Often designated as ‘illegal’ immigrants, an African person who cannot speak an indigenous language is clearly foreign, a threat and thus a potential target for abuse. Such stereotyping helps create and reinforce a xenophobic climate. The papers in this book explore and attempt to understand the nature of the phenomenon. The disintegration of apartheid in the 1990s was accompanied by the scrapping of the whites-only immigration policy and thousands of Africans from the region and further north moved to South Africa. A feature of this immigration flow has been the number of immigrants and asylum seekers from francophone Africa. Unfortunately this has not been welcomed by a large part of the local population and xenophobia has become an increasingly serious issue.
ANTOINE BOUILLON was the Director of Research at the French Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD).
Morris (sociology, U. of New South Wales, Australia) and Bouillon (French Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement) compile five chapters that examine the migration of individuals from francophone African countries in the 1990s to South Africa. They address the debate around the number of these individuals, seen as "illegal" immigrants, in South Africa, in which numbers have been inflated to reinforce xenophobia; the experiences of Nigerians, Congolese, and Zaireans and why they went to South Africa, their economic contributions, and issues they face; their relationships with the local black population, with an emphasis on language problems and stereotyping; and the migration of African traders. Distributed in the US by International Publishers Marketing. First published in 2001 and now available in the US.
~Reference and Research Book News
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