Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa

A Review Essay on Francis B. Nyamnjoh's Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (London: Zed Books, 2006, pp.288) by Munyaradzi Mawere (Associate Professor, Universidade Pedagogica Gaza, Mozambique) and Artwell Nhemachena (PhD Candidate, University of Cape Town, South Africa). Living in a world that is simultaneously closed and open always poses challenges for humanity. This is because such a world privileges some while constraining others in different ways. Such a world is selective, segregationist, or discriminatory as it handicaps some while others sometimes exercise their agency with irresponsible freedom. This review examines Francis B. Nyamnjoh's Insiders and Outsiders in relationship to Zimbabwe by giving highlights on Zimbabwe around the time Nyamnjoh (chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa) wrote his book. Nyamnjoh has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon, Botswana and South Africa, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the "Senior Arts Researcher of the Year" prize for 2003. In March 2013 he was named African Hero of the Year by the African Student Union at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.IntroductionHumanity is arguably struggling to live in a world that is simultaneously closed and open, contained and containing. In a sense it is a world, if open has very small apertures through which only a small fraction of humanity can pass through and be free to move. It is a world that is containing for those whose freedom of mobility is absent or virtually nonexistent and it is a contained world for those whose freedom of mobility is extant and can be actualized, if at the instant of their imaginations. The rest of humanity may have to do with, if accessible, virtual mobility, moving to other worlds only through the media: watching other parts of the world on television, on the internet, in press pictures or having to listen to the stories of those who are free to move about to places that have been or are subjects of their sojourns. It is a world that has in place hurdles often put in place by humanity for humanity so that some are free while others are handicapped or made to carry burdens larger than their heads with which they cannot pass through the narrow apertures of the world's containers. In a sense the mobile become or are deemed by sections of humanity to be the lifeblood of the world whose free circulation the world cannot afford to do without, the rest have to be static even when where they are sitting is hot or even as the proverbial hut in which they are staying is burning.These sentiments appear to be at least implied in "Insiders and Outsiders", and brought out more forthrightly in his "Intimate Strangers"(2010) - both of which portray issues of citizenship, migration and xenophobia in southern African countries namely Botswana and South Africa at the time of the Zimbabwean crises which saw many Zimbabweans migrating or seeking to migrate to neighboring countries, if for relief at a time when the country was haunted by massive unemployment, hyperinflation, food shortages and political violence. Thus, Nyamnjoh shows how borders were enforced and policed with respect to Zimbabwean immigrants in southern Africa, and how Zimbabwean immigrants creatively navigated the border restrictions as well as how once inside the host countries, they are met with xenophobic violence.DiscussionThis review paper sifts out insights from Nyamnjoh's book which might shed light on how borders, migration and movement are in fact politics and arguably politics that is often authoritarian to immigrants seeking to traverse the borders. In this vein, it is argued that a phenomenological perspective to movement and migration might not be adequate to understand the politics of borders and movement, and thus borrows insights on the phenomenology of movement from Ingold (2007, 1993, 2008 and 2011). …