Beyond Migration Categories: Amity, Conviviality and Mutuality in South Africa

Abstract

Our ethnographic fieldwork with Congolese and Zimbabwean economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees and educational migrants reveals a complex narrative of exclusion and inclusion in South Africa. Frontier Africans – South African citizens and African transmigrants alike – initiate and maintain connections that create a vexing and entangled narrative of hard and soft borders. A deeper consideration of how South African citizens and African transmigrants subvert and transcend state-centric categorisation of citizen and migrant other, through amity, conviviality and mutuality – a process of humaning – harasses the alignment of political categorisation with analytical elucidation.