migration within the
region. Current conditions of flexible accumulation and globalisation economic
practices militate against a facile incorporation into a national imaginary. Transnational
migrants see southern Africa as a single arena of social action rather than
territory divided by boundaries into states. We should realise that
embeddedness in cross-border exchange is now a normal part of people’s
contemporary social statuses. Transnational migrants are thus front-runners and
actors in the regionalisation project with southern African states and state
policies lagging behind, hamstrung by narrow, parochial and inward-looking
interests. Transnational migrants in southern Africa expose the fiction of
state sovereignty daily as goods, people, capital and resources flow freely and
continually throughout the region creating flourishing informal sectors that
ignore borders and evade taxes. This alludes to the waning of state and society
convergence. Migrant third spaces offer an invitation to rethink the concepts,
foundations and boundaries of states and identity formation. They represent
tentative alternative locations of community, identities, economic, social and
political (in)security that exists alongside, across and in competition with
states. This makes scenario building for southern Africa’s future outlook an
interesting project.
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