Living at the borders within the metropolis in post-apartheid Gauteng, South Africa

Abstract

Most African migrants, living in Johannesburg, South Africa, are undocumented and as a result illegalized. In that, borders are no longer fixed at the physical boundaries between nations but are in a state of flux extending into the interior of nations, most African migrants live their lives ‘at the border’ even though geographically within Gauteng, the country’s richest and most metropolitan province. This paper considers the coloniality of borders and their violence in postapartheid South Africa. It traces border existence for many black Africans in daily negotiations to survive xenophobia. These negotiations are between the migrants, the law andm law enforcers. It is about how migrants survive outside the formal economy and the formal structures that govern life in Gauteng, and the struggle to access government services such as health and education. Located in postcolonial and decolonial theoretical frameworks, the paper takes the border as a contested space and also considers ways in which the migrants also construct their own borders as a way of resisting the violence of the nation and the state. These daily survival strategies of the excluded African Others are theorized as decolonial politics deployed in resisting the coloniality of the border.