Everyday life and the political economy of displacement on the Mozambique–South Africa borderland

Abstract

This article examines how struggles to re-establish the familiarities and regularities of everyday life in the aftermath of war and displacement had the important effect of promoting and sustaining transnational social and economic ties between refugee settlements in South Africa and home villages in Mozambique. Focusing on the postwar post-apartheid period, the article demonstrates how diverse practices related to the poetics and possibilities of cattle ownership, access to land, struggles over employment, ancestor worship and fear of the occult compelled transnational forms of exchange and interaction that shaped economic life in significant ways across this border region. But these crossborder practices were not necessarily experienced as desirable, convenient or profitable. In most instances they did not deliver the tangible benefits of mobility or ‘flexibility’ of citizenship (Ong 1998) so often assumed in a globalised economy. Rather, I argue that they engaged a more longstanding struggle to define place and belonging in this border region, highlighting a historically familiar politics of race, ethnicity, gender and modernisation. Focusing on the social, cultural and economic intimacies of everyday life, reconstituted in a refugee setting, the analysis cautions against the interpretation of transnational movement and exchange in the wake of displacement as bold assertions of entrepreneurship or claims to membership of a globalised community.

Keywords:

• refugees
• everyday life
• Mozambique
• South Africa
• transnationalism
• land cattle
• ancestors
• work

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Amanda Hammar for her careful (re)reading and critical suggestions in the course of reworking this paper. I would also like to acknowledge the encouraging comments on the paper received from Deborah James and Patrick Harries when I first presented it in Leiden, July 2007.

Notes

1. Principally in the ‘self governing’ bantustans of Gazankulu and KaNgwane.

2. I refer to the Mozambicans who form the focus of this study collectively as ‘refugees’, partly as a term of convenience but also as an attempt to sustain a rhetorical reminder of the (often self-identified) links between their current predicament and earlier refuge from war. Whilst they are no longer regarded officially by the South African authorities and the international community as conforming to the international definition of refugee, other collective designations of this population that has experienced such rapid change, such as ‘migrant’ or ‘former refugee’, are equally problematic.

3. My research was conducted mostly within refugee settlements in the Bushbuckridge area of South Africa and associated home villages in the Massingir district (Gaza province) of Mozambique. Most of the fieldwork was conducted in 1998, followed by ongoing shorter periods of research that continue to the present.

4. Frente de Libertaçáo de Moçambique (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique).

5. At the time of my research the new Mozambican Land law of 1997, which explicitly seeks to address some of the issues and insecurities of land tenure among peasant communities, had not had any noticeable impact on local narratives.

6. The tension between sentiments of attachment to land at home and the practical difficulties of visiting or returning home emerged as an ongoing preoccupation in the refugee settlements, particularly amongst older men. In recorded messages that I transported from Mozambique to South Africa, refugees were taunted over their inability to maintain a strong social presence in Mozambique.

7. The environmental difficulties in pursuing agriculture successfully in the area were, of course, compounded extensively by the impact of apartheid planning in South Africa, which undermined the peasantry by blacking black communities from accessing the most productive land.

8. I have been to a few local South African funerals where the deceased was buried in the yard of the home. But as the villages become more crowded, there is increasing pressure on people to bury their dead in cemeteries.

9. Resistáncia Nacional Moçambicana (National Mozambican Resistance).

10. Omar was married to Philemon's sister. Philemon was married to Xikwamba's sister.

11. See Bundy (1988); Palmer and Parsons (1977).

12. See Coplan (1994); Harries (1994); James (1999); Murray (1981).

13. See Ferguson (2006) and especially Milgroom and Spierenburg (this volume) for an analysis of the impacts of the privatisation of nature conservation in southern Mozambique.