Abstract
Sadouni offers a much-needed description of the methodology and conceptual framework for the study of Somalis’ migrant experiences in Johannesburg. Adopting a transnational perspective, the author introduces an interdisciplinary dimension (historical, sociological, political) to the analysis of Somalis living in Johannesburg, an investigation which is strongly linked to a consideration of the spatiality of the Southern African Indian Ocean region. Somalis’ waves of migration to Johannesburg are analysed during different periods: the colonial era up to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the apartheid period and finally the post-apartheid era, which began in 1994 with the first democratic elections.
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Notes
- 1.
In mid-2011, nearly 51 million people lived in the country. Black Africans constituted close to 80% of the total population. The other classified populations are 9% coloured, 9% white and 2.5% Indian. The two most populated provinces are KwaZulu-Natal (previously Natal before democratisation), where Durban is located, followed by Gauteng (formerly Transvaal during colonial times), where Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria, are situated. Retrieved from http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022011.pdf.
- 2.
Since the introduction of Islam more than three centuries ago in the Cape, Muslims never represented more than 2% of the total population until the mid-1990s.
- 3.
According to informants, 23,000 Somalis were resident in the country in 2006. In 2012, Somali organisations estimated that they were 60,000 Somalis in South Africa.
- 4.
The urban context needs to be understood not as an external entity, an externality, but rather as a historical, interactional production of struggles and negotiations between different dimensions of the context.
- 5.
Urban Islam is not a new phenomenon, as the Islamic faith was born in the city of Mecca in the seventh century: the Arab merchant networks spread from this central point in the region and across the seas down to Abyssinia in the Horn of Africa of today.
- 6.
The terms Cape Malay, Indian, Black and White are used in the national South African census even though they are contested. In the specific case of South African Muslims, “Cape Malay” refers to people descended from Muslim immigrants brought to the Cape initially as slaves by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century; “Indian” denotes people whose ancestors arrived from India in the late nineteenth century; “Black Muslim” is used to refer to the descendants of the Zanzibari population in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and to local black converts to Islam. A small number of whites have also converted to Islam.
- 7.
The group of Somali “Bantus” and a small minority of Christians somewhat challenge the commonplace representation of Somalia as a mono-ethnic and mono-religious country. “Bantu” was used in colonial times to identify riverine peoples of Somalia and a class of agricultural labourers.
- 8.
As stated by Peggy Levitt (2012: 163), “a transnational optic helps identify the actors, ideas, and technologies that are the carriers [original emphasis] of religion”.
- 9.
As Thomas Blom Hansen (2014: 14) has stressed, this is also related to post-imperial formations. For him, international migration today, “pathways, regulatory regimes and racial-cultural hierarchies that govern and shape these movements are decisively shaped by a not very distant imperial age and mentality”.
- 10.
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Sadouni, S. (2019). Introduction. In: Muslims in Southern Africa. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46708-9_1
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