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Female circumcision among Somalis is a deeply personal and subjective practice, framed within traditional norms and cultural practices, but negotiated within contemporary realities to produce a set of processes and practices that are nuanced, differentiated, and undergoing change. Based on ethnographic research among Somali women in Johannesburg and Nairobi, we argue that the context of forced migration provides women with opportunities to renegotiate and reinvent what female circumcision means to them. The complex, subjective, and diverse perceptions and experiences of circumcision as embedded processes, within the context of migration, we argue has been overlooked in the literature, which has tended to be framed within a normative discourse concerned with the medical effects of the practice, or in anthropological studies, counter to the normative discourse based on personal narratives.

Commercial farms in South Africa have relied on cross-border migrant workers for decades. In this article the author explores how social relations on farms in Musina, Limpopo, South Africa, shape the employment conditions of Zimbabwean farmworkers. Drawing on empirical fieldwork with 134 workers, the author argues that within a context of unequal social power on farms and conditioned by a labour migration regime that has strong informal patterns, workers use silence and invisibility as tactics of self-preservation, and everyday survival. The author locates these actions within the political economy of Musina; and the strong desire amongst farmworkers to ensure access to livelihoods in the face of compounded precarity.

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