Commentary
Somewhere in Africa - McClatchy Newspapers
Wise and Joy
Posted by Shashank
Fri Jul 11, 5:25 PM ET
The line outside the South African Department of Home Affairs office in Crown Mines, an industrial section of Johannesburg, began forming late last night and was well into the hundreds by the time I got there this morning. Immigrants from Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Somalia, Uganda and -- most of all -- from Zimbabwe crowded the gated entrance as police officers barked at them to move away. On one of the coldest days of the year, women wrapped themselves in blankets and men blew into their fists in a vain attempt to keep warm.
Everyone was there for the same thing: a legal document certifying their right to be in this country.
South Africa is the youngest democracy on the continent but also its most prosperous by far, and since the fall of apartheid it's been a massive magnet for economic migrants and political asylum-seekers. The recent wave of deadly attacks on African immigrants was merely the latest manifestation of the difficulties that await people who come here. They also suffer indignities at the hands of South African authorities, who make it difficult for them to obtain legal papers and then arrest them or demand bribes if they're caught without them.
The Department of Home Affairs, the government agency that deals withrefugees, is woefully understaffed and rife with corruption. People wait for days or weeks to get their papers and then report being turned away on technicalities or for no reason whatsoever. Immigrants are in constant fear of the police. About five blocks from the immigration office this morning, I saw three officers harassing a shabbily dressed man who I can only assume was either on his way to get his refugee documents or had just been denied them.
While standing at the back of the line, I met Joy, a middle-aged mother of two from Zimbabwe who was trying to apply for asylum. She'd come to South Africa three months ago, illegally jumping the border across the Limpopo River. Her father, a noted opposition supporter in their home village, had been killed in the election violence. But it wasn't just fear that drove her south. "There's no food at home," she said. The week before she left, the economic crisis had emptied all the stores in her Harare neighborhood of cornmeal, the national staple. Her two young children went two days without eating anything at all.
In Joburg, she's found a job doing housework for three South African women in a middle-class black suburb. In a good week she can make about $100, which she uses to buy clothes or packets of rice to send back to her children and parents in Harare.
Her husband, who introduced himself as Wise, came here five months before Joy. He's a builder, but construction work is scarce. "Too many Zimbabweans here now to do that work," he said wryly. I believed him. In the past three days I've met Zimbabwean teachers, civil servants and even an IT professional who've found work on construction crews here. Zimbabwe may be crumbling, but its refugees are helping to build South Africa.
