NIGHTWATCHING: MALE MIGRANT NETWORKS AND THE SUSTENANCE OF BROTHERHOOD IN CAPE TOWN James Williams A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 2013 © James Williams All Rights Reserved A friend loveth at all times; a brother is born for adversity (Proverbs 17:17) ii Abstract This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of companionship, enterprise, and urban survival among four transnational networks of young male African migrants in Cape Town, South Africa. It is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in South Africa between 2006 and 2009. The first three chapters examines labors and undertakings the young migrants action collaboratively in the context of the everyday. The first chapter studies ways the migrants navigate a hostile urban landscape using sensorial maps of the city to mitigate risk and evade state surveillance. The second describes how the youths organize themselves as entrepreneurial operations. The third chapter shows the migrants residing discreetly in Cape Town within and across various bachelor households, examining the kinds of domesticity these forms of male householding generate and foreclose. The dissertation employs the concept of network to chart and investigate forms of relationship and relatedness these migrants comprise, embrace, sustain, and produce. Despite the migrants’ uncertain legal status in South Africa, the negative stereotypes they are branded by and the risks of violence they face there, and their exclusion from conventional modes of family and community life, I argue the youths’ networks afford these migrants a form of mobility and companionship that helps secure their survival as urban and economic actors. I consider how the youths’ lateral, flexible forms of peer association – relations subsumed under a special rubric of ‘brotherhood’ – make certain forms of living possible. The ethnography challenges dominant depictions of African migrants in South Africa as destitute victims. iii The dissertation uses the migrants’ experiences in Cape Town to frame an exploration of life in a fast-changing, expensive, and segregated African metropolis. The urban setting of my study is examined throughout the chapters, but is foregrounded as particularly deadly and eventful in the final chapter. South Africa has emerged recently as a hosting country to large numbers of African migrants and refugees, whose growing presence has roused rivalry and friction between South Africans and migrants. These tensions climaxed in May 2008 when a ferocious campaign of anti-immigrant violence broke out across South Africa, internally displacing hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals. The violence and its aftermath are examined in the fourth chapter, which uses evidence obtained from my participation in the relief and advocacy efforts in Cape Town to query official narratives and explanations of events. I suggest the crisis provides valuable insight into debates on migrants, citizens, and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Advisor: Veena Das Committee: Jane Guyer, Aaron Goodfellow, Todd Shepard, Dipankar Chakravarti iv Contents Abstract iii Contents v Maps, Tables, and Figures vii Introduction Relations as subjects: Other migrants in Cape Town 1 Young migrants in Cape Town 1 Survival as accomplishment, pleasure, and anomaly 3 Marginal migrants 12 Reading data sideways 16 Networks as forms and systems 23 Relations as subjects 29 A chronology of fieldwork 33 An outline of the chapters 41 Chapter 1 Nightwatching: Fear and flânerie 44 Alien apartheid 44 Human, aliens, and ‘Nigerians’ 49 Mobility, space, and transgression 59 Sensorial geographies 61 Flâneurs and their doubles 66 Nightwatching 69 Chapter 2 Relations as infrastructure: Guarding, selling, dancing, switching 71 “Night eyes” 71 Practices of collaboration, relational networks 74 Lessons in posture and posturing 84 “Dancing” and “switching” 90 Reshuffling 96 Confrontations 101 Relations as infrastructure 105 Chapter 3 Houses without memory: Kinship in search of a household 109 Leaving the streets 109 Surfeits and silence 112 “The hell-pit” 117 Threads of similarity 128 Four and a half men 138 v Unspeakable households 146 Households in suitcases 158 Acephalous households 164 Houses without memory 167 Chapter 4 National struggles in naming violence: Displaced persons, displaced words 172 Aftermath as crisis 172 Interrupted fieldwork 176 Displaced persons, displaced words 183 Ordering disorder, technical languages 186 ‘Newspeak’ 193 Reading and misreading images 197 The President’s “people” 206 Anthropological disputes 220 Conclusions 228 Conclusion The sustenance of brotherhood 233 The idiom of brotherhood 233 Youth as “stuck” 234 Bibliography 237 Acknowledgements 258 Curriculum Vitae 261 vi Maps, Tables, and Figures Maps 1 Greater Cape Town 9 2 Central Cape Town: Migrants’ main places of work 10 3 Migrants’ places of birth by network 22 4 Network D, Household 6, Places of birth 127 5 Residential areas sought by migrant youths, circa. 2007 135 6 Movements of households, 2003-2008 136 7 Locations of households, April 2008 137 8 Movements of Household 2, 2005-2008 163 Tables 1 Basic data on 68 close informants 19 2 Network B, Membership 83 3 Network D, Household 6, Membership 125 4 Household census, Physical presence 153 5 Household census, Membership 154 6 Household census, Occupancy by type 155 7 Household census, Overview 156 Figures 1 Wikus serves an alien an eviction order 48 2 Wikus is captured by the ‘Nigerians’ 56 3 ‘Nigerian’ gang leader, Obesandjo 57 4 The ‘South African’ Map of Africa, June 16 58 5 Segment of Network A (inc. H1, H2, H5), circa. 2007 145 6 Cape Town branch of Network B (inc. H4) 166 7 Refugee protest sign, June 2 192 8 Fanning flames of hate, May 19 203 9 Xenophobia and the meaning of ubuntu, May 25 204 10 South Africans take out rage on immigrants, May 20 205 11 Shock by two important icons in South Africa, May 22 218 12 The many faces of Thabo Mbeki, May 29 219 vii Introduction Relations as subjects: Other migrants in Cape Town Young migrants in Cape Town This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of companionship, enterprise, and urban survival among four transnational networks of young male African migrants in Cape Town, South Africa.1 It is based on fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2009. The study presents the migrants traversing three domains of city-life. It first shadows the migrants as they navigate a hostile urban terrain, mapping passageways through the city the migrants craft together to mitigate risk, stay unseen, and evade state surveillance (Chapter 1). It next describes ways the youths cooperate as economic actors in Cape Town; it shows the migrants organizing themselves effectively as slick, agile, entrepreneurial operations in the city and facing off competition from South Africans and other migrants (Chapter 2). It looks 1 Migrant is an old political, economic, and racial concept in South Africa, malleable. Complicit with recent scholarship from South Africa, and with how ‘migrant’ is used today in public conversations in the country, I use the term in its limited, recent sense to refer to black Africans who live and work in South Africa, who are not South African citizens. Literature on past and present processes and experiences of labor migration within South Africa (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1987; Coplan 1985; Mayer 1971; Ramphele 1993; White 2004; Wilson 1972) are rarely connected to contemporary work on foreign national refugees and migrants. Given most migrants in Cape Town live alongside South Africans in townships, enduring similar living conditions, however, these and other studies could be connected by focusing on the mutual vulnerabilities shared by migrants and many millions of South Africans. Indeed, the accenting of migrants’ differences on grounds only of citizenship reinforces popular perceptions that migrants hold a special status in South Africa, cited as a central factor in causing the anti-immigrant violence in May 2008 (FMSP 2010; HRSC 2008a; Landau 2011). I use ‘youth’ and ‘young men’ interchangeably. The concept of ‘network’ is discussed below. 1 finally at how the migrants reside in Cape Town in a variety of discrete, interlinked, and mobile households – domestic units that are forged and inhabited differently to the family households they fled or left behind, which they both begrudge and deeply long for (Chapter 3). These chapters examine everyday tasks the migrants undertake together as they attempt to forge livelihood, evade state suspicion, engage quietly in homemaking, and get by each day unharmed. I envision them as an accompaniment to the youths as they negotiate an environment in which African outsiders struggle routinely to find work and live in safety. Brought together, the youths’ joined labors and experiences in Cape Town frame an exploration of life in a particular urban underworld. My study thus also examines the urban context in which the migrants operate: a wealthy, fast- changing, and segregated metropolis that has emerged recently (significantly, since 1994, after apartheid) as a major hosting city to migrants and refugees from across and beyond Africa.2 The growing presence of African foreign nationals in Cape 2 No reliable data exists on the numbers of African foreign nationals in South Africa. The Forced Migration Studies Program (FMSP, a leading research collaborative based at the University of the Witwatersrand) estimated the total population of African foreign nationals in 2010 to be between 1.6 and 2 million, of which over half are Zimbabwean (FMSP 2010a:2-3). This figure is considerably lower than numbers quoted by the media and politicians; in 2009, for example, the South African Police Service claimed between 3 and 6 million undocumented migrants alone were living in South Africa (SAPS 2009; see FMSP 2010b for a discussion of the various methods used by the state and others in an attempt to estimate the numbers of undocumented migrants in South Africa). 2 Town, as elsewhere in South Africa, has roused rivalry, friction, and mutual resentment between South Africans and migrants.