Lorena Nunez Carrasco

Migration has a long-standing history in Southern Africa. This paper aims to understand how ongoing contextual transformations due to migration actively shape narratives about families. Specifically, how families and familial relationships have been constructed through the everyday interactions and roles within the family. Through the family histories method, we generated novel data that shows how family accounts transcend normative boundaries of familyhood and how they change in time and across place, which, we argue, are required to understand migrant families. We adopt a multi-sited and gendered approach to gather data from left-behind women in Tsholotsho and migrant men in Johannesburg. The findings show that the meaning of family for left-behind women has remained confined to the normative parameters of kinship, biological, and marital ties. In the past, with husbands and fathers who migrated, families invoked substitute authority in decision-making, where power was conferred o...

Background: Studies on the barriers migrant women face when trying to access healthcare services in South Africa have emphasized economic factors, fear of deportation, lack of documentation, language barriers, xenophobia, and discrimination in society and in healthcare institutions as factors explaining migrants' reluctance to seek healthcare. Our study aims to visualize some of the outcome effects of these barriers by analyzing data on maternal death and comparing the local population and black African migrant women from the South African Development Countries (SADC) living in South Africa. The heightened maternal mortality of black migrant women in South Africa can be associated with the hidden costs of barriers migrants face, including xenophobic attitudes experienced at public healthcare institutions.

It is unsurprising that a range of organisations have been created both by and for migrants, as unique needs have arisen alongside the growing flow of migration from the African sub-continent to South Africa in the post-apartheid era. This article investigates in particular the Johannesburg-based organisations that serve the needs of cross-border migrants and their families when death occurs, facilitating

This chapter examines various waves of migration and their processes of settlement in Greater Rosettenville in south Johannesburg from a historical and contemporary perspective. We explore how various migrant groups have gained access to sacred spaces and this exploration leads to an analysis of these spaces as pivotal in the process of place making. We discuss here the process of place making, examining the case of a longstanding but dwindling Jewish community residing in the area and contingently sharing the synagogue space with a more recently settled Congolese Pentecostal congregation. We begin from the standpoint that when communities move to a new area, the manners in which they claim these spaces are as diverse as people themselves. By exploring the ways in which the Jewish and the Congolese migrant community occupy the same religious space, we hope to shed light on the relationship between mobility, diversity, and politics of the sacred in the city.

This volume has charted diverse lines of mobility and migration and the ways religion has shaped these, and Johannesburg, in multiple ways. It has explored the sojourns of the living and the dead, the movement of people, ideas and objects, across borders and within city blocks. It has explored the ways in which spirits are experienced as incarnated not only in sacred spaces but also in the banality and tumult of everyday life.

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space. The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion. This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control.

This chapter explores how former Zimbabwean soldiers who deserted or resigned from the Zimbabwe National Army journey between two seemingly contradictory spaces in search of healing: the space of camaraderie in the political association of the former soldiers in exile namely Affected Military Men of Zimbabwe Association (AMMOZA) and Pentecostal churches in Johannesburg where many of these former soldiers participate. In the former the men reaffirm their military past, keep it alive, and use it to justify who they are in their post-combat life in South Africa. In the churches, in contrast, the men are guided to reconstruct their perspective on the past in terms of expiating remorse and guilt and to obtain forgiveness, presuming that this will liberate them from the haunting effects of hope dzakaipa or ukucubungula meaning bad dreams. From the men’s narratives it emerges that to come to terms with their past and find some sort of reconciliation between their two contradictory perspectives in dealing with the past, the men would require political amnesty by the Zimbabwean government. This would ensure they would be recognised as former soldiers who served the nation and could reconcile with their families and friends, and openly present themselves to civilians. This chapter is primarily based on interviews with 10 of the 44 former soldiers who participated in a larger study on members of the Zimbabwean army who deserted or resigned and are in exile in South Africa.

Gender mainstreaming has itself become something of a mainstream practice in much development work. As the theory and practice of mainstreaming has developed so too have a range of debates over what exactly gender mainstreaming can contribute to development. This article refl ects on a gender mainstreaming intervention in the East African region to explore the role that gender mainstreaming can play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In this article we discuss how gender mainstreaming has, at times, functioned as a retreat from women’s equality and is used to render feminist perspectives more palatable to those who resist them. Far from being a simple critique of gender mainstreaming this refl ects the broader tensions and debates that are shaping what gender has come to mean in different contexts. This brings diffi cult tensions over who develops a gender mainstreaming agenda and who claims to have expertise on gender. We explore how much is at stake in claims to repres...

Purpose Migrants historically and currently form an integral part of South Africa. Their importance and contribution to the country’s economy and development are undeniable. Yet, life for African migrants in South Africa is becoming increasingly difficult. An analysis of migrants mortality until now has not been conducted. The purpose of this paper is to compare the trends of the cause of death among South African Citizens (RSA) and African migrants from countries that form part of the South African Development Community (SADC), that make up nearly 70% of the migrants in the country. Design/methodology/approach Using Stats SA data of all registered deaths in South Africa (2002-2015), this paper compares all causes of death (COD) between RSA and SADC migrants. This paper studies the patterns in COD among these population groups for the years 2002 to 2015 in deaths due to infectious diseases and unnatural causes. Logistic regression was used to quantify the odds of dying due to infect...

By looking at the case of Peruvian migration to Chile, this article explores some of the characteristics of the social reproduction of transnational families between two neighboring countries in the South. This article examines the role played by structural socio-economic conditions migrants live by in Chile in shaping their transnational family lives. It discusses how the labor and housing segmentations of migrants in Chile make family reunifications difficult so that geographical proximity between the two countries is not an enabling factor for the encounter of these families. It also examines some of the characteristics of this community of migrants in Chile, and how their class origin and gender help to understand the particular dynamics of these transnational families and the conjugal relationships migrants maintain in Peru and in Chile. The article focuses on the emotional experiences of Peruvian migrants in Chile and the efforts they invest in keeping their place within their...

This chapter explores the relationship between mobility, belonging and places of burial. The focus is on foreign migrants who die in Johannesburg and are buried on foreign land, away from their hometowns and countries of origin. Questions about where in the City of Johannesburg foreign migrants are buried and how decisions around burial place are made are of interest. These questions are informed by historical patterns of burials in South Africa, as they are a reflection of broader societal orders and past racial hierarchies. We take an historical perspective on the evolving spatial regimes of cemeteries to illustrate this point. In our efforts to understand the choices (or lack of thereof) the living make around the burial place for deceased foreign migrants, we engage with the concept of place making and challenge its traditional deployment in the literature in light of our focus on the current burials in a foreign land. In engaging this concept, we use data gathered through interviews with key informants, namely, public servants, representatives of funeral parlours and different foreign migrant groups residing in Johannesburg.

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space. The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion. This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control.

Through military training, soldiers' bodies are shaped and prepared for war and military related duties. In the context these former Zimbabwean soldiers find themselves - that of desertion and 'underground life' in exile in South Africa - their military trained bodies and military skills are their only resource. In this article, we explore the ways in which former soldiers maintain and 'reuse' their military trained bodies in South Africa for survival, in a context of high unemployment and a violent, inner-city environment. We look at their social world and practices of soldiering - a term that refers to the specific forms of their social interaction in exile, through which they keep their memories of their military past alive. By attending to their subjectivities and the endurance of their masculine military identities and bodies, we aim to contribute to the discussion on demilitarisation, which has largely focused on the failure of models of intervention to ass...

This chapter explores how Pentecostal Churches understand, capitalise on, and address issues of distress and emotional suffering among migrant populations in South Africa. It describes how religious interventions work in specific cultural contexts by assisting with migrants’ need for healing in post-conflict situations and considers how, through their healing work, cultural notions and practices of gender are shaped by the church. The study looks at the experiences of migrant congregants and pastors in Turffontein, south of Johannesburg. In-depth interviews were conducted with both migrant congregants and pastors in two churches (one Nigerian and one Congolese). In addition, participatory observation was conducted in order to better understand the processes of indoctrination and initiation that migrants—as well as local participants—undergo in order to be delivered and ultimately healed. The forms and causes of distress that migrants present to the church are diverse, ranging from unemployment, poverty or lack of economic improvement, as well as poor interpersonal relations, illness and family problems, including domestic violence and infertility. A significant dimension of the healing and conversion processes in Pentecostal Churches in Africa is their role in saving members from the threats posed by the spiritual world, as conceived by traditional African religions. The church aims at establishing a different spiritual order by defeating the ancestral entities that have ruled the life of African people for so long. That dimension is of central interest to this work as it is embedded in these conceptions that notions and prescriptions about gender are crafted.

This chapter presents three case studies of, what the authors have termed, trauma care in contemporary South Africa. The case studies are not about psychosocial interventions in the traditional (counselling) sense, but they look rather at how migrant communities in South Africa have sought out ways to deal with the deeply dislocating effects of living as migrants in the complex political context of post-apartheid South Africa. They therefore present a range of activities which may not, at first glance, seem to be trauma interventions. Nevertheless, they were taken seriously as interventions precisely because of their frequent use by migrants and the absence of more mainstream psychosocial interventions for migrants in contemporary South Africa. The previous work that the authors had done on psychosocial interventions had made us realise that their use by migrant communities is not common and so we began from a different starting point. We began by asking what it is that migrants are already doing to deal with distress, trauma, and post-violence reconciliation, and how does this in turn connect to the ongoing process of peacebuilding, development, and social transformation both in South Africa and in their countries of origin. It is from this question that the three case studies presented here were selected. These three were chosen (from seven in total, see Palmary et al., Healing and change in the city of gold: Case studies of coping and support in Johannesburg, forthcoming) because they presented the diversity of what might be considered a trauma intervention, but also because they spoke of the need to consider how the context of political transition in so many African countries and associated attempts at peacebuilding, connects with the contemporary socio-economic injustices that characterise South Africa’s political transition in ways that refuse a distinction between the economic, social, and psychological.

The informal sector is often seen as being composed of a lump sum of people's failures, or is defined as arising out of limitations in the formal sector itself. It is, as a consequence, looked upon as stagnant. However, the informal sector can also be seen as being constantly built ...

ABSTRACT Comparison of the experiences of middle-class Peruvian immigrants in South Florida and working-class Peruvian immigrants in Santiago confirms that individuals negotiate the framework of legality differently according to social class. Although the middle-class Peruvians in South Florida were forced to live in what Susan Coutin has called “spaces of nonexistence” there, their interactions with other Peruvians similar to themselves allowed them to retain their middle-class identity regardless of their legal status. In contrast, the working-class Peruvians in Santiago, who lived precariously in both places, were forced to compete with each other for jobs and to rely on their employers for regularization of their status, and therefore they could not count on the solidarity of other immigrants like themselves to bolster their sense of belonging.

Purpose-Migrants historically and currently form an integral part of South Africa. Their importance and contribution to the country's economy and development are undeniable. Yet, life for African migrants in South Africa is becoming increasingly difficult. An analysis of migrants mortality until now has not been conducted. The purpose of this paper is to compare the trends of the cause of death among South African Citizens (RSA) and African migrants from countries that form part of the South African Development Community (SADC), that make up nearly 70% of the migrants in the country. Design/methodology/approach-Using Stats SA data of all registered deaths in South Africa (2002-2015), this paper compares all causes of death (COD) between RSA and SADC migrants. This paper studies the patterns in COD among these population groups for the years 2002 to 2015 in deaths due to infectious diseases and unnatural causes. Logistic regression was used to quantify the odds of dying due to infectious disease and unnatural causes for each population group. This paper included a calculation of the odds of dying due to assault, as a subgroup within unnatural deaths. Findings-A total of 7,611,129 deaths were recorded for the local South African population and 88,114 for SADC migrants for the period under study (2002-2015). The burden of mortality for both infectious diseases and unnatural causes was higher for SADC migrants as compared to RSA. SADC migrants were 1.22 times more likely to die from infectious diseases than RSA (P < 0.001, 95% confidence interval (CI) (1.12, 1.23). Similarly, SADC migrants were 2.7 times more likely to die from unnatural causes than South Africans (P < 0.001, 95% CI (2.17, 2.23). The odds of dying from assault was the same as that of unnatural causes. Also, it was found that women were more likely to die from infectious diseases (OR = 1.11, P < 0.001, 95% CI (1.11, 1.11) compared to men, regardless of nationality. Research limitations/implications-The bias resulting from migrants who return home to die due to illness, described in the literature as the salmon bias, is present in this paper. This paper, therefore, concludes death due to infectious diseases could be higher among migrants. Practical implications-The heightened mortality among SADC migrants can be related to the impact of social determinants of health such as living and working conditions and barriers to access to health care. Moreover, the higher probability of death due to unnatural causes such as assaults constitute a proxy to estimate the impact of xenophobic violence observed in the country over the past decade. Policy interventions should focus on migrant health-care systems. Also, programmes to mitigate and curb xenophobic sentiments should be carried out to address the growing disparity of preventable unnatural causes of death. Originality/value-This study offers the first quantification of mortality due to infectious diseases and unnatural causes among RSA and SADC migrants.

CHAPTER 6 Migration and health in South Africa Niel Roux and Louis van Tender The health dimension of migratory movements is becoming ever more prominent in response to the large and increasing number of people who are traversing geographical, cultural and ...