Migrants de Mozambique dans le Johannesburg de l’après-apartheid

Travail, frontières, altérité

[Migrants from Mozambique in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg. Labour, Border, Otherness]
Dominique Vidal, 2014, Paris, Karthala-IFAS, 216p.

[Book in French]

The presence of boundaries in their relationship to others is omnipresent in the logics underlying the actions of Mozambican migrants in Johannesburg. As migrants, the adversity encountered brings them to try to melt into the urban environment mainly as individuals and, at the same time, to define themselves as a group endowed with attributes that can be shown to advantage, so as to establish a positive perception of themselves in a world which is destabilising, as far as personal identity is concerned.

The end of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic government in South Africa have changed the migration experience between Southern Mozambique and Johannesburg, a city that has attracted men by the millions since gold was discovered there at the end of the 19th century. Today, most Mozambican migrants are no longer contracted to work in the mines, as in the past, but work in the informal economy of the city, where they are confronted with the hostility of Black South Africans, themselves discriminated against by the White minority under apartheid. Based on interviews conducted in Maputo and Johannesburg, this book examines the changes experienced in the migration framework, thereby showing the intertwining of the inextricably social et political dynamics which are revealed in various forms, when travelling between the two countries.

This study of international migrations examines the notion of border from at least three viewpoints. Firstly, from the viewpoint of State borders, the establishment and development of which have been analysed as the political element making it possible to distinguish modern immigration from other forms of mobility. Secondly, from the viewpoint of urban research, which shows that major metropolises, while more than ever representing destinations for migrants, are seeing socio-spatial borders being developed as a result of the action of those seeking to protect themselves from otherness. Thirdly, from the viewpoint of works on ethnicity, which highlight that ethnic boundaries are often built in the relations between migrants and earlier populations.

Dominique Vidal lectures Sociology at the University Paris Diderot and is a researcher at the Migrations and Society Research Unit (URMIS – UMR CNRS and IRD). He is the author of La politique au quartier. Rapports sociaux et citoyenneté à Recife (Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1998) and of Les bonnes de Rio. Emploi domestique et société démocratique (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2007).