Everyday life and the political economy of displacement on the Mozambique-South Africa borderland
In: Journal of contemporary African studies, Band 26, Heft 4
ISSN: 0258-9001
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. Adapted from the source document.