Bessie Head and the Zimbabwean women who are forced to wait in Lindela

abstract

In the last half-century, `strong passport’ national democracies have turned the application for asylum into a criminal justice procedure. In so doing, these nation-states have redefined citizenship. With the opening of Lindela Repatriation Centre, South Africa joined the community of democratic nations in that project. Lindela, meaning `wait’ or `wait here’, is a prison filled with people, many of whom have committed no crimes, assigned to waiting: waiting for processing and/or deportation, and waiting, in a different sense, for citizenship. For asylum seekers, and for Zimbabwean women asylum seekers in particular, the `crime’ is that of being unworthy of citizenship. This article attempts use Bessie Head’s writings to read the situation of Zimbabwean women asylum seekers in Lindela, and more broadly in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

keywords:

• asylum
• women
• citizenship
• Zimbabwe
• South Africa
• Lindela Repatriation Centre

Notes

1. See: http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/unhrc-asked-to-probe-sa-rights-abuses-1994591, site accessed 6 June 2016.

2. See: http://mg.co.za/article/1997-09-19-anc-womens-deportation-camp-may-close, site accessed 1 June 2016.

3. See: http://mg.co.za/article/2016-03-15-irr-urges-lawmakers-to-assist-poverty-stricken-prisoners, site accessed 8 June 2016.

4. See: http://mg.co.za/article/2016-03-03-filth-disease-sex-and-violence-for-pollsmoors-female-inmates, site accessed 13 June 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Moshenberg

DANIEL MOSHENBERG directs Women In and Beyond the Global and is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the George Washington University, in Washington, DC, United States. From 2004 to 2015, he was Director of the Women’s Studies Program. With Shereen Essof, he edited Searching for South Africa: The New Calculus of Dignity (Unisa Press, 2013) and has most recently been published in The Journalist, in South Africa, The Guardian and Africa Is a Country. He is completing a book on women in the political economy of global and transnational incarceration.