Living and Organizing While Undocumented in South Africa

A CONVERSATION WITH KUDAKWASHE VANYORO

In Southern Africa, the structures of settler colonialism and apartheid still shape the way people living on land are racialized today, with an important distinction between citizens and foreigners, in particular undocumented laborers. We talk with Kudakwashe Vanyoro about the way the border regime materializes in present South Africa, and how undocumented people navigate through these violent structures.

LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: The current political reality of South Africa is built on both the settler colonial legacy of the apartheid, and the various measures taken since 1994. Could you talk about the way immigration policy has changed since the explicitly racist one of the apartheid regime?

KUDAKWASHE VANYORO: Yes, it’s a very good question and I think one aspect of the response has to do with governance. And the other one has to do with issues of identity and belonging. And I suppose that the center of the immigration policies in South Africa is a drive to try to manage economic resources and access to them, which then entails regulation of space, that is who gets to access what kind of space. So apartheid was a system that was fundamentally built on trying to regulate who has access to the city, who has access to the land, or the beach, to swimming pools, etc.. It regulated individuals in a racialized way, because in order to achieve that result, you obviously need a system that determines privilege on the grounds of racial characteristics. And that required a mode of governance that was very spatially discriminatory, which meant that it had to come up with a way of keeping African Black people in townships and keeping white people in the more affluent areas and neighborhoods. But at the same time, it also needed to ensure that the system could maintain wage labor which meant that at the same time, it still needed to have Black people coming into those spaces reserved for white people in order to do the work. Your “pool boys,” your so called “garden boys,” your so called “housemaids,” were required in these affluent houses and they were also laborers that were required in the mines and the agricultural sector.

So to do that, the law and the policies had to be able to respond to this very sort of ambivalent scenario of keeping people in and out? The apartheid regime had to then come up with the pass laws, where Black people were allowed in certain areas, only at certain times. And if you’re in violation of those policies, you would be arrested. The system couldn’t just have people staying in the rural areas spaces reserved for Black people like so-called “bantustans.” The apartheid regime had to effectively keep certain people in rural remote areas, but still to create an inadequate environment, to push certain people out. So labor had to be pushed out in order to come to hostels and townships, close to the city, but not within the city. This already meant that the system didn’t only rely on immigration, but also on those from these rural areas. This is why the differential between the rural and the urban had to also be maintained in that particular way. So the system couldn’t really develop those areas at all if it was to be at all effective. And of course this internal system was complemented by regional, cross-border recruitment of migrant laborers, often through bilateral agreements, which would ensure that you could still get laborers from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

So how does this relate to today? I think you see a similar modus operandi, in terms of what migration governance means in South Africa. For a capitalist kind of economy, you still see the reliance on wage labor from not only different parts of South Africa, but as was also the case during Apartheid regions cross-border migration particularly as there is a demand for similar migrant labor. But this is now in an environment where the colonial borders have been fortified, which is the dilemma of Africa, really in a post colonial moment where the leaders had to say, what do we do now with these borders? So politically, you see a scenario where there’s a sense that everyone is African, but at the same time, immigration policies in South Africa are really quite neoliberal and meant to selectively manage and govern migration. What is maintained then in the current immigration regime that is similar to apartheid is what some scholars have called this two gates system, which allows people to come in who have the required or desired skills such as high skills. These are people working perhaps in universities, law firms, accounting firms, and at the same time this regime still needs domestic workers, right, because local workers are not all necessarily keen on taking up some of that work if it’s too manual. Or one of the things you find is that these low wages are exploitative, so undocumented workers are likely to accept them.

Those people are part of the workforce that is functionally kept in that particular precarious situation. Without getting into the specific policies themselves, that is generally the bedrock of South African immigration policy.

LL: This issue looks at the complexity of the border regime’s violence and the political organizing of undocumented activists. Your work looks particularly at the relationships between undocumented workers in South Africa and the various state apparatuses, in particular healthcare. Could you please share with us how these apparatuses increase the precariousness of their lives?

KV: The main issue related to health in terms of precarity is that people who then move on sort of the lower end of migration are subject to the risky crossing that accompanies being undocumented. This means that health precarity is engineered at and by the border. People who cross informally are exposed to different kinds of risks. For example, if we take those that move  across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border we find that women can potentially get raped by criminals and gangs that are operating in that particular area known as “no man’s land.” There are people who have experienced all sorts of harm and trauma along the way. Some people have died while crossing the river while others have gotten maimed. As people who are crossing without papers means and relying on smugglers, sometimes they run out of money, which leads to unforeseen delays and finding themselves in the border town of Messina where they rely on the help of humanitarian shelters: there’s a lot of congestion and very limited space and sanitation for people to live. 

So what you see in that particular border space, as you are likely to find anywhere else, is that space is already a health issue for people who are probably heading towards Johannesburg. These are people who already need to access some kind of treatment for these risks, be it biomedical or psychosocial. And when you’re undocumented, accessing services in the public health care system, in as much as it’s constitutionally guaranteed, is not always a safe space, because health care providers can easily deny care for one reason or the other, mostly related to bureaucratic issues of saying, “Oh, I can’t record you, I can’t capture you on the system because you don’t have a paper,” which is not always necessarily true, because there are ways of doing that. But more importantly, these are constitutional rights and legally that shouldn’t even be a question, particularly when we’re talking about primary healthcare. Outside of the border, when people do make it into Joburg, there come the social determinants of health as people who have crossed in these risky ways are more likely to find themselves in these spaces of vulnerability. For example, they stay in shacks and these are places where there’s no water or sanitation. So there’s that interaction between precarity and other kinds of vulnerability that they encounter. But at the same time, this reality is often overplayed politically to suggest that the need for migrants to access health care means that people are moving for healthcare. This is politically productive in that it overlooks the social engineering of poor health through border securitisation that leads to the risky journey, such that the legal precarity is in itself a health vulnerability of sorts, and not only in the biomedical sense, but mostly in terms of the infrastructure or in the spatial sense. In other words, what are the kinds of vulnerabilities that emerge and how do they reproduce situations and environments that are hazardous for the mind and the body? So, this reality should never be taken to suggest that people are moving to South Africa for care. That is a very politically dangerous discourse. People who are moving are mostly young. These are people whose families invest in as agile and young people who are more likely to bring the best outcomes. They’re not going to be sending people that are sick across the border as that would be a bad investment.

LL: The gendered dimension of this precariousness is crucial to note; in particular when it comes to domestic workers who are predominantly women, or for construction workers who are predominantly men. How does this hyper-gendered sectorization of labor intensify the violence of the border regime with regards to undocumented workers?

KV: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because I think the risks are different for men and for women in terms of crossing the border, but it’s not always in that intuitive way of saying it is all good for men. Along the journey, women are vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation like sexual exploitation, and where the situation is so dire they’re forced to move with children. While men do encounter similar challenges in terms of also being largely, perhaps undocumented, the risks are not necessarily the same along the journey. Usually, the violence is limited to physical violence and confrontation when encountered by criminals and gangs, whereas with women, there are all kinds of possibilities that arise. But when men are now placed in work, that’s where you see the risk shifting. Masculinity can create expectations from society such that men are largely working in certain sectors like construction work where conditions are quite dangerous. Anything can happen there like accidents, say a brick or machine falling over your head. This is something that requires that you’re also sort of covered by some kind of insurance, and have good medical cover. But we know this also depends on whether you have some kind of documentation to allow you to make sure that when something does happen, you can approach the state for whatever social security is associated with getting injured or, or harmed in that instance. The same applies to people working in mines. This means you now find people working without the necessary cover to ensure that when they return home they can start building new lives. Do they even have access to pension funds, retirement, all of that?

Meanwhile, domestic work has its challenges too, but they are not quite similar. The main challenges there are related to the fact that work is not always contracted beyond verbal agreements, and it also takes place in invisible, private spaces, which are very marginal even to people who are mandated to monitor labor standards.

If you are staying with your employer as a worker, you could be working from 6 AM and finishing off at 10 PM and no one would know. In the event that you do get dismissed unfairly, on paper there is access to the CCMA. If you and your employer have been contributing to the Unemployment Insurance Fund, you should be able to get something out of it. But then when it becomes a challenge there’s a lot of hesitancy when people don’t have papers to approach these particular institutions, whether it’s for mediation, or to claim the actual UIF. For women, that is also the challenge. For them, there’s a greater degree of possibilities for getting unfairly dismissed. Because these are spaces where if you just make a mistake or something, the employer can just say, “Look, this is not working out.” So it’s very precarious, very unstable, and very unpredictable work. 

Of greater concern and one thing that you also don’t want to see from this reality emerging is the essentialization of these experiences to particular genders. It’s not that these issues are limited to certain genders or that men are less vulnerable or more vulnerable, as vice versa. It’s really about thinking through how these issues shift across different life experiences and across the determination of how much social capital someone has and how this influences how they can be able to then navigate some of those challenges. 

LL: I read in your work how labor unions tend to recite this mantra “a worker is a worker” to affirm their effort is the same regardless of whether the workers they represent are documented or undocumented. How does this liberal vision affect negatively undocumented workers who, of course, are the particular target of capitalist exploitation? 

KV: I think mostly the issue for those trying to organize for migrant workers is that they are sometimes perceived by those unions, or those who have been organizing on the front line for Black people historically for a long time, as trying to divide the working class. So there’s this understanding that there is such a thing as a working class in South Africa, which of course there is, but but that is also a sometimes overplayed in its sort of utopian sense to suggest that it’s a similar group and everyone is supposed to unite across those similar lines and challenges. And, of course, there are moments where experiences are similar. Between a South African and a Zimbabwean in domestic work who’s undocumented, they are issues that are most likely to cut across in a way that experiences become similar, but they are also points of departure where things are a little bit different. And those are the issues that migrant solidarity groups usually are trying to address when they come up with their own unions or organizations to try and engage some of these issues. This is where there’s sometimes some pushback to say, “Look, this is now a way to try to divide the working class.” That creates a lot of challenges, particularly as migrant worker unions or groups sometimes don’t feel that the local ones address some of their concerns and some have even gone as far as suggesting that some of them are xenophobic and do not feel that this particular group should be included within these kinds of movements. At this particular moment organizing as a migrant worker or as a migrant worker union is not necessarily something that is sort of streamlined within these movements. So these groups have to almost always find a way to fit in or to bring about the message in a way that also doesn’t cause too much confrontation with these long standing local unions. This kind of organizing creates a situation where some people then choose to simply not engage but find ways of simply sort of coping and being resilient on their own in their own capacities. 

Outside the organization, the great work that is being done is really when there are key networks for finding different kinds of jobs and referral around different legal needs like renewing of Zimbabwe Special Exemption Permits or accessing healthcare services.

This is important in a context where migrants have simply chosen to be aloof and not necessarily be connected because of some of the possible dangers that come with that kind of visibility.

LL: Importantly, how have undocumented people organized and continue to organize against this system of production of deliberate vulnerability that they have to face?

KV: Organizing politically is quite risky and dangerous, particularly as an undocumented worker, because it obviously puts you in the spotlight in that you can create all sorts of unnecessary and needed attention. So this is where you will see that they are people who are doing that on behalf of these groups. To what extent you can call them migrant secret civil society or migrant organizing like what you find in certain parts of the world with robust migrant diaspora groups is certainly worth pondering. Of course they are there, but what you will find in the public sphere and legal space is that civil society is the one that is very proactive. If migrants, refugees and asylum seekers need legal help they can go approach, for example, Lawyers for Human Rights, and they will, they will assist with the case and even litigate if they have the capacity. That creates change on the front line at least legally by setting all sorts of legal precedent, whether it’s related to documentation of children whose parents don’t have passports or whatever that case may be. So you will see your Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa being a central point for some of these engagements. But it’s not led by a migrant per se yet it’s an organization that tries to be in connection with some of these migrant groups. And then you find that migrants are really organizing at a very grassroots level where that invisibility is somewhat guaranteed. Ethiopian communities will have a little diaspora group like the Zimbabweans in South Africa and the same applies for a lot of them. Your national civil society are in the frontline of taking these matters up to court or to Parliament as you will find even with the Zimbabwean Exemption Permits where the Helen Suzman foundation is the one that’s taken the lead in litigating against the Department of Home Affairs. for this particular challenge of related to the cancellation of these, these permits. You will find that there’s a lot happening, particularly there, and what it points to then largely is how in South Africa, the politics that matters is the politics of representation. It means that as long as we have these national civil society groups that are lobbying and advocating and finding ways of of creating solidarity and finding issues, working with people on the grassroots and getting their issues on the national table, then that is more likely to be something that works strategically and also in ways that can can give safety to migrants. What you’re not going to find is a migrant group that is outspokenly saying “We are undocumented and we want our rights,” or “We want this right and that right.”

LL: My extremely partial and naive perspective of the time I spent in Johannesburg makes me see the city a bit like a fragment of the pan-African dream with so many people from all over the Continent living there. At the same time, I was present in the city during and in the aftermath of the violent manifestations of xenophobia that killed seven people over five days, and many people I spoke with were worried for their well-being or even their lives. May I ask you how we can reconcile this dichotomy that accounts for the complexity of this notion of “xenophobia” when it comes from communities who are Indigenous to the land, yet live under settler colonial conditions, and take their anger towards people who, for many, are also Indigenous to the Continent and have simply moved south to seek a better life? 

KV: I think what you’re suggesting there for me is there’s this social life of xenophobia. It’s not something spectacular like the representations of it being like a fire that just blazes and rages on. There’s really a kind of sociality and not necessarily a brazen attack against foreigners that is taking place in a vacuum.

Some colleagues I’ve worked with at the African Center for Migration and Society through the project on Xenowatch, which picks up on different reports of xenophobia, find that work is that attacks are more prevalent in areas where there’s weak forms of governance. It’s most likely to be turned into a scapegoating tool. And so if people go complain to a particular local leader about a certain challenge or a service delivery issue or they protest, it’s in those areas where leadership is not really accountable or strong enough to bring up measures to address the issues that they point to the foreigner or to the other. This explains why xenophobic violence takes place in certain moments, in certain places and not others even though these are townships or areas that have similar profiles in terms of the economy.

The other paradox has to do with the body and how people engage and interact because South Africa is not also this generally hostile place. When people are trying to access healthcare, for example, where you’re from is not the only determinant of how things would end up for you and what the outcome is, in terms of whether you get access to a resource or not. It’s really about some of the expectations in that encounter. One of the things that was fascinating in my engagement with healthcare workers was how they perceived people who would not even try to speak the local languages are somewhat rude or people who are just not willing to cooperate. So there is that kind of social expectation that people are going to meet us halfway with our language. And if they don’t, then that’s an issue, which is obviously not, which is obviously xenophobic. But I think it shows us how these things can  turn out differently for people who have similar identities. So you can both be Zimbabwean in terms of your nationality and interact with the same healthcare worker and walk out with different experiences all together about that encounter. Another thing that also protects people is class and where they live. There are areas where people can be proudly, Nigerian, or Congolese and sort of flaunt and actually own their own regalia as much as there are areas where perhaps it’s not necessarily a safe space, not just because it’s a problem to do that but that if something does take place then they need to find a scapegoat you will most likely be on the firing line. ■