Intra-Migrant Economy: Chinese Restaurant Entrepreneurship and Zimbabwean Migrant Workers In South Africa

Abstract

South Africa is "home" to the two largest populations of foreign nationals on the African continent. Its Chinese population numbers at least 300,000, and its Zimbabwean population, the largest outside of Zimbabwe, numbers at least one million. Many of these migrants end up working in Chinese restaurants as this is, by and large, a low-wage, lowskill, and low-barrier-to-entry sector. Based on original ethnographic research conducted in Johannesburg for fourteen months, this dissertation explores the cultural politics of diasporic entrepreneurs and migrant labourers, what I call the "intra-migrant economy," among everyday racialized insecurities in urban South Africa. I use the term "intramigrant economy" to refer to the employment of one or more group of migrants by another group of migrants as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. With little capital, Chinese restaurant owners are able to maximize profit through cheap Zimbabwean labourers, while Zimbabweans can easily obtain jobs without proper procedure or formal training. Through exploring the structure of this sector, and the complex economic realities of and working relationships between Chinese and Zimbabwean migrants, I examine how the migrant and economic flows are negotiated and localized in South Africa's market, which also provides a concrete case study of intercultural (mis)communication.Anthropologists have paid attention to how economic practices are intertwined and embedded in historical, political, and cultural systems. This dissertation suggests that not only are these factors intertwined but they also reinforce each other. The intramigrant economy is thus more than a story about migrants' economic hardships; it is also a reflection on two migrant groups who are linguistically and culturally different, the social structures that create their exploitation, and how they construct informal labour relations and cope with wider forms of uncertainty in one of the most notably racialized states in history. ACKNOWLDEGEMENTFirst and foremost, I would like to thank my research participants for telling me their stories and sharing their restaurant life with me. I am especially grateful for those who fed me with their homemade food, invited me to their homes, gave me a ride when my car broken down, introduced me to more research participants, and shared their hopes and fears with me.

Mobile workers, contingent labour: Migration, the gig economy and the multiplication of labour

“…The dynamics of migration and the gig economy are in no way exclusive to Europe: Reports from the US, India, China or South Africa, for example, show the importance of mobile workforces to gig economy platforms across the globe (Bandeira, 2019;Das and Srravya, 2021;Greef, 2019;Liu, 2019;Markham, 2018;van Doorn, 2020). The same is true for Latin America, the home continent for many of the former Berlin Deliveroo workers.…”