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Framing
harm: Legal, local and anthropological knowledge in the context
of forced migration
Shannon Morreira
October 07, 2011
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The southern African state of Zimbabwe, which borders South Africa,
has undergone a decade of severe political and economic instability.
Migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa has been extensive, and
continues even with the slight improvements that Zimbabwe has seen
since 2009. In this paper I use migration from Zimbabwe to South
Africa as a case study through which to explore knowledge creation
within the field of forced migration and human rights, and within
the field of anthropology. What are the similarities and differences
between local, legal and anthropological knowledge of rights violations
in the context of crisis? How do individual, subjective tales of
suffering and violation become, or fail to become, supposedly objective
'evidence', and how might legal evidence differ from Zimbabwean
moral knowledge of harm? In this paper I consider the difficulties
of translating experiences of violation into legal and anthropological
language and knowledge.
'Rights,
not Wrongs-: an Introduction
There are no
"neutral" words and forms - words and forms that belong
to "no one"; language (is) shot through with intentions
and accents . . . All words have the "taste" of a profession,
a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person,
a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of
the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged
life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. (Bhaktin,
1981: 293)
In 2007, whilst engaged
in fieldwork for my Masters degree, I attended a protest held at
the Home Affairs Refugee Centre in central Cape Town, South Africa.
I was present both as researcher and as activist. My research was
focused on Zimbabwean undocumented migration to South Africa, and
my activist work sprung from my own position as a Zimbabwean living,
albeit legally, in South Africa for the same sorts of reasons as
the undocumented migrants with whom I worked - namely, to
escape from an escalating political and economic crisis. As such,
wearing the two hats of intimacy and distance that are required
by activist anthropology, I was present when a group of Zimbabweans
began the process of writing on banners provided by the activist
group of which I was a member. A group of ten of my informants and
friends clustered around an old sheet that was placed on the pavement
outside the gates of the Centre, with one man brandishing a paintbrush
and a tin of red paint. He squatted down, dipped the brush in paint,
held it over the sheet . . . and then hesitated. 'What do
I write?- he asked, 'What are we saying to these people?-
There was a moment of
silence, followed by a plethora of answers - 'We are
tired of waiting for an appointment-; 'We are not animals
that must wait in the rain for them to let us inside-; 'We
want to be allowed to stay here because things are so bad at to
say that we are suffering, here and at home-; 'We have
had enough of Mugabe and Mbeki- (the respective presidents
of Zimbabwe and South Africa at the time); and 'We would not
be here if we could make a living at home.- The man looked
at his companions and said, 'But I can-t write all those
things on a banner. It must be catchy, quick - but it must
say why we are here.- A pause whilst people tried to think
of something catchy, something 'quick- - and then
one man said 'Just write, "We want human rights, not
human wrongs", or "No rights in Zimbabwe, no rights
in South Africa."- Everyone in the group nodded approvingly
and the two banners were made. A language of human rights, it seemed,
was able to speak across disparate intentions - to provide,
if you will, a summarizing symbol (Ortner, 1973) that could encompass
suffering, tiredness, illegality, personhood, politics, economics
and morality (both 'here- and 'at home-),
and 'quickly- transpose these to the powerful realm
of legal language. Individual, subjective knowledges of what it
meant to be an illegal immigrant were rapidly reordered into the
(supposedly) more objective, and thus weightier, realm of knowledge
that we categorise as human rights discourse.
That brief moment outside
Home Affairs thus seemed to me to provide a window into the entanglements
(Mbembe, 2001) at play when the notion of human rights is called
upon. Throughout my fieldwork in 2007 and 2008, 'human rights-
(or just 'rights-) were invoked again and again, in
contexts as incongruous as the christening of a child or the personal
recounting of a life history marred by political violence. It thus
seemed to me that 'rights talk- (Mamdani, 2000), in
this context, had become a powerful way of ordering experiences,
and of ensuring that those experiences could be legitimised and
shared with others.
In 2010, I returned to
the field as a doctoral student, focusing specifically on the ways
in which notions of rights were being mobilised by Zimbabweans in
South Africa and at home. In this paper I use migration from Zimbabwe
to South Africa as a case study through which to explore knowledge
creation within the field of forced migration and human rights,
and within the field of anthropology. What, then, comprises 'knowledge-
or, for the particular purposes of this paper, a knowledge of human
rights? In this paper I take knowledge of rights to constitute familiarity
with, or perceived understanding of, the notion of the rights that
are accorded to people by the simple virtue of their being a person.
I argue that this knowledge is based both on personal experience
(individual knowledge), and on culturally transmitted (shared) information.
This fluid mix of the shared and the personal means that there is
more than one way of knowing rights, and thus that ways of knowing
are situational. Further, the processes of knowledge transmission
are also subject to contestation, and knowledge is thus imbued with
power relations. In the case of asylum seeking, some kinds of knowledge
are more powerful than others, as is explored below.
What, then,
are 'human rights-? On one level, the answer, whilst
not simple, is at least easily definable - human rights constitute
a set of morals, a normative guide for behaviour towards others,
which have been encoded in international law. In Africa, for example,
'human rights- are those things which have been written,
in legalese, into the African
Charter on Human and People-s Rights (ACHPR) as adopted
by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1981 (Akokpari and
Zimbler, 2008), and to which, as African Union members, Zimbabwe
and South Africa are signatory. How many people, however, are well
versed in such legal documents? Legal charters reflect a domain
of a specific sector of the elite - yet 'human rights-
as a phrase is one which is drawn upon by many more diverse sectors
of the populace, from other elites to, as the above example shows,
the deeply marginalised. Notions of 'human rights-,
then, have to reflect more than that which is encoded in Charters
- beyond this legal discourse lies a realm of rights that
is truly 'socially charged- (Bhaktin, 1981:293), a realm
that is, to mix my theorists and borrow a phrase from Wilson (2006;
cf. Appadurai, 1986), immersed in the social life of words.
The data in
this paper is drawn from primary research I have undertaken over
the last three years from 2007 to 2010. Using case studies and my
own experiences in the field (both as anthropologist and as activist
against the political crisis in Zimbabwe), I trace how people struggle
to present their individual, subjective stories of violation in
such a way that they constitute adequate 'evidence-
in the contexts of formal interviews at Home Affairs for the purposes
of seeking asylum, and the ways in which, more often than not, this
ends in failure. Secondly, I go on to explore how this evidential
based way of knowing differs from Zimbabwean informants- moral
knowledge of harm, though both are presented as a way of knowing
rights, or, conversely, knowing a violation of those rights. Finally,
I consider the ways in which the kinds of knowledge that have legitimacy
within anthropology allow for access to other ('local-)
ways of knowing, whilst simultaneously bowing to the (global) epistemological
pressures that push toward categorisation in particular ways. It
is first necessary, however, to briefly provide the socio-political
context of migration, particularly as the outcome of attempts to
seek asylum often depend upon official South African perceptions
of the political context in Zimbabwe.
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