Beyond Migration Categories: Amity,Conviviality and Mutuality in South Africa

Abstract

Our ethnographic fieldwork with Congolese and Zimbabwean economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and educational migrants reveals a complex narrative of exclusion and inclusion in South Africa. Frontier Africans – South African citizens and African transmigrants alike – initiate and maintain connections that create a vexing and entangled narrative of hard and soft borders. A deeper consideration of how South African citizens and African transmigrants subvert and transcend state-centric categorisation of citizen and migrant other, through amity, conviviality and mutuality – a process of humaning – harasses the alignment of political categorisation with analytical elucidation.

In April 1994, at the dawn of a new democracy, the South African state attempted to create a non-racial nation-state that transcends the racialised socio-economic consequences of centuries-old settler colonialism and Apartheid in South Africa. However, the socio-political, economic and psychological work of creating a unified and cohesive nation-state is a difficult and contested process. The state’s continued politics of difference and differentiation among its citizenry, its inclusion in the global political economy, and increased migration from the African continent and elsewhere have created an uncertain socio-political landscape (Moyo and Nshimbi, 2020).

This uncertainty materialises, in part, as an Afrophobic orientation in state bureaucracy and the citizenry (Harris, 2001; Landau et al., 2005; Ochonu, 2021; Reilly, 2001; Solomon and Kosaka, 2013) and a nuanced experience of conviviality, care, social assistance and xenophilia between African transnational migrants and South African citizens (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2015; Ojong, 2005; Owen, 2011, 2016b; Sichone, 2003). This latter reality detailed ethnographically since the first decade of the twenty-first century (Ojong, 2005; Owen, 2011; Sichone, 2003) took root with the residence of transmigrant Africans ¹ in South Africa’s rural and urban spaces. Here, they have worked, employed South Africans, completed further graduate studies, created long-term and committed xenophilic relationships with South African women and men and made South Africa ‘home’ (Ojong, 2005; Owen, 2011, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Sichone, 2003, 2008). In the maelstrom of mundane and spectacular eruptions of Afrophobia, African transmigrants have secured a transnational existence emplaced in South Africa, irrespective of the categorisation of their movement.

In this article, we argue that African transmigration to South Africa is messy, interconnected, entangled and disconcerting as we trace Congolese and Zimbabwean migration to South Africa across time, borders and transnational social space. The experience of African transmigration is both Afrophobic and convivial. Further, while the state’s immigration policies organise entry into South Africa, the reach of government control is not ubiquitous or omnipotent given the state’s limited capacity to police its borders, corruption within the Department of Home Affairs, and a stalled migration processing system (Harris, 2001; Masuku, 2020; Washinyira, 2022). As such a complex process of humaning defined by Erasmus (2017) as ‘a lifelong process of life-in-the making with others (our emphasis)’ is occurring among South Africans and African others (p. xxii). This process demands careful consideration of the everyday lived realities of migration in South Africa, where all actors, including African transmigrants and South Africans – the state and its citizenry – are considered in situ. As we sharpen our lenses to observe and apprehend nuanced and enmeshed emic and etic experiences against the backdrop of Afrophobia in South Africa the redundancy of migrant categories becomes clear; and so too, however subtly, the limited analytical value of maintaining a distinction between involuntary and voluntary migration.

Our research in Cape Town and Bloemfontein, two cities in South Africa, spanning nearly two decades, confirms that cosmopolitan and convivial binational and multinational relationships between South Africans and Congolese and South Africans and Zimbabweans provide care and assistance in the face of othering (Owen, 2015, 2016a; Owen et al., 2021). Our research relationships with those politically defined as non-citizens revealed the importance of social networks that resist national matrices of power built on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, gender and age. Recognising the situational and relational vicissitudes of engagement in our research humaning (Erasmus, 2017) or humanising (Owen, 2016a) became the ‘object’ of analysis, rather than pre-defined and differentiated academic and political definitions that positioned the African transmigrant as the strange or unfamiliar other.

An exploration of the migration literature confirms the facticity of mobility in the onslaught of state craft that depends on naming, identifying and categorising us and them – citizen and non-citizen – and distinguishing and restricting human movement physically and psycho-emotionally (Neocosmos, 2010). This fact of political life ignores the agency of citizen and non-citizen to resist and transcend political categorisation as part of the inevitable humaning process. While the process of defining who belongs and who does not belong – differentiation and categorisation – occurs at hard, physical borders (Agier, 2016), in a borderland (Chekero and Morreira, 2020) or in the case of South Africa in various urban spaces too (Landau et al., 2005; Sichone, 2003, 2008; Vigneswaran et al., 2010) these soft and hard borders do not necessitate nationalist othering. The minutiae of every day, ordinary life exemplify how individuals weave webs of belonging that circumvent entrenched forms of social categorisation like nationality, gender, race, age and cultural norms (Agier, 2016; Nugent and Asiwaju, 1996; Owen, 2015, 2016b; Sichone, 2003; Vigneswaran et al., 2010; Werbner, 2014). Owen’s (2015) and Sichone’s (2008) exploration of xenophilia, for example, speaks to private ways in which entrenched politically charged labels are dissolved in the intimacies of life. These xenophilic relationships built on mutual appreciation and love counteract the nature of Afrophobia, an aspect of creating a nation (Harris, 2002).

In the rest of this article, we detail our research experiences and upend the ‘naturalised’ distance between researcher and researched (Smith, 1999), imbricating our lives as South Africans with the research and national other – African transmigrants. We assert that our personal experiences and those of other South Africans with African transmigrants – our interlocutors/research friends and collaborators – agitate the socio-politically and academically constructed binary between citizen and non-citizen. The definitional line between citizen and non-citizen further labelled as refugee, economic migrant or educational migrant is obscured and invalidated as their lived realities surpass categorisation.

We briefly contextualise Congolese and Zimbabwean migration to South Africa from the twentieth century onwards, sketching the context of our research and analyses in the twenty-first century. Detailing the confounding socio-political climes of a state that is still in transition and the convivial relationships between South African citizens and African transmigrants, we argue that African transnational migration to South Africa is a complex and nuanced process that negates the absolute truth of xenophobia and its role in nation building in South Africa (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Harris, 2002; Nyamnjoh, 2007, 2015, 2017, 2019; Owen, 2016a, 2016b; Owen and Mokoena, 2022; Sharp, 2008; Sichone, 2003, 2008). The work of this process – arrival, liminality and acclimating – entails humanising interactions (Owen, 2015, 2016a, 2019) between transmigrants and South Africans that harass the political categorisation of African others. South African laws and regulations impose politico-legal frames of citizenship. But the mundane experience of coexistence through conviviality, mutuality and amity – the process of humaning (Erasmus, 2017) – diminishes the significance of that categorisation and differentiation in the face of human struggle. Through their agency, our interlocutors demonstrate the dissolution of migrant categories and their limited influence in the making and unmaking of life in South Africa.

The conviviality of fieldwork – immersion, connection and reflexivity

Researchers influenced by their training ( ‘learning, unlearning and relearning’ – Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018), positionality, personal biographies, the experience of transformative experiences in the field, and specific ethical orientations have employed reflection and reflexivity variably and in varying ways (Becker et al., 2005; Eriksen, 2001; Harrison, 2008; Okely, 2012; Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021). Aware of these personal and professional aspects of research and focused on an emic understanding of transnational life for Congolese asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants (Owen), and Zimbabwean educational migrants (Juries) and economic migrants (Mokoena), our research became an emergent and immersive process experienced through participant observation (Halstead et al., 2008) resonance (Wikan, 2013) and sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 2010).

As racialised South African women, defined as coloured and African, our anthropological training ² initiated particular thematic interests and research orientations. Our socialisation in a racialised and patriarchal South Africa and our un/conscious resistance to the confines of that racialisation further impacted our rational, affective and methodological choices in the field.

While we did not frame our research and writing process as decolonial initially the following points exemplified a decolonised methodology and Erasmus’ (2017) conceptualisation of humaning.

1. Our positionality in the field as coloured and African ³ South African women was important, and had to be unpacked in our experiences of and with South Africans and African transmigrants (Becker et al., 2005; Smith, 1999).

2. Because of our positionality, we were quickly divested of the idea that we, as researchers, were omniscient and omnipotent (Becker et al., 2005; Smith, 1999).

3. Centreing the body, as a site of knowing (Okely, 2012) through sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 2010), and the mind was important as our interlocutors were embodied mobile subjects, not objects and

4. Through experience, we learned that our initial emphasis on structured and unstructured interviewing was not conducive to accessing our interlocutor's lived experiences (Spradley, 2016). The focus on words and talking to the exclusion of that which was not said (Wikan, 2013) impoverished our relationships and our ability to see and listen ‘rightly’.

Honouring the above awareness, we practised a cosmopolitanism (Agier, 2016; Werbner, 2014) that unwittingly positioned us as ‘Frontier Africans’ (Nyamnjoh, 2015) and part of the emotional and material landscapes of our interlocutors as we came to know our research participants. In step with, and at times misstepping with, our research friends, we stitched a co-created and entangled way of being in our fieldsites. Interacting with, speaking to, collaborating with and assisting African others who also initially recognised us as other, abstracted from their realities of woe, joy and their everyday existence, we created ‘herstories’ (Bam and Muthien, 2021) and histories; some of which you will encounter here.

We conducted ethnographic fieldwork individually in Cape Town and Bloemfontein over 15 months and 21 months, respectively. ⁴ Stretched across almost two decades from 2004 to 2022, our work coincides with Afrophobic events in South Africa and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As participant observers, and observing participants, we ‘followed’ our mobile research subjects. We travelled with them physically and emotionally as they introduced us to the varied life-ways of a mobile African ‘other’ in Cape Town and Bloemfontein.

We became embroiled in everyday experiences of mutuality and conviviality, undertaking physical journeys by car, plane, and train and emotional journeys through mutual narrative exploration and exposition, sharing memories and experiences as guided by our research friends. Across extended and extensive interactions, we conversed, discussed, argued and debated life and living. Both Owen and Mokoena, robust personalities in personal encounters, were often the antithesis of the congenial anthropologist. We questioned and debated our male research participants’ thoughts, beliefs and orientations to gender, presentations of masculinity, religion and life in general.

Our ongoing and successive encounters moved us beyond the initial use of structured and unstructured interviews based on our review of migration literature as they castrated our interlocutors’ responses (Halstead et al., 2008; Sanjek, 1990; Spradley, 2016). The interview questions foregrounded what we as anthropologists thought we wanted to know, rather than the vast knowledge and wisdom of our research collaborators. As time progressed in the field, this agitation with the interview process led to various pivots. Owen shifted her methodological focus to include sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 2010) and resonance (Wikan, 2013), paying attention to her engagement with her primary research informants, singly or as part of a larger group of Congolese transmigrants or multinational gatherings. Juries fleshed out her interviews with immersive participant observation that included various individuals in her research participants’ networks (Halstead et al., 2008), and Mokoena, compelled to employ virtual research methods during the hard COVID-19 lockdowns imposed in South Africa in the later months of 2021, employed a mixed methods approach (Pink et al., 2015). Further research, beyond face-to-face interactions, was mediated through technology like SMS and WhatsApp conversations, Facebook engagements and WhatsApp and video calls.

As we became invested in our research participants as human beings, rather than research subjects, the embodied nature of our experience surpassed an over-reliance on words and narrative, to a more situated experience of quotidian realities. Resident close to our research friends, we observed them in situ across multiple physical and emotional spaces, creating lives that were physically situated in one place as they connected and maintained different local and global sites of engagement across time zones (Basch et al., 1994; Glick-Schiller, 2014; Harvey, 1990). Our interlocutors’ networks gave life to Harvey’s (1990) idea of globalisation as time-space compression.

Through intimate one-on-one participation and virtual fieldwork that proceeded beyond the period of official fieldwork, we have maintained relationships with our participants across local, regional and transnational distances. We were and are a part of their multi-stranded social networks (Owen, 2019). As such, we have not held to an illusory practice of objectivity, particularly ill-advised when focused on intimate, emic data that details the grit and determination of cross-border living; nor have we maintained an aloof distance from our research friends. Through amity, conviviality and mutual appreciation for each other, we became a part of each others’ transnational networks (Owen, 2016a) and extended networks of belonging (Owen, 2015; Owen et al., 2021).

Contextualising migration to South Africa – Congolese and Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa

Zimbabwean and Congolese migration to South Africa

Zimbabwean and Congolese migration to South Africa extends as far back as the early twentieth century and the 1980s (Crush et al., 2016; Mlambo, 2010; Morris and Bouillon, 2001; Nugent and Asiwaju, 1996; Owen, 2011). As Apartheid South Africa corralled its black ⁵ ‘citizens’ into ‘native’ reserves, legislating their internal movement through laws that supported racial capitalism (Adhikari, 2005; Alexander, 2013), black African labour migrants from the southern African region including Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho became circular migrants in the mining, agricultural and domestic sectors (Wentzel and Tlabela, 2006). Zimbabweans have been oscillating labour migrants to South Africa since the 1900s (Mlambo, 2010), and as the political and economic fortunes of Zimbabwe waxed and waned in the decades that followed, the Zimbabwean diaspora burgeoned globally, with Zimbabwean migration to South Africa exemplifying voluntary economic migration and involuntary migration (Adepoju, 2006; Hwami, 2011).

In much the same way, Congolese migrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo migrated voluntarily to South Africa before the fall of Apartheid. The first cohort of transmigrants drawn from the elite class in the DRC (Owen, 2011), inclusive of professionals like engineers, dentists, doctors and educators immigrated to South Africa in the 1980s. The second and third waves included middle-class Congolese men and women and educational migrants between 1990 to 1997; and thereafter, an increase in the number of Congolese men and women seeking political asylum and refugee status (Morris and Bouillon, 2001). Across each wave, Congolese transmigrants sought a way to secure their livelihoods, and the extended well-being of their families, a universal phenomenon shared among the world’s migrating individuals, irrespective of the circumstances or the reasoning that leads to migration (Adepoju, 2006; Basch et al., 1994; Werbner, 2014).

In the twenty-first century, Zimbabwean and Congolese transmigrants self-identify as economic migrants, asylum seekers, educational migrants, immigrants and refugees depending on their circumstances and the most convenient legal route to stay in South Africa. Each of these categories is administratively managed in different ways, with asylum seekers unable to work in South Africa during their application process (Harris, 2001). However, the Home Affairs department, hampered by corruption, ineffective service delivery and inappropriate capacity, cannot process these asylum seeker and refugee applications timeously or within suggested time frames (Masuku, 2020; Washinyira, 2022). As such, African transmigrants circumvent administrative processes and procedures to secure their livelihoods.

South Africa’s progressive 1996 constitution offers broad protection for im/migrant rights, providing several socio-economic rights and the right to human dignity and non-discrimination (Mukumbang et al., 2020). It provides im/migrants protection against potential human rights’ violations and unconstitutional acts (Chekero and Ross, 2018; Zanker and Moyo, 2020). However, the post-Apartheid government has struggled to implement and apply these progressive and liberal laws in systematic ways. They are undermined in practice by state officials’ lack of compliance with legal prescriptions and an increasingly punitive regime that attempts to restrict the rights enshrined in the constitution (Masuku, 2020; Moyo et al., 2021).

COVID-19 and its aftermath

During the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa, the various controls executed through the Disaster Management Act 57 of 2002 to curb the spread of COVID-19 had devastating effects on African transmigrants resident in South Africa. While unemployed citizens, including those who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, received R350 ($20) as a COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant, African transmigrants were ineligible for this grant. Through a court order granted on 18 June 2021 (over 15 months after the initiation of hard lockdowns in South Africa), the state was forced to provide for asylum seekers on Section 22 ⁶ permits and migrants from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Angola on special permits ⁷ (Moyo et al., 2021). While this was a victory for documented migrants, those still in the processing system of Home Affairs and undocumented migrants were left without government assistance.

In the aftermath of a series of harsh lockdowns, many companies were forced to close their doors due to rolling financial shocks. Whereas many South African business owners were assisted through the Business Relief Fund, African transmigrants who run small businesses in the country were excluded as the requirement to secure assistance was 100% South African ownership (Mukumbang et al., 2020). Like South Africans, African transmigrants turned to solidary networks to assist themselves and their ‘hosts’ when the government failed to provide an economic safety net during the pandemic crisis. ⁸

In the midst of COVID-19, Operation Dudula, a social movement targeting the removal of illegal migrants in the country, underscored South Africa’s deepening economic crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the depth of the state’s vulnerability and ineptitude in the face of a global pandemic that demanded immediate and efficient responses to a threat to all life, irrespective of nationality (Moyo and Nshimbi, 2020; Mushomi et al., 2022). The state’s inability to clarify and distinguish between undocumented migrants and documented migrants, its inability to secure South Africa’s borders, and effectively police the application of the Immigration Act of 2002 has added further fuel to Afrophobic intent in recent years (Masuku, 2020). In the face of Afrophobia (a hard socio-cultural boundary), and an inefficient migration system, what can African transmigrants do to secure themselves? Our research participants’ experiences point to the significance of humaning (Erasmus, 2017) as an emergent and strategic response and a process that qualitatively invalidates the idea that migrant labels reveal the reality and ‘content’ of African transmigrants’ lives in South Africa.

The politics of inclusion – amity, conviviality and mutuality

Fieldwork in Muizenberg and Bloemfontein

The help of a familiar stranger – Muizenberg, Cape Town

In 2004 Owen entered Muizenberg to initiate doctoral fieldwork with Congolese men and women resident there. An Afropolitan space, Muizenberg was the backdrop for a reality in which South African men and women and European women interacted with and became entangled with Congolese or other transnational African men.

On a summer’s day, Owen had a quick interaction with Eric, a stout Congolese man in his early thirties at the local supermarket. Eric, with smiling eyes and a resonant laugh, encouraged Owen to stop and chat. Eric talked slowly, greeting various people intermittently as they entered or exited Shoprite with ‘allo, allo’. He had moved from Muizenberg ‘up the line’ as he put it and explained further,

‘I was so worried. I have to go to Wittebome. I have a flat there. Small but bigger than where I am staying now. And how was I going to move everything? So so worried. I met a white lady here. Saw her at my other car guarding job. And she recognised me here. A really nice lady. I told her my predicament and she offered to help. Can you imagine? A white lady help me? She gave me her bakkie. ⁹ With petrol in. And I did three trips. Up the M5. Up and down. She trusted me. When I returned the bakkie, she wouldn’t take any money. She said she was happy to help. Can you imagine? Now I want to buy her a gift. Can I buy her flowers?’

Eric and Owen are both surprised by his positive, supportive experience with a white South African woman, given the systemic socio-political and economic construction of racialised interaction before 1994 (Adhikari, 2005; Erasmus, 2017; Owen, 2015) and the aftermath of socio-political division. ¹⁰ However, Eric’s experience and the many other experiences her primary research informants had with their white male South African ‘patron’ and other South African interlocutors corrected a simplifiefd story that pitted white South Africans against black South Africans during Apartheid; and South Africans against foreigners in the early twenty-first century.

With a little help from my friend – Bloemfontein

Like Owen’s research over a five-year period, Juries’s interaction with her interlocutors, confirmed the entangled and interwoven lives of a Zimbabwean educational migrant and a South African citizen across time, space and life’s vicissitudes.

Faith is a petite, black African female. With clear and radiant light brown skin and her black natural hair styled into locks, she cuts a striking figure. A 26-year-old orphan born in Harare, she mentioned Tshidi, her older brother Chad’s friend, in one of her earliest conversations with Juries. As further interviews and conversations followed, Faith revealed the depth of her relationship with Tshidi as separate from the friendship Chad had with Tshidi. ¹¹

In 2020, Tshidi was involved in a horrific accident that left her bedridden and incapacitated for several weeks. Faith moved in with Tshidi temporarily to help her dress her wounds and to take care of Lerato, Tshidi’s son. Long after Tshidi’s recovery, Faith made regular visits to them. In 2022, Faith and Tshidi were physically separated as Faith moved to Durban and Tshidi to Limpopo. Yet they maintain contact, emphasising the importance of their relationship as crafted in the fires of personal need and crises.

In similar ways to Owen’s and Juries’ interlocutors, Mokoena’s Zimbabwean interlocutors, working predominantly in the informal sector in Bloemfontein, were assisted by Zimbabwean nationals and South Africans alike. One of Mokoena’s research collaborators explained.

‘In January 1995, a year after initially migrating as an economic migrant to Musina, then Johannesburg in November that year, I decided to try in Bloemfontein; a lady from my church back home stayed in Bloemfontein. I thought that if I find her, maybe she can help me. I took a Shosholoza train headed to the Eastern Cape. The train dropped me at the station in Bloemfontein. When I arrived here, I was shocked at how big the place was. For two weeks, I slept at the waiting area at the rail station and used the toilets there to wash. During the day, I would walk around town looking for a job, hoping to see Mme Anah. One Sunday in the early hours of the morning, I saw Mme Anah at the train station. She was going back to Zimbabwe to visit her relatives’.

Chitova explained his situation to Mme Anah and she offered him her home in [a local township] for 3 months during her absence. While resident there, he conducted his morning prayers at 6 am, and soon black South African neighbours and township residents joined him:

‘Through those prayer meetings, I was able to meet people from here in Bloem. Some of them would bring me food. I never went to bed hungry. Others would find me odd jobs to cut people’s grass, painting, fixing things like rooves, kettles and irons. I was able to make some money, and I saved it and went to Joburg to stock gas lighters to sell them to tuck shop owners, taverns and people around. I was also able to find a place to rent. That is how I survived the first few months in Bloem before being able to afford my own place. It was through [South African] people helping’.

Chitova’s story, like that of Eric’s and Faith’s, emphasises the importance of contingency (Owen, 2015), and the support of strangers, familiarised through consistent and meaningful interaction that includes transnational prayer circles (Ojong, 2005; Owen, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Owen et al., 2020). Our research participants crafted complex intersectional realities of sociality, loving and eking out a living in close proximity to each other. Eric’s, Faith’s and Chitova’s varied and multiple experiences of care and assistance, however brief, and the many others we observed and were informed of during our fieldwork transcended superficial otherness grafted on racial, ethnic, linguistic and national differences.

Our complex experiences across time, and geographical space, across researchers and across national research subjects, stitch together slices of human possibility, and human reality situated in a country that has a history of segregation, Apartheid and Afrophobia. A focus on these experiences and the ways in which metaphorical and embodied boundary making was and is subverted physically and socio-culturally confirm that the Congolese, South African and Zimbabwean nationals we have worked with give meaning to various African ideas and philosophies such as ubuntu in South Africa (Cornell and Van Marle, 2015; Nyamnjoh, 2019), and hushamwari for Shona speaking Zimbabweans (Chekero and Morreira, 2020). These philosophies and ways of being embody the humaning process, which includes a deep commitment to conviviality, mutuality, compassion, amity, interconnection and interdependence (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Mbatha and Koskimaki, 2023; Nyamnjoh, 2019; Ojong, 2005; Owen, 2015; Sichone, 2003, 2008).

The complexity of inclusionary and exclusionary politics

Hard and immobile borders (infrastructure and experiences of alienation – Afrophobia) are softened and transcended through mutuality and conviviality (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2013, 2015; Owen, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2019). The experience of hard borders, like South Africa’s wire fences that run the length of the physical border between Zimbabwe and South Africa in the north, can strike terror into a mobile African subject. Yet this terror depends on the individual’s citizenship status, reason for crossing the border, the possession of the correct paperwork (passport, visa), their race, their ethnicity and the legality or illegality of their entry.

In a state like South Africa, where encampment of asylum seekers and refugees is not compelled or offered, despite it being a signatory to various agreements with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), ¹² movement across South Africa’s porous borders for undocumented and illegal immigrants can be dislocating and traumatic. South Africa’s reputation as an Afrophobic country underscores the ill treatment of African migrants at the macro level of the state and the micro level of its citizenry. At the level of the state, the asylum-seeking process has been hampered by closures of Refugee centres across the country, such as in Gqeberha ¹³ and Cape Town ¹⁴ (Masuku, 2020), incapacitated or defunct Home Affairs departments, maladministration and corrupt officials who use discretionary powers to validate or invalidate an asylum seeker’s request for safe harbour, or to extend his ‘indeterminate’ stay (Masuku, 2020; Washinyira, 2022). This historical and contemporary abuse of power is aimed predominantly at African transmigrants irrespective of their political categorisation as documented migrants, economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees or educational migrants (Nugent and Asiwaju, 1996). Perceived and presented as an undifferentiated mass African transmigrants become the exemplars of parasites who are only in South Africa to steal South Africans’ jobs, and/or marry South African women for citizenship status, while remaining loyal to their kin in other countries (Harris, 2002; Nyamnjoh, 2007; Palmary, 2002).

The state’s blatant Afrophobia is further localised at the micro level where African migrants encounter South African citizens. Here, the boundary between citizen and subject (Mamdani, 2018), Afrophobic citizen and other, is tested and confirmed in episodic encounters that are violent and often deadly. The xenophobic events in 2008, 2015 and 2016 were harbingers of rising Afrophobic sentiment among the South African precariat. In this atmosphere of anomie and atomisation, African migrants who are resident in cosmopolitan townships are scapegoated (Harris, 2002; Pineteh, 2017) as their ability to maintain a livelihood, often through trade, small businesses or services inclusive of gardening, and domestic work in a depressed economy is anomalous and suspicious. As Kaziboni (2022) notes, ‘Since 2004 more than 900 violent xenophobic incidents have been recorded in South Africa, resulting in at least 630 deaths, displacement of 123,700 people, and looting of about 4,850 shops’.

In spite of these shocking statistics South Africa is not exceptional in its response to African migrants (Nugent and Asiwaju, 1996). The draconian imposition of laws, searches and controls elsewhere, most recently experienced by African educational migrants fleeing war-torn parts of Ukraine to Germany, is a case in point (Howard et al., 2022). The reality of global xenophobia and Afrophobia does not, however, deter political commentators from aggravating a more balanced representation of South Africa.

While the state remains ambivalent towards African transmigrants and mass protests continue to denounce and decry the continued residence of illegal African immigrants, the mutuality and conviviality of a banal encounter (Agier, 2016; Werbner, 2014) humanises mobile Africans and immobile South Africans (Owen, 2011, 2015; Nyamnjoh, 2013). As others have argued (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2015; Owen, 2015, 2016a, 2016b), our work furthers relationships of reciprocity, exchange, emotional support and mutual respect created between African migrant others and South African citizens across socially inscribed and politicised forms of difference or identity construction – race, class, gender, lingua franca, migration categories and nationality. In these momentary and continuous encounters, the political imposition of ‘us and them’, ‘citizen and subject’, South African and non-South African, loses its exclusionary grip on the psyche of the interacting individuals.

Our research experiences and observations are representative of amity (Mbatha and Koskimaki, 2023), mutuality (Chekero and Morreira, 2020) and conviviality (Nyamnjoh, 2015, 2019) as part of a humaning (Erasmus, 2017) process, confirm that the most basic consideration of others is not an either/or proposition, but rather one that is crafted and created in the mess and juice of life. Offers of care and assistance are situational and contextual arising among people who have engendered a mutual familiarity that supports the extension of the self to secure the well-being of another. In a convivial environment, individuals and communities empower one another through personal investments of time and effort (Nyamnjoh, 2015; The Care Collective, 2020). The work of humaning transcends hard, social and infrastructural boundaries, even those physical and legal administrative ones crafted by the state. Boundaries are thus porous and malleable; constructed and open to transcendence (Paasi, 2019).

Our research across nearly two decades with differently labelled transnational African migrants reveals their agency and the different futures they are co-creating with fellow African transmigrants and South Africans. These futures actively subvert socio-political boundaries. Irrespective of their categorisation at the border black African transmigrants’ experiences as mobile transnational subjects question the maintenance of a system of categorisation that obscures lived realities and experiences (whether at the level of the state, or in academic considerations of movement). Their experiences and our experiences antagonise the social and scholarly meaning attached to hard boundaries expressed materially through border posts, border patrols, labelling and other symbolic forms of citizenship (Cohen, 1985). Connection, mutuality, assistance, hospitality, amity and conviviality, soften the materially symbolic expressions of otherness, creating a reality that is complex, messy and humane. Fission and fusion are part of South Africa’s socio-political fabric.

The reality of building connections within a habitus of banal cosmopolitanism (Agier, 2016) shared by Frontier Africans (Nyamnjoh, 2015), that includes both continental Africans and South African others, complexifies and complicates a simplified and simple narrative of Afrophobia, and the exclusionary meaning attached to the ‘hard’ borders imposed by state infrastructure and embodied state actors at borders and through attempts at governance (Wilson, 2014). Without a functioning state system to police categorical boundaries beyond the actual border, despite haphazard attempts to do so periodically, our interlocutors were and are ‘gone in the wind’, relatively free to create and sustain co-mingled, intertwined and mangled (Nyamnjoh, 2013) lives beyond the control of the state.

Initially living cheek by jowl in national enclaves, African migrants in conversation with, and daily interaction with South Africans and similar national others have created solidary networks that overshadow the state’s attempt to locate them categorically as non-citizens. These transnational solidary networks, exemplary of Glick-Schiller’s (2014) discussion of transnationality, invoke particular expressions of being (habitus) and togetherness that assert commonality of interest, affect and survival. At times, a chance encounter does not extend beyond this initial interaction; and at other times, reoccurring encounters – in medical facilities, in car parks, in prayer circles, in each others’ abodes, in churches or streets, in cars or in the continuous encounter between researcher and researched – build a connection of longue duree that is meaningful to all concerned.

Conclusion

The presence of African transmigrants in South Africa and their complex reception underscores a process of humaning that includes Afrophobia, and mutually disruptive and disrupted economies of care (The Care Collective, 2020). In our ethnographic case studies amity, conviviality, and mutuality evoke an extension of the self to offer respite or care to another. These various iterations and dimensions of humaning between non-national African transmigrants and South African citizens interrogate the binary between citizen and subject. A deeper consideration of the ways in which South African citizens and African transmigrants transcend state-centric formations of citizen and other, presents an inclusive and human narrative that traces the flows, stops and starts of relationships and relating. Our research participants reveal humanity at work, in love, in prayer and even in death at the southern tip of Africa. Their narratives confirm that context, which includes the past, the present and the future, matters.

As social anthropologists and fellow humans, we recognise our complicity in the lives of our research participants and the ways in which our lives became enmeshed in theirs. As we encountered each other across time, physical distance and emotional space, we witnessed each others’ changing fortunes. Depending on personality, personal circumstances and willingness to share private thoughts, dreams, fears and antagonisms we became a part of each others’ circuits personelles (Owen, 2011, 2015). Through discussions, conversations, debates, arguments and observations of the ordinary and mundane, the day to day dynamics of transnational life writ small became clear. And while Afrophobic sentiments and/or violence of thought, word and deed were manifest, these were but part of the backdrop to life of an African migrant of indeterminate status; a part of transnational coexistence but not the overarching reality. Owen’s asylum seekers and refugees, Mokoena’s economic migrants and Juries’s educational migrants lived ordinary lives that were not curtailed or harassed by the state beyond its attempts to police entry at the border, through university processes (in the case of Juries) or through administrative requirements to continue residence in South Africa (as experienced by Owen’s and Mokoena’s interlocutors). Contextually, South Africa’s incapacitated immigration system creates possibilities for a cosmopolitan life that supports mutual growth and survival. The shadows of Afrophobia are present and do exist; and they are tamed and vanquished in the mundane minutiae of interconnected living.

In light of our research data, which adds to the growing research on conviviality in South Africa between unfamiliar African others (Chekero and Morreira, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2007, 2013, 2015), and the Western literature on cosmopolitanism (Agier, 2016; Hannerz, 1990; Werbner, 2014) ‘What does the disentanglement of political categories from theoretical exposition reveal about transnational migration?’ Simply, state-centric categories cannot be confused with analytical categories as they obfuscate lived experience in specific locales. They are not universally meaningful as their use blights the contextual terrain of their use, the state’s ability or inability to police them, and resistance (humaning) to these political categories. Definitional myopia that is abstracted from mundane sociality and social contexts obscures the agency and creativity of actors, and the curiosity of the human spirit; so too human beings’ resilience and their will to live and thrive irrespective of their political definition.

Our work reveals the limited applicability of fixed, political categories. They are not containers or indicators of territorial and emotional engagement for resilient and creative humans. Whether we refer to these mobile and immobile Africans as cosmopolitan (Agier, 2016; Werbner, 2014) by way of Western theoretical exposition, or as ‘Frontier Africans’ by way of Nyamnjoh’s (2015) exterpellation, African transmigrants’ lives enmeshed with South Africans’ lives in South Africa confirm an experience of transcendent humaning (Erasmus, 2017). Humaning is a fragile process ‘threatened by countervailing ethnicist, nationalist and racist forces’ (Werbner, 2014: 309). But the fragility of this process does not obliterate its existence. ‘Ordinary’ acts of kindness, assistance, amity, conviviality, and mutuality confirm the expansion of a politics of inclusion alongside a politics of exclusion in South Africa. Once African transmigrants, whether categorised as voluntary or involuntary migrants or labelled specifically as asylum seekers, refugees, economic migrants and/or educational migrants, are in South Africa, they are forced to create a life of substance as there are no state or international welfare systems in place to secure them. When we reorient our focus away from the vacuous nature of categorisation, the agency, personality, street-smarts and chutzpah of African transmigrants and South Africans point to different socio-political possibilities and realities within states burdened by segregationist and colonial histories.