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Beyond the frontiers
African women are targets of racism and xenophobia in South Africa
Khadija Magardie
Khadrah Ahmed, 30, is at her wits' end. Sitting on the steps of the house in Mayfair, Johannesburg that now operates as a "hotel", her eyes slowly fill with tears. She has just spent another day scanning the classified sections of the newspapers, knocking on doors, and meeting, yet again, with disappointment. "I really don't know what to do, now, what do I tell my children?". Ahmed has been trying to find a flat, or a room, to rent in Mayfair, for herself and her four children. A month ago, she was forced to move out of a room in a dank, run down house, which she shared with four other women. The landlady hiked up the rent to a sum exceeding what most people make in two months. Ahmed and the women she shared the house with are refugees. They were forced to flee their native Somalia, where the decades-long civil war has caused untold hardship for countless families. After many journeys by ship and overland, they eventually settled in South Africa. Ahmed's husband, who is in the UK, regularly sends money to his family, but it is she that keeps them alive. Despite her courage and resilience, she says she cannot take it anymore. The source of her frustration is her present state of homelessness. She is staying in a traditional "hotel", run by a member of the Somali refugee community in Mayfair to provide temporary accommodation for families newly arrived in the country. Every time Ahmed finds an apparently vacant dwelling, the landlord tells her it has "just been taken". Other times, she is promised a place over the telephone, but when she arrives in person, she is told she has been put "on a waiting list". Ahmed, like many others like her, knows the real reason. It is well known that Mayfair landlords do not let to foreigners, particularly Somalis. As one woman bluntly told Ahmed, "I let the room to one of you people, and the next thing, twenty of you are living in it".
However, Ahmed's experience of racism at the hands of property owners is mild, compared to that of her fellow Somali refugee, Aisha Jama. The 56 year old woman arrived in South Africa in 1996, after leaving Somali with little more than the clothes on her back. Her husband was killed in the fighting, and her children, as is the case with so many refugee families, are scattered around the world. "I was happy to come to South Africa, because it's another African country, and I thought I would feel at home", she says. But Jama's first experience of African hospitality nearly killed her. She was working as a street hawker in the black township of Mamelodi, outside Pretoria, when a group of three black male hawkers approached her. After asking her why she was selling, they assaulted her and stole all her merchandise. One man told her: "This isn't your country, you can't sell here". Jama was too scared to fight back. The second time Jama was assaulted by a local man, she was also turned away by the police when she went to report the incident. "You're not bleeding, maybe if you died, we would look into it", a policeman told her.
Despite its transition to democracy in 1994, which put an end to decades of racist white minority rule, South Africa is experiencing the rise of a new racism - hatred of foreigners by South Africans. While it cuts across many boundaries, it is clear that the xenophobia against non-residents is primarily directed against nationals from other African countries. Various human rights advocacy organisations, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and South Africa's own Human Rights Commission, have released reports documenting a wide range of abuses suffered by immigrants from neighbouring countries. Particularly vulnerable are those without valid documentation, so called "illegals" and asylum-seekers. The abuses range from applications for bank loans being turned down, to being cheated out of wages, threats of deportation, and assault. Since women often occupy the lowest strata of society when it comes to paid employment, and suffer a range of forms of violence, they are bearing the brunt of xenophobic sentiments expressed by South Africans of all races.
The policy of "non refoulement", which forms part of international refugee protocol enforced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), holds that a refugee may not be returned to their country of origin if they have a well-founded fear of being persecuted, even killed, upon their return. Therefore, once a refugee has been given asylum in South Africa -provided it was not fraudulently obtained- there is little chance of him or her being returned to their country. But so-called economic migrants, who make up the bulk of people entering South Africa, are subject to a see-saw life ruled by a cycle of entry, repatriation and re-entry. Coupled with their desperate economic conditions, these economic migrants, for example, from states like Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, are most vulnerable to abuse, in particular if they are women unaccompanied by male family members.
Nyasha Tagwireyi (1) 23, entered South Africa illegally, in search of work, and refuses to say how she crossed the border. Her first experience of exploitation at South African hands was when she, together with some twenty Zimbabwean nationals, were offered work by an "agency" in Louis Trichardt, a town near the border. She says the women spent days sitting in a room until a prospective employer came to "view" them and choose one to work as a domestic servant in his or her home. Though she admits she never found such work, she says some of her friends were practically "sold" by the agency to the employers, who then paid them as little as fifty rands a month. Tagwireyi ended up in Pretoria, where her dark complexion and accent drew particularly discriminatory attention to her. She worked as a cleaner in a hairdresser's in a Pretoria suburb, and was constantly being propositioned by men for sex. "They all knew that I'm Zimbabwean, so they thought I was available", she says.
Locals commonly believe that immigrants are responsible for the rising levels of crime, and have typecast nationalities into certain roles. Nigerians, for instance, are believed to control the drug trade, while Mozambicans are said to be involved in car theft syndicates and Zimbabwean women are believed to be the main sources of prostitution.
According to a recent book, entitled "Beyond Borders", "the gender-neutral language used by officials, researchers and the media to describe migration and migrants - although intended to be non-sexist, effectively acts to discriminate against women". The book, published by the South African Migration Project (SAMP), contains a specific chapter on gender and migration, which reveals several interesting patterns relating to women, particularly those from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The research found that they have fewer employment opportunities than migrant men. It also found that female migration is increasingly "independent", as opposed to women entering the country as wives or girlfriends. Migrant women are to be found in a variety of fields, ranging from traders to domestic workers, and from prostitutes to waitresses. It also found that both sexes expressed concerns that they might get injured or become a victim of crime in South Africa, and both male and female migrants agreed in their rating of South Africans' perceptions of foreigners. An earlier SAMP study had found that twenty-five percent of the South African public supports a total prohibition on migration to the country.
Women immigrants face being beaten, denied a minimum wage, raped in police cells, and spat at in the street for being a "kwere-kwere" (derogatory term for foreigner). Just as is the case with the majority of immigrants, they are deported back home weekly and their plight is too often ignored.
(1) Not her real name.
Khadija Magardie is a senior reporter at the Mail and Guardian newspaper
in Johannesburg, South Africa.