For some, registering a child’s birth is not simply a visit to a government office. It is a journey shaped by distance, uncertainty.
Dear Family and Friends,
Thousands of foreigners, forced by the recent xenophobic protests to flee South Africa, are stranded in the border town of Musina, where many have been forced to shelter in the open as they navigate bureaucracy and problems associated with overstayed visas.
Decades of economic failure has created genuine desperation, into which an ideological campaign by mainstream economic actors has injected the false idea that we are trapped in a world of scarcity. And into this world political entrepreneurs have inserted the figure of the migrant as the illegitimate queue-jumper.
Being reassuring is one thing; being dishonest and misleading is another.
