Apportioned city: Gendered delineations of asylum, work and violence in Cape Town

Suzanne Hall,Liza Rose Cirolia,Henrietta Nyamnjoh

doi:10.1177/02637758211048199

Abstract

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town’s segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city.

Highlights

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa
Tete tells us how she came to Cape Town and about her ongoing struggle to hold onto her place in the city: I came to this country when I was sixteen
This paper focuses on the question of what it means to live with highly restricted access to the city in the context of urban asylum in South Africa

Summary

Introduction

Living with discriminatory access to the city remains integral to the racialised and classed formations of urban life in South Africa, where historic structures of segregation continue to delineate how space and time are inhabited (Naicker, 2016) For those seeking asylum, the deferral of rights that is maintained by an under-resourced system is understood as a slow violence protracted by the state (Amit, 2011; Amit and Kriger, 2014). How do we understand the gendered inhabitation of precarious urban citizenship, in which overlapping layers of restriction result in less and less space and time being available to make a life liveable?

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Conclusion