Affirmation and Defamation: Zimbabwean Migrant Teachers’ Survival Strategies in South Africa

Abstract

The largest number of foreign teachers in South Africa come from Zimbabwe and there is some literature on their experiences. The purpose of this article was to explore the survival strategies used by Zimbabwean migrant teachers located in rural schools in one South African province. The current literature does fleetingly reveal that they have experienced discrimination in South Africa but there is a dearth of literature on the survival strategies utilized by Zimbabwean migrant teachers in discriminatory and xenophobic spaces, such as the workplace, in South Africa. This paper was guided by social capital theory and social network theory. The paper is distilled from a teacher migration study which was interpretive and qualitative in nature, adopting a case study research design. In-depth semi-structured interviews and WhatsApp social networking were utilized to generate data from a snowball sample of fifteen Zimbabwean migrant teachers in one province of South Africa where there had been xenophobic outbreaks since 2008. The findings indicated that Zimbabwean migrant teachers survived by excelling in their work but they attempted, where possible, to avoid an acknowledgement of their efforts thus hoping to be inconspicuous in the profession and community, out of fear. They additionally behaved with humility at schools to avoid the germination and spread of jealous tendencies from their local African colleagues which made them prone to risk if and when xenophobia erupted in their communities.