The nationalist imperative : south africanisation, regional integration and mobile livelihoods
In the context of the present volume, the reconfiguration of citizenship within the regional powerhouse has had consequences for Southern African economies and societies. The remittance revenues that bank - rolled families and communities for decades dried up and non - South Africans were criminalized: they became people against whom the new South Africa had to defend itself and its national democratic revolution.
Source: The
security-development nexus : expressions of sovereignty and
securitization in Southern Africa / Lars Buur, Steffen
jensen, Finn Stepputat (eds.)
Paradoxically, the moment when
the new South Africa assumed its place as a senior
partner within the Southern Africa region
was also the moment when it became aware of and began
to protect its national borders in new ways. This paper is
the story of the reconfiguration of
citizenship and the consequences it has had for people
now categorized as a threat. We begin by focusing on how identities
and consequent rights of belonging of different groups of migrants
have been reconstituted by the transition. We
distinguish between one group of migrants, now firmly lodged within
post-1994 citizenship - namely Zulu migrants from present - day Kwa
- Zulu Natal - and migrants from Southern Africa
who were left out of nationalist
politics.
By bringing these two groups
together in the analysis, we also bring
two distinct academic and political debates together:
one on migration from Southern Africa and
another debate analyzing the violence
between IFP and ANC supporters in the first half of
the 1990s. In the literature,
these domains seem to be largely unrelated, despite
the attention that both have attracted not only from
South Africans but also a world audience. However, by reading
the two developments together, we can
examine the different political spaces or languages
that opened up to include formerly excluded groups. We begin by
tracing the changes in the migrant system
from the 1980s and explore how they were
caused by political and economic developments.
This is followed by an analysis of how new
the new South Africa has been recast in terms of
insiders and outsiders. In the third section, we
explore how the recasting of citizenship,
together with the transformation of
nationalism and the economy, has affected
the livelihoods of the two migrant
groups. Finally, we move on to analyse the production
of differentiated political subjectivities in
post-apartheid South Africa.