Belinda Dodson

Locating Xenophobia: Debate, Discourse, and Everyday Experience in Cape Town, South Africa

In May 2008, South Africa experienced an outbreak of violence against foreign Africans living in the country. Political leaders expressed shock and surprise, but there has in reality been long-standing and well-documented hostility toward African immigrants in South Africa. Several competing explanations have been put forward, with debate gaining urgency and polarization since the xenophobic attacks of 2008. After a selective review of the relevant literature to sketch the contours of that debate, this paper presents findings from research conducted with African immigrants living in Cape Town. Their experiences provide further evidence that anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors on the part of “ordinary South Africans” toward foreign Africans are entrenched and systemic. The paper concludes by calling for further academic engagement and greater political commitment.

Urban advantage or Urban penalty? A case study of female-headed households in a South African city.

Basic services have improved in many urban areas of South Africa, which should improve health and well-being. However, poverty and ill-health persist and are unequally distributed by race, class and place. This paper explores conditions of the most marginalized group, female-headed households, in a case study of Msunduzi Municipality (formerly Pietermaritzburg). Data from two household surveys conducted in 2006 show important patterns regarding the incidences of and coping strategies around, illnesses and deaths. While some positive environmental health outcomes are apparent, considerable stresses face households in relation to HIV/AIDS related deaths, poverty, and lack of health services. The insights of both urban environmental health and feminist geography assist in explaining the gendered and spatialized patterns of health in post-apartheid urban South Africa.

A report on gender discrimination in South Africa's 2002 Immigration Act: masculinizing the migrant

Changes in immigration policy and legislation have the power to shape and alter the gendering of migration in significant ways, and can have a dramatic effect on the lives and relationships of the men, women and families involved. In this paper, we examine the provisions of the new Immigration Act introduced in South Africa in 2002. The Act, which replaces the outdated Aliens Control Act of 1991, gives considerable cause for concern on gender grounds. Foremost, the Act entrenches a system of male-dominated regional labour migration that has its origins in the 19th-century discovery of gold and diamonds. The male bias in the work permit and other employment-based categories along with the limits to family reunification for those entering for work are likely in effect to discriminate against women to a greater extent than men. While similar gender concerns are common to most immigration policy regimes around the world, the particular circumstances of the South African case, where both skilled and unskilled migration streams are heavily male-dominated, makes them especially acute here. This paper contextualizes migration regimes in South Africa and examines in detail the likely implications of the new Immigration Act.

A Soil Conservation Safari: Hugh Bennett's 1944 Visit to South Africa

Hugh Bennett, then Chief of the United States Soil Conservation Service, paid a two-month official visit to South Africa in 1944. His visit threw into relief many of the countryʼs social and political cleavages, not least the administrative division between the Department of Agriculture, responsible for soil conservation on white-owned farms, and the Department of Native Affairs, responsible for soil conservation in so-called native areasʼ. The latter were paid scant attention in the itinerary, and Bennett himself appeared reluctant to acknowledge how any national soil conservation effort would be compromised by the racially segregated socio-political context in which it occurred.

‘Gender hates men’: untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi

Abstract This article examines the social construction and contestation of gender and gender roles in the city of Blantyre in Malawi. In fieldwork on gendered household roles related to food security, interviews with men and women revealed a distinct set of connotations with the word gender, which reflected Malawians’ historical and contemporary engagement with concepts of development, modernity, and human rights. We denote the Malawian concept of gender as gender in order to distinguish the word participants used in interviews from the more widely accepted conventional definition. We then use this distinction to highlight the ways in which ideas of gender equality have been introduced and received in the Malawian context. The urban setting of the research is key to drawing out the association of gender with Westernization, bringing into focus the power dynamics inherent in the project of translating global discourses of gender rights and gender equality into meaningful social change in developing countries. Gender in Malawi denotes a top-down (and outside-in) process of framing Malawi’s goals for gender equality. This creates political constraints both in the form of resistance to gender, because it resonates with a long history of social change imposed by outside forces, and in the form of superficial adherence to gender to appear more urban and modern, especially to a Western researcher. Local understandings of gender as gender undermine efforts to promote gender equality as a means to address Malawi’s intense urban poverty and household food insecurity.

Reconfiguring space, reimagining place: post-apartheid geographies of South Africa and its region

This thematic section of an issue of theCanadian Journal of African Studies arose out of a day of sessions entitled Post-Apartheid Geographies of South Africa and its Region at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) inWashington in 2010. The conference sessions were inspired by the fact that 2010marked two decades since the release of Nelson Mandela and the commencement of negotiations to end apartheid rule in South Africa. Twenty years was sufficiently long, the session organizers felt, to allow critical reflection onwhat had andwhat had not changed since SouthAfrica’s political transformation to a democratic state. As geographers, we were especially interested in exploring the geographical dimensions of post-apartheid South Africa: how space, place and nature were not just affected by, but instrumental to, apartheid’s dismantling and the country’s social, economic and political reconstitution. For apartheid was fundamentally a geographical project. As documented in an extensive literature and mapped in publications such as Christopher’s (1994) Atlas of Apartheid, not to mention as experienced bodily and daily by thosewho livedunder it, apartheidwasbasedon the racial demarcation and allocation of space and resources. This tookplace at scales ranging from the size and formof individual dwellings through race-based delineation of urban Group Areas to the ethnic division of national territory into bantustans or homelands. Along with its social, political and psychological legacy, apartheid left physically built forms, spatial divisions and landscape scars that, unlike apartheid laws, could not simply be undone at the stroke of a presidential pen. The idea for the conference sessions had been hatched a year earlier, in March 2009, in the somewhat unlikely surroundings of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, venue of that year’s AAG meeting. It was there that Glen Elder and I, two emigrant South Africans both working in geography departments at North American universities, decided that 2010 was the year, and Washington the place, to bring together geographers from South Africa and internationally to think critically about the geographical legacies of apartheid. Barack Obama had recently taken up residence in the White House, and the United States seemed to be in a transformational moment. Hope was in the air and it was in that spirit, rather than one of disillusionment or despair, that the sessions were conceived. The sessions duly took place, but Glen Elder did not live to see them. He died, suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, in May 2009. This set of papers, then, is not only a

Housing and Marginality for Female-Headed Households: Observations from Msunduzi Municipality (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa)

Abstract South Africas constitution enshrines the right to adequate housing, and policy since 1994 has attempted to address this issue. However, realities of poverty, rapid urbanization and limited resources for local authorities undermine the states ability to meet housing needs. This article presents a case study from Msunduzi Municipality (formerly Pietermaritzburg) to evaluate state policy in the urban low-cost housing sector, particularly in terms of the needs of female-headed households. While subsidized housing allocation has successfully reached female-headed households, and recent policy documents acknowledge gendered housing needs, the situation on the ground remains problematic. Gender-based social and economic inequalities persist, and new government-subsidized housing suffers problems including inappropriate location, poor housing quality, and inadequate protection of tenure security. Applying a gender lens to housing highlights shortcomings in South African housing policy, while applying a housing lens to examine gender inequality demonstrates limitations to the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming in this sector.

Bandaid transnationalism: remittance practices of emigrant Zimbabwean medical doctors

Despite the well-documented negative impacts of the ‘brain drain’ of medical doctors from Africa, there is an argument that their departure is not an absolute loss and that transnationally oriented migrants (or diasporas) can act as development agents in their home countries. Financial remittances, in particular, are said to have significant transformative development potential. This paper assesses the remitting patterns of emigrant Zimbabwean medical doctors and examines the potential impacts of the remittances which they send on both the local and national levels. We argue in this paper that the remittances which are being sent by the medical doctors are only cushioning their close family members against the harsh economic conditions in the country, a practice which we termed ‘bandaid transnationalism’. The research results question the nature of development resulting from bandaid transnationalism. Furthermore, we argue that social remittances from the emigrant medical doctors can achieve greater social development impact than the monetary and material remittances which they send. Even though both social and monetary remittances can benefit Zimbabwe’s economy, a more hopeful solution is one that retains medical doctors in the country and attracts emigrant doctors back home to participate in rebuilding health institutions in a democratic Zimbabwe.

Natural Disasters in Africa

The popular media commonly portray Africa as a continent in crisis, afflicted by AIDS, military conflict, drought, desertification, and hunger. African environments are represented as being simultaneously hazardous to and threatened by Africa’s people. The general perception is that Africa is relatively non-hazardous, at least in terms of the major physical events that cause conventionally recognized natural hazards. For example, Africa is largely spared the hurricanes of the Caribbean, the floods of Bangladesh, or the earthquakes of the Pacific Rim, although flooding is serious when the southeast coast and Madagascar are hit full force by a cyclone. In comparison to human conflicts on the continent, natural hazards combined account for only 3 percent of disaster deaths, with the remainder being the direct result of war and civil strife. Over all these looms HIV/AIDS, which affects an estimated 30 million Africans and is the most common cause of death in many African countries (IRIN News, 2004). Key Ideas

Gender, Mobility and Food Security

Access to food, rather than a shortage of food availability, is the central problem for urban household food security. Blantyre in Malawi presents a useful case study for demonstrating the importance of linking gender and urban food security. Rates of urban food insecurity are less severe than in other cities surveyed by AFSUN. Yet female-centred households were twice as likely to be severely food insecure as nuclear households. This paper offers some explanations for the survey findings by drawing on qualitative research to understand the gendered geographies of food access in Blantyre. The first point is that gender shapes mobility, which in turn shapes a household’s ability to increase its food security by procuring food from the most affordable sources, particularly peri-urban markets. The second point is that gender shapes a household’s ability to produce its own food, a popular livelihood strategy in Blantyre that often mitigates the effects of low incomes on household food security. The third point is that gender influences a person’s potential income, which shapes the household’s economic access to food. These three points demonstrate the multi-dimensional relationship between gender and urban food security.