In this paper we will provide a preliminary overview of the Chinese diaspora in South Africa, with particular focus on non-metropolitan, rural contexts.The migrations of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a complex array of Chinese communities around the world. While we know a fair amount about the Chinese diasporas in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and also diasporic communities within Asia, Africa's Chinese community remains a vastly understudied aspect of this larger Chinese diaspora (Ma & Cartier, 2003). Yet there have been long-standing ties between Africa and China, going back to the fifteenth century, and presently China is one of Africa's biggest trade partners and investors (Rotberg, 2008).

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The relationship between ethnolinguistic fractionalisation and development has long been of interest to economists and linguists. While econometric analyses have shown relatively stable interactions between high levels of fractionalisation and low indices of development, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are still unclear. This paper explores the importance of fragmented versus unified communication networks for socio-economic development, using data from Cape Town, South Africa. Like other cities in low-and middle-income countries, Cape Town shows growing linguistic diversity due to high levels of rural-urban migration. Two aspects of the city's economy will be discussed on the basis of specialised survey data and anthropological fieldwork: (a) the labour market, and (b) informal entrepreneurial activities. The analysis shows the importance of language as an explanatory variable in the study of economic life, and allows us to advance our understanding of human and social capital formation in ethnolinguistically fragmented societies. In the conclusion the authors discuss the policy implications of the study.Let say you uneducated now you are going to find a job, and there's a white man/woman in the office, and he/she ask you in English what do you want, let say is Xhosa, and the white ask what kind of job you want. The Xhosa person said, 'Nokuba unjani' ('Whatever you have'), and the white person didn't understand he/she. And the white person call security to get him/her out. And this Xhosa person and the end he/she didn't get a job because she/he uneducated, she/he didn't know English. (From a grade 10 essay by Andile S., I. A Tale of African UrbanisationConsider a boy, born in an African village. He rises early, helping his parents to cultivate the fields and looks after livestock before making his way to the local village school. Network structures are dense and interaction with extended kin and other villagers takes place exclusively through the local vernacular. Opportunities to acquire or practice languages of wider communication which allow exchanges across language groups in the multilingual nation do not exist; the local village school only teaches the rudiments of these languages, mostly through rote learning and oral repetition practices. Even the teacher does not speak these languages well. There is no paid work available anywhere nearby, and as he grows up he hears the stories of return migrants: stories of work and hope, of cars and houses, electricity and running water. Like most of his generation, one day he too will make his way to the city, to look for work and a better life, for himself and for those of his family who will remain in the village. But when he gets there, he not only sees shacks and long lines of men waiting patiently for work morning after morning, hears gunshots and experiences the violence characteristic of much urban poverty -he also encounters a world whose languages he does not speak, whose languages he has never learnt. These are the languages spoken by those who ...

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In 1996, the inclusion of sexual orientation in the anti‐discrimination clause of South Africa's post‐apartheid constitution aligned LGBT+ rights with the larger struggle against oppression and inequality. In this paper we focus on a small, rural town in the Eastern Cape, a town we call Forestville. How are LGBT+ identities made visible in this town? How do residents respond to the diverse sexualities they encounter? How do they talk about diversity (sexual and otherwise)? The data was collected in the context of a long‐term ethnographic project, which looks at responses to diversity in non‐metropolitan settings. Reconstructing local philosophies of hospitality and looking at affective‐discursive practice, we argue that social life in Forestville shows traces of what Derrida () calls ‘absolute hospitality’. There is a sense of welcome and inclusivity, but, unlike in Derrida's conception, this hospitality is deeply embedded in the speech act of asking, indeed in curiosity. At the same time, hospitality remains fragile; it is always on the border of exclusion and judgment. The article explores Mignolo's () idea of ‘critical border thinking’ as a core episteme for Southern theory and puts academic philosophy and everyday knowledges into dialogue with one another.