Once in South Africa, a network will provide shelter - a couch in a house filled with 20 people, food and a job in a field they have made their own through decades of practice. And with the Gauteng market already well served by immigrants, Cape Town is a lucrative new market for immigrant communities. Long Street's faintly seedy flats and hotels have long been a first stop for newcomers to Cape Town. Recently the area has taken on an African flavour. It is home to migrants from other Southern African states, West Africa, Angola, Congo, Liberia and even faraway Somalia and Rwanda.
Population estimates vary.
Mostly young men, Long Street's newcomers live four or five to a flat and earn a living by trading, providing services such as hairdressing or working in the security industry. Greenmarket Square, a tourist attraction in the city centre, has local handicraft stalls jostling alongside trestles piled with crafts produced elsewhere in Africa and sold by Malawian, Zimbabwean, Zambian, Namibian and West African traders. Some of these traders employ compatriots or locals to assist in business. They use their earnings to purchase local goods which they then sell on the way home, while stocking up on goods to trade - a complex network extending across Southern Africa and in some cases still further. It is a trade network which historians say has operated in various forms in West and Central Africa for centuries.