Jonathan Crush

The dark side of democracy: migration xenophobia and human rights in South Africa.

South Africa prides itself on having one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. The Bill of Rights guarantees a host of basic political, cultural and socio-economic rights to all who are resident in the country. Yet there have been persistent reports that citizen intolerance of non-citizens, refugees and migrants has escalated dramatically since 1994. This article documents this process through presentation of results of national public opinion surveyed by the Southern African Migration Project (SAMP). The surveys show that intolerance is extremely pervasive and growing in intensity and seriousness. Abuse of migrants and refugees has intensified and there is little support for the idea of migrant rights. Only one group of South Africans, a small minority with regular personal contact with non-citizens, is significantly more tolerant. These findings do not augur well for migrant and refugee rights in this newly democratic country, or early acceptance of the UN Convention on the protection of migrant workers.

Supermarket Expansion and the Informal Food Economy in Southern African Cities: Implications for Urban Food Security

The new international food security agenda proposes small farmer production as the solution to growing food insecurity in Africa. A striking omission in this agenda is any consideration of the dimensions and determinants of urban food security. In Southern African towns and cities, lack of access to food is key to the food insecurity of poor urban households. This article reviews the current state of knowledge about the food sources of such households, paying particular attention to the expansion of supermarket supply chains, their impact on informal food suppliers and the relative insignificance of urban agriculture. The article also presents and analyses the significance of findings from a recent eleven-city survey of food insecurity in Southern Africa conducted by the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN).

Food security in Southern African cities: the place of urban agriculture

Several decades of research on ‘urban agriculture’ have led to markedly different conclusions about the actual and potential role of household food production in African cities. In the context of rapid urbanization, urban agriculture is, once again, being advocated as a means to mitigate the growing food insecurity of the urban poor. This article examines the contemporary importance of household food production in poor urban communities in 11 different Southern African Development Community (SADC) cities. It shows that urban food production is not particularly significant in most communities and that many more households rely on supermarkets and the informal sector to access food. Even fewer households derive income from the sale of produce. This picture varies considerably, however, from city to city, for reasons that require further research and explanation.

The relative deprivation-gratification continuum and the attitudes of South Africans toward immigrants : A test of the V-curve hypothesis

It has long been established that there is a linear and positive relationship between relative deprivation and prejudice. However, a recent experiment suggests that the converse of relative deprivation, relative gratification, may also be associated with prejudice (S. Guimond & M. Dambrun, 2002). Specifically, the evidence suggests that the usual test for a linear relationship between relative deprivation-gratification and prejudice might conceal the existence of a bilinear relationship. This function, labeled the V-curve hypothesis, predicts that both relative deprivation and relative gratification are associated with higher levels of prejudice. This hypothesis was tested with a representative sample of South Africans (N=1,600). Results provide strong support for the V-curve hypothesis. Furthermore, strength of ethnic identification emerged as a partial mediator for the effect of relative gratification on prejudice.

Urban food insecurity and the new international food security agenda

The new global and African food security agenda is overwhelmingly productionist and rural in its orientation, and is based on the premise that food insecurity is primarily a rural problem requiring a massive increase in smallholder production. This agenda is proceeding despite overwhelming evidence of rapid urbanisation and the growing likelihood of an urban future for the majority of Africans. Urban food insecurity can therefore no longer be ignored. This paper argues that achieving urban food security is the emerging development challenge for the 21st century and that the complexities of urban food systems urgently need to be addressed by researchers, policy makers, and international donors and multilateral agencies.

Scripting the Compound: Power and Space in the South African Mining Industry

In this paper the discursive construction of South Africas quintessential institution of labour coercion and control—the mine compound—is explored. Popular and academic narratives of the origins, spread, and role of the compound are traced, with particular attention to the scripts of marxists, social historians, and poststructuralists. I argue that underlying each is a set of spatial images which powerfully constrains what is admissible to the narrative. Recent attempts to resituate the compound as a fluid ensemble of power geometries are highlighted through a review of the interior spatiality and cultural life of the compound and its connections to its immediate surrounds and the distant countryside. The aim is an empowering narrative which centres migrant cultural resistance and helps to explain the dramatic reordering of the mine landscape since the mid-1980s.

Contra Free Movement: South Africa and the SADC Migration Protocols

This paper examines the formidable obstacles to the development of a regionally harmonized approach to migration management in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Tracing the origins and development of SADC initiatives on regional cooperation on population movement, the paper shows how the far-reaching 1995 SADC Draft Protocol on Free Movement was killed off by South Africa. An examination of South Africas response and counterproposals reveal the myth and paranoia that characterize thinking on crossborder migration within the country. The SADC initiative to develop a Migration Protocol, akin to those on education and training and regional trade, finally ran aground in Mauritius in September 1998. This paper shows why it has been so difficult to develop a regional protocol on population movement and speculates on the likelihood of such a development in the future.

Introduction to Special Issue: Evaluating South African Immigration Policy after Apartheid

Apartheid-era immigration laws remain in force in South Africa. The will to change is considerable but the whole transformation process has been constantly bedeviled by the complexity of the issues and political tensions between the ruling ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Medical Xenophobia and Zimbabwean Migrant Access to Public Health Services in South Africa

Xenophobic attitudes and actions are all-pervasive in South Africa in civil society and the state. Medical xenophobia refers to the negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees based purely on their identity as non-South African. This paper examines the extent to which xenophobia manifests itself within the public institutions that offer health services to citizens and non-citizens, based on primary research with Zimbabwean migrants who try to access the system. The paper argues that medical xenophobia is deeply entrenched in the South African public health system despite being a fundamental breach of the countrys Constitution and Bill of Rights, international human rights obligations and the existence of professional codes of ethics governing the treatment of patients.

Liquor and labor in Southern Africa

In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets. In Soweto alone during the first days of the revolt protestors smashed and burned eighteen beerhalls and a similar number of bottle stores; as the rebellion spread more were destroyed. This study sets out to demonstrate that liquor outlets were not simply convenient symbols of oppression. The anger that launched gasoline bombs into beerhalls across South Africa had specific origins in deep and complicated struggles over the control of alcohol production and consumption in South Africa. Conflict over alcohol has continuously intruded upon the lives of the black residents of southern African towns, cities, and labor compounds and upon the rural communities to which these people traced their origins. Yet the subject has received little systematic scholarly attention until now. In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa scholars explore the complex relationship between alcohol use and the emergence of the modern urban-industrial system. In examining the role of alcohol in social control and the state, they also reveal the vibrant subcultures nurtured in beerhalls and underground shebeens and expose the bitter conflicts over alcohol that run along the fault lines of age, gender, class, and ethnicity.