Seeking Solidarity

The political and economic crisis that Zimbabwe has been experiencing since 2000 has resulted in the large-scale migration of Zimbabweans to South Africa. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zimbabwe and South Africa in 2006 and 2007, this article argues that Zimbabwean migrants expected that the South African state would acknowledge the incidences of violation in Zimbabwe that prompted their movement to South Africa. Specifically, migrants asserted that conditions of structural violence in Zimbabwe were serious enough to warrant asylum. However, upon arrival migrants found that the South African state considered these reasons to be less valid than those of physical political violence. Within South African discourses around the Zimbabwean crisis, there are thus forms of suffering that are considered more valid than others. The article further argues that migrants were also mistaken in their expectations that South Africans themselves would be welcoming. The article examines how the positioning of Zimbabwean migrants within various legal and social categories limited the ways they could speak and act, encouraging them to speak and act through difference rather than similarity. The article thus contextualises undocumented migrants' experiences of South Africa in the build up to the xenophobic violence of May 2008.