‘I can’t return empty-handed’

IT was around 6.30am. Still half asleep, I picked up my ringing cellphone and heard Rosine’s distressed voice. She and her three children had been evicted and their belongings were spewed on the pavement. Now she was homeless and desperate.

The last few months had been difficult for Rosine. Her husband, who had deserted her and his children, was in hospital with pancreatic cancer. She made a living selling bananas, running a telephone line and illegally subletting a room in her two-bedroom flat in Yeoville.

But even when times were good, she could not meet basic living costs. Her husband had made it clear to his children that their mother was inferior, a “cockroach,” as he often called her — a term redolent of the mass killings of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. A few hours later, Rosine and I weighed her options.

Her in-laws in Rosettenville was not one of them. She had married a man from Rwanda and she was Burundian, and their relationship had slowly disintegrated as a re- sult of ethnic pressures.

“But surely they will take care of the children?” I said. “Yes, these are their children. But if they take my children, I will have nothing left. I may never see them again.”

A few months before, I had found a shelter willing to take Rosine and her children. But she seemed reluctant to move there, concerned about being away from her support network and church.

We had visited the shelter a few months after the xenophobic violence spread across South Africa.

She said she felt safer in inner-city Johannesburg, where many of the inhabitants were foreigners. She worried that moving to a township [where the majority of people were South Africans] would make her and her children a target of xenophobic violence. I asked her whether she would consider going back home to Burundi.

I pushed a little: “What if money for transport and your in-laws were not a problem? Would you consider going back?” I knew that she had recently made contact with her mother and sister in Burundi, after years of not knowing where they were. Burundi was now being rebuilt, she told me, the war was over and there seemed no immediate threat.

“But if I go, what will I show them? How will I go with nothing?” “What do you mean nothing?” I said. “You have your children and your experience.”

“You don’t understand.” She laughed bitterly. “I will be a failure. I will be a nobody because I do not have money to help people at home — to help even myself and my kids.”

Rosine’s fear about going home as a “nobody” is common among migrants. As Ayo from Nigeria put it, “going home with nothing in your hands is social death. There is no way I am going home emptyhanded. Do you want me to shame my family?”

The term “social death” is associated with the process of dehumanising individuals. Ayo and Rosine would rather live in Johannesburg’s misery than experience the humiliation of being labelled worthless by their sending communities. Social death amounts to being a “nobody”.

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