African Immigration to South Africa: Francophone Migration of the 1990s

Often designated as ‘illegal’ immigrants, an African person who cannot speak an indigenous language is clearly foreign, a threat and thus a potential target for abuse. Such stereotyping helps create and reinforce a xenophobic climate. The papers in this book explore and attempt to understand the nature of the phenomenon. The disintegration of apartheid in the 1990s was accompanied by the scrapping of the whites-only immigration policy and thousands of Africans from the region and further north moved to South Africa. A feature of this immigration flow has been the number of immigrants and asylum seekers from francophone Africa. Unfortunately this has not been welcomed by a large part of the local population and xenophobia has become an increasingly serious issue.