No abstract

Both Uganda and South Africa were quick to respond to the global pandemic – Uganda for example imposing quarantine on foreign travellers after only a handful of cases before shutting off all international flights, and South Africa imposing one of the first lockdowns on the continent. Reflecting on the first 6 months of the pandemic responses in terms of refugee protection, the two countries have taken diverging pathways. South Africa used the pandemic to start building a border fence on the border with Zimbabwe, initially curtailed all foreign shop owners from opening under lockdown and excluded asylum seekers from emergency relief grants. In contrast, Uganda opened its borders to refugees from the DRC in June, when border closures were still the global norm. Whilst both responses are not unusual in light of their standard governance approaches, they highlight the own self-image the countries espouse – with Uganda positioning itself as the world’s premier refugee protector at a time when it is desperately in need of more funds and South Africa looking to politically capitalize internally from reiterating a division between migrant communities as a threat to poor and disenfranchised South Africans. Even during a pandemic, the practice of refugee protection does not happen in a political vacuum. This paper is based on over 50 in-person and digital interviews conducted in Uganda and South Africa in 2020, as well as nine focus groups with refugee and host communities.

This article provides an ethnographically informed critique of the humanitarian self-management model that informs reproductive health trainings for young urban refugees in Kampala, Uganda. It draws on interviews with 16 adolescent refugees, as well as policymakers, aid workers and health care professionals in Kampala in April 2019. We found that reproductive health education training sessions are a site of gendered learning where displaced boys and girls gain an understanding of what it means “how to live a good life” and how to become marriage material. Their focus on self-control also reflects a wider shift in humanitarianism toward female empowerment as a tool of neoliberal governance. In a low-resource context, however, “self-managing” one’s reproductive health takes on a different meaning, as displaced adolescents weigh up opportunities for short-term income from transactional sex with imagined reproductive futures elsewhere.