Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become a new home for many immigrants and refugees from all over the African continent. Engaging with this "new season of migration to the South", 1 South African writers are increasingly including migrants from elsewhere on the continent into their casts of protagonists. Moreover, in autobiographies and works of fiction, African migrants themselves have begun to reflect on their experiences of living in South Africa. In this interview, Yewande Omotoso discusses her emigration from Nigeria to South Africa in the early 1990s. She argues that her family's choice to remain on the African continent, rather than emigrating to the UK or the US, as so many contemporary Nigerian writers did, has given her a distinct diasporic experience. As the interview unfolds, she emphasizes that the notion of Afropolitanism does not capture this experience. She also discusses recent developments in contemporary South African publishing and literature, stressing that the country's literary scene, despite its shortcomings, is vibrant, young, and full of creative energy. Omotoso's comments on her debut novel Bom Boy reveal that she is a writer deeply concerned with questions of migration, displacement, and loneliness.

This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short story anthologies since the late 1980s, we argue that short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary South African short story writing has consistently emphasized the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country. Critics have frequently observed a shift from the overtly politicized short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present. In this special issue, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction, and erotic fiction. Short stories also increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or gender-based norms.

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This article aims to examine the portrayal of African migrants and South Africa's relationship to the African continent in post-apartheid crime fiction. Exotic settings and the figure of the stranger have featured in the crime genre since its emergence in the 19th century.