Clandestine crossings: Narrating Zimbabwe’s precarious diaspora in South Africa in Sue Nyathi’s The Gold-Diggers (2018)

ABSTRACT

While there is a growing interest in Zimbabwean literature about diasporic experiences in the UK and the USA, scholarship on literary engagements with the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa remains sparse. This article analyses clandestine migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa and the formation of a precarious diaspora in the host country as represented in Sue Nyathi’s 2018 novel The Gold-Diggers. In contrast to strategies seen in South-North migration writing, those adopted by Nyathi’s migrants and diasporic subjects to negotiate everyday challenges – such as the need to pass as South African – reflect the close historical and cultural ties that structure African borderlands. Nyathi’s polyvocal text reconfigures diaspora discourse in relation to class and community, drawing attention to migrant vulnerability while illustrating strategies of resistance through identity erasure and homemaking. It carves out a space for precarious, yet not wholly disempowering, intra-African migratory and diasporic experiences often elided in diaspora studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Intra-African diaspora
• Zimbabwean diasporic fiction
• contemporary South African fiction
• precarious migration
• Afrodiasporic writing
• Sue Nyathi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Nyathi’s most recent novel, A Family Affair (2020), although mainly set in Zimbabwe, also recounts her characters’ past and present circular, short-term and more long-term movements between Zimbabwe and South Africa, albeit in a much less pronounced fashion. In contrast to The Gold Diggers, the novel also addresses earlier migratory movements by weaving in flashbacks to the time of the family patriarch’s studies at the University of Fort Hare during apartheid where he meets his future Xhosa wife who subsequently moves with him to Bulawayo.

2. The term refers to “the common practice of burning identification documents before undertaking the sea crossing in order to avoid repatriation, and the figurative act of ‘burning the road’ (in this case, the sea)” (Abderrezak 2009, 463).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Fasselt

Rebecca Fasselt is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, where she teaches African and postcolonial literatures. She is particularly interested in literatures of intra-African migration and in literary and cultural connections between South Africa and other parts of the continent. Her recent publications include: “Defying Closure: Hospitality, Colonialism and Mobility beyond the Limits of the Nation in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi” in Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South (2020), “Decolonising the Afropolitan: Intra-African Migrations in post-2000 Literature” in the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019) and “Chick Lit Politics in a Post-truth Era: Tricksters, Blessees and Postfeminist Girlpower in Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl” in Safundi (2018).