Description
Book SynopsisHoping for a better life, many migrants have made the journey to South Africa and set up as informal spaza shop traders in small towns and township areas, supplying the local residents with essentials. But thriving in environments afflicted by unemployment and crime is almost impossible when armed robberies are a daily reality, protection from law enforcement is not a given, and access to justice is effectively out of reach.
Engaging first-hand with small traders and the Somali communities in Khayelitsha, Kraaifontein and Philippi, Vanya Gastrow investigates the predicament of these modern-day pariahs – social and political outcasts who belong neither to the elite nor the common people, and who are frequently the focus of xenophobic anger.
Tracing national-level regulatory developments in post-apartheid democratic South Africa Gastrow shines a light on how retailers have been politicised and how they have faced growing informal and formal regulatory efforts to curtail their business activities. She demonstrates how democratic and constitutional frameworks can erode in contexts of heightened nationalism, populism and economic inequality. By investigating Somali informal shopkeepers’ experiences of crime, justice and regulation in the country, the fragility of law, pluralism and democracy in South Africa is uncomfortably exposed.
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I: Arrival and Reception
- Chapter 1 Introduction: law, justice and the pariah
- Chapter 2 Getting started: a tale of three cities
- Chapter 3 The unwelcome guest: flight and arrival in South Africa
- Chapter 4 Crime and the fluid migrant
- Chapter 5 A window on statistics opens up
- Chapter 6 Fortress South Africa: informal justice and control
- Chapter 7 Elusive justice and xenophobic crime
- Chapter 8 An ordinary crime: the politics of denial
- Part II: Regulation and Containment
- Chapter 9 The Masiphumelele shop threat, 2006
- Chapter 10 In the shadow of Masiphumelele
- Chapter 11 The shifting problem and changing narratives
- Chapter 12 Infestation and backlash: the Soweto cleansing of 2018
- Chapter 13 When reasoning rings hollow
- Chapter 14 The problem as legitimacy
- Chapter 15 Regulating trade: informality and segregation by agreement
- Chapter 16 When agreements fall apart
- Chapter 17 Legal imaginaries: trading without a licence
- Chapter 18 Turning to formality, 2012
- Chapter 19 Formalising exclusion as the African way
- Part III: The Politics of Pariahdom
- Chapter 20 Pariahdom and bare life
- Chapter 21 Pariah justice
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
