A mixed reception: Mozambican and Congolese refugees in South Africa

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 inn 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 village with infrastructure.