If we are to believe headline reports over the past 15 years, South Africans have raged against the presence of African and South Asian migrants living in South African townships. Xenophobic attacks have been particularly violent against working-class black African ‘foreigners’. They have been maimed, killed, and robbed of their dignity, because their citizenship was not secured within the foothills of South Africa. They have been harangued, harassed, and brutalised because they could not speak a South African language (or so we are led to believe); they have been questioned, humiliated, and shot at by police in random raids or random searches in the streets of Johannesburg. They have been harassed in hair salons and threatened with kidnapping; they have been thrown from moving trains, necklaced and killed in Bloemfontein, Masiphumelele, Bellville, Pretoria, Philippi, Katlehong and elsewhere in South Africa.

Some commentators argue that the violence meted out against our African brothers and sisters represents a violent South Africa. Xenophobia is thus subsumed under the aberrant reality of a violent South African population, as embodied and expressed through a virulent, oppressive, and toxic hyper-masculinity. To subsume xenophobic or Afrophobic violence in this way ironically captures African nationals as part of the contemporary South African story, enmeshed within our collective present of high unemployment, and deep racial, gendered, and social inequalities. However, we are not encouraged to perceive this subtlety and nuance.

As government’s plans for its citizens are shared during COVID-19, the silence on serving the parallel needs of the African migrant population is deafening. As non-citizens, they are not perceived as bona fide beneficiaries of the state; their assumed rootlessness and statelessness leave them in a precarious quagmire, reliant on handouts from local South African and other diasporic organisations. Yet, their labour too contributes to the ticking over of South Africa’s economy. As participants in the formal and informal economies, they purchase food at supermarkets or vegetables from hawkers on the street; they pay taxi fares, pay university fees (much higher than South Africans), need medical care and attention, participate in illicit undertakings, fall in love, marry, live and die.

Educational migrants

As South African universities closed their doors to stem the potential transmission of COVID-19 on campuses, students were compelled to head home. However, for various reasons, some educational migrants were unable to undertake the journey home. Two months into lockdown, they remain on campuses, separated from immediate family and the familiarity of ‘home’.
Stop for a moment and conjure up the feelings, smells, experiences, and attachments related to home. Imagine the smile of your grandmother, the sound of your siblings’ laughter, the earthy, homely smell of your mother’s cooking; the heat of the day, the shade sought under the tree in the backyard, gossiping with favourite cousins, your grandmother, or aunt. Get lost in the stoicism of your father, and the familiar sounds of home. The sound of padded feet moving down the passage; the click of the kettle as it boils water for the day’s morning beverage. The radio or TV tuned in to the news. All of this and more provide the backdrop of familiarity, comfort, and casual belonging, ‘back home’. All of this, gone with the stroke of an ordinary ballpoint pen held by the hand of President Ramaphosa, ratifying the closure of South Africa’s borders. Gone.

Access to medical care and attention
On 15 April 2020, the Centre for Human Rights and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies issued a plea to government to ensure the inclusion of African migrants in updated frameworks for healthcare provision during COVID-19. This plea was not without reason. Research shows that undocumented and legal migrants have experienced medical xenophobia in South Africa. As the virus is irreverent of citizenship, the situation we find ourselves in demands that every individual resident in South Africa be screened, tested for, and treated for COVID-19. There is no room for discrimination of any kind, as the efforts to curb the exponential increase in the infection rate could be nullified by it. The failure to include African migrants – however categorised – in government’s risk-adjusted plans thus threatens every other individual in her environment, South African or not.

At death’s door

As President Ramaphosa said when addressing the nation on 15 March 2020, “we have decided to take urgent and drastic measures to manage the disease, to protect the people of our country, and reduce the impact of the virus on our society and on our economy”.

The reference to ‘people of our country’ highlights the elephant in the room – who are the people of our country? Is the reference specific to those born in South Africa, and who thus enjoy citizenship? Or is it inclusive of African and South Asian migrants, however categorised by the state? If the President’s protection extends to include migrants, how will migrant deaths be managed? The closure of our international borders has scuppered attempts to repatriate mortal remains of the deceased; and as fears rise that COVID-19 can still be spread by the dead, will the body of an African migrant be buried or cremated in South Africa?

Health authorities advised that cremation is the best method for dealing with a COVID-19 death. Yet, in the African context, cremation is complicated as it opposes certain belief systems. Further, mortuary facilities in South Africa are scarce and hardly able to respond to the potential need created by South African deaths, whether from COVID-19 or something else. Given this context, will African migrants finally be treated with dignity and respect in death?

Not every black African migrant crossing into South Africa is illegal or disempowered. There are middle-class nurses, dentists, doctors, university professors, mechanical engineers, businessmen, and researchers. However, they are not newsworthy, as their class status often removes them from physically violent persecution in local townships. In this extended COVID-19 moment, race and class continue to be inextricably interlinked among South Africans, as during segregation and apartheid. The images of black, destitute, and hungry men, women, and children queuing for food support this assertion. Yet, adding to the complexity of this racialised class reality are the further social categories of nationality, gender, and health status. Depending on the intersectional configuration of your identity, further confirmed by the national documents you carry, your chance of surviving COVID-19 in South Africa waxes or wanes. Your access to healthcare, to state assistance in the form of food aid or a social grant, depends on your citizenship status; and your health and/or death is mediated through your predefined status, inclusive of your citizenship.

The South African government will have numerous obstacles to remedy the further devastation and destitution of its citizens. We argue here that the idea and characterisation of South African citizens must be inclusive of our African brothers, our African sisters, and their children. An erasure of their humanity and their very real need for protection makes us as ordinary South Africans complicit to their deaths, and by extension our own. Discrimination in all its forms is inimical to the preservation of life.

By Keamogetswe Juries, Dimakatšo Veronica Masenya, Mamokoena Mokoena And Joy Owen