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The deepening levels of poverty in Zimbabwe have resulted in high numbers of Zimbabwean women migrating to South Africa in the hopes of securing better wages and job security. Most of these migrants end up working in the informal sector with limited income, high levels of insecurity, and a lack of protection against gender-based violence and xenophobia. Regardless of the adversities that these women encounter, they often display resilience and adaptability. Based on semi-structured interviews with 22 Zimbabwean migrant women, this article documents how these migrant women navigated some of the vulnerabilities and challenges they encountered. Instead of always being constrained by different structures of violence, this article unpacks the women's strategies to ensure their survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's major cities are periodically wracked by large-scale xenophobic violence directed at migrants and refugees from other countries. Informal sector businesses and their migrant owners and employees are particularly vulnerable targets during these attacks. Migrant-owned businesses are also targeted on a regular basis in smaller-scale looting and destruction of property. There is now a large literature on the characteristics and causes of xenophobic violence and attitudes in South Africa, most of it based on quantitative and qualitative research in the country's major metropolitan areas. One of the consequences of big-city xenophobia has been a search for alternative markets and safer spaces by migrants, including relocating to the country's many smaller urban centres. The question addressed in this paper is whether they are welcomed in these cities and towns or subject to the same kinds of victimization as in large cities. This paper is the first to systematically examine this question by focusing on a group of towns in Limpopo Province and the experiences of migrants in the informal sector there. Through survey evidence and in-depth interviews and focus groups with migrant and South African vendors, the paper demonstrates that xenophobia is also pervasive in these smaller centres, in ways that both echo and differ from that in the large cities. The findings in this paper have broader significance for other countries attempting to deal with the rise of xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2015, a Whatsapp text message instructed millions of African immigrants in South Africa to go home. The message drew on xenophobia and afrophobia to criminalise African immigrants in South Africa. Broadly, immigrants are seen as breaking the law by illegally crossing a sovereign border and becoming illegal foreigners. Having entered the country without authorisation (‘papers’), these foreigners become perceived as drug dealers, traffickers of children, squatters, facilitators/exploiters of an informal economy, and thieves stealing opportunities from South Africans. This article identifies three principle techniques of criminalising immigrants: 1) immigrants being compelled to purchase immigrant documents through illicit means to stay legally in South Africa; 2) the South African Police Service conducting raids such as Operation Fiela and arresting foreigners; 3) the South African Police Service, along with the Department of Home Affairs officials, illegally detaining immigrants. Together, these techniques contribute to the criminalisation of African foreign nationals. These techniques are increasingly characteristic of governance in the global south and explain how a Whatsapp message can reverberate throughout South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines conflict and cooperation between South Africans and Somali spaza shop owners in townships and informal settlements in the context of post-apartheid structural inequities. I argue that Somali and other poor newcomers suffer the same daily insecurity as the majority of the population. However, with the exception of the concerted killings, lootings and displacement of migrants in 2008–2009, this Somali case shows that contact between newcomers and local people is not always antagonistic and that newcomers are not passive victims of violence, but rather engage successfully in both competition and collaboration to cement their presence in these areas. I conclude that violence against migrants is rooted in South Africa's continuing structural violence and communal crisis, a condition characterised by tensions with compatriots as well as with newcomers. To solve the problem, attention must be paid to the persistence of this structural violence in the post-apartheid political dispensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on xenophobia directed towards citizens of other African countries in various areas of South Africa, including the informal sector, appear sporadically in the media. With this in mind a study on the relationships between street traders was conducted during 1999 in a section of Govan Mbeki Avenue in the city centre of Port Elizabeth. The research population included both black non-South Africans and black South Africans. The animosity that was evident was far less than the goodwill expressed between these two groups of informal street traders. The primary reason for this can be ascribed to the fact that they were not in direct competition with each other for customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]