Negotiated Cenizenship: foreign nationals’ tactics of belonging in a Cape Town township

Abstract

This article draws on interviews and ethnographic research conducted in early 2010 in a Cape Town township to study the establishment and first stages of a newly formed organisation representing the interests of foreign nationals. It examines how and to what extent its early work has shown the potential to prise open alternative spaces for its members to participate meaningfully in local affairs without being “captured” by South African interests. Faced with intergroup distrust and the considerable pressures to assimilate into the prevailing political culture, the newly formed organisation adopted what I term “negotiated denizenship” as a distinctive tactic of belonging in an environment in which foreign migrants must earn access to certain basic rights and resources. By simultaneously engaging with existing nodes of authority in the community and establishing their own resource node, early evidence suggests that foreign migrants might be able to gradually influence local events...