Monograph 117: A Mixed Reception, Mozambican and Congolese Refugees in South Africa, Jonny Steinberg
This monograph reviews existing literature on two episodes of forced
migration to South Africa. The first is the flight and reception of
between 250,000 and 350,000 Mozambicans during that country’s civil war
in the 1980s. The second is an influx of people to South Africa from
what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) beginning in the
early 1990s and continuing to this day.
The reception of the Mozambican refugees of the mid-1980s was shaped
by a subtle and variegated cocktail of national apartheid politics and
local interests and sensibilities. On the one hand, the apartheid
government did not offer Mozambicans forced to leave their country by
war refugee status. Until the mid-1990s, their presence in South Africa
was de jure illegal. Yet, in a somewhat complicated gesture of
ethnic solidarity, the Shangaan-speaking homeland administration of
Gazankulu accepted all Mozambican refugees in its territory and provided
them with land and assistance. The refugees thus occupied an ambivalent
legal space. Within the borders of severely poverty-stricken homeland
territory their presence was de facto legal. Yet the moment they
crossed the border into South Africa proper, they risked arrest and
deportation. In this twilight existence, many joined the very lowest
ranks of the (illegal) labour market, working for commercial farmers in
the northeastern lowveld, for their Shangaan-speaking neighbours as
field labourers and domestic workers, and in the industrial economy of
the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region.
From 1995, the Mozambican refugee population slowly and
incrementally began to gain formal legal status. By mid-2000 the
majority had permanent residence status, and by the end of 2004,
permanent residents had won the right to receive social grants from the
state.
Yet a disturbing gap remains between the refugees’ status in law and
their status in reality of social practice. It appears that state
officials, from welfare department agents to law enforcement officers,
refuse to recognise their South African identity documents; that
refugees occupy much the same place in the labour market they did when
they were undocumented; that local government refuses to furnish their
villages with infrastructure.
The existing literature is curiously quiet on this disturbing gap between the de jure and de facto
status of former refugees. One possible explanation for this state of
affairs, which requires further research, is that local and regional
economies became structurally dependent on the labour of undocumented
refugees, and thus resisted their legal integration.
Forced migration to South Africa from the DRC appears to be a
predominantly young, urban, male and middle-class phenomenon. Nearly one
in two forced migrants from the DRC have some tertiary education and
fewer than one in 20 was unemployed in the DRC. They are thus a world
apart from their Mozambican counterparts, and their motivations and
aspirations are very different too. While many no doubt fled in the face
of persecution, and others in the face of violent instability, still
others left because the DRC is increasingly unable to sustain a
middle-class existence.
If the motives of many were indeed to retrieve a middle-class
existence, the majority have failed categorically to do so. While 4% of
Congolese migrants were unemployed in the DRC, 29% are unemployed in
South Africa. A further 50% are in work they describe as unskilled –
street vending, cutting hair, washing and guarding cars – while just
four 4% are in what they regard as skilled work. If the majority
occupied the upper echelons of the Congolese labour market and education
system, their situation in South Africa is pretty much reversed. The
mean monthly income of Congolese refugees in South Africa is R618 per
month; their median monthly income R500 per month.
All qualitative research on Congolese refugees in South Africa has
found levels of integration to be frail and insubstantial. Congolese
refugees generally cluster in tight-knit, defensive ethnic networks,
their relations with other Congolese hostile and suspicious, their
relations with South Africans thin and cautious. They thus occupy a
social territory characterised by low trust and limited reciprocity, a
state of affairs which renders their capacity to be absorbed into the
labour market very slight indeed.
Several dozen ethnically constituted associations of Congolese
refugees exist in South Africa. Their functions are primarily to assist
new arrivals with survivalist strategies and to shore up and preserve
their members’ cultural and ethnic identities, particularly those of
children born on South African soil.
While research has shown that some African immigrants to South
African have become reasonably successful cross-border traders,
Congolese refugees are not well represented among them. Most are
survivalists working in the margins of the informal economy. For reasons
the literature has not explored, Congolese predominate in the ranks of
South Africa ’s car guards and street-side haircutters.