Schooling has acquired symbolic value as the prime means of escaping household poverty and inequality and realising ambitions for social mobility, especially for Ethiopian migrant children in South Africa whose parents are not formally educated. While parents connect migration with the process of ‘becoming somebody in life’ and their high educational aspirations, the need to speak the language and understand the culture is a way of rooting the children to straddling both their Ethiopian and South African identities. This paper focuses on the migration of Ethiopian children who accompanied their parents in the migration process, and the first-generation Ethiopian children born in South Africa.
The facets of visibility and invisibility were explored within the community and the state. Also examined was the extent to which the children, under the guidance of their parents, straddle the tensions of being Ethiopian while living and making sense of their lives in South Africa. It is noted that despite the invisibility within the state owing to lack of documentation, formal education is greatly amplified, and excelling in education makes them visible in their communities and therefore looked up to as torchbearers for other children. By the same token, being firmly immersed in the Ethiopian culture amplifies their visibility and becomes a way of helping the children navigate both worlds.
This study notes how Ethiopian migrant refugee children and youth are captured by the South African Department of Home Affairs, and how unaccompanied migrant children and teen brides are self-labelled illuminating the ways visibility and invisibility are constructed and managed in the context of migration governance, with negative effects on the migrant children. Self-labelling is seen by most as a ‘way of operating’ resistance or agency (De Certeau, 1998). Concerning Ethiopian youth and children, invisibility results from inadvertent framing to enable institutionalised actions, rather than a desire to cause harm. However, in some cases, there is a deliberate intention to exclude certain groups from services, rights, or protection because those excluded are undeserving, not in need, or do not fit into (or even may lead to question) legal categories being used to define inclusion.
Visibility is noted within a structural and systemic perspective and how migrants are seen as an intractable problem to the state, hence are rendered invisible through the excessive control of documentation e.g. the birth certificate they are given. Also considered is how youth are kept on a ‘leash’ that despite their educational achievements are unable to meaningfully access common benefits within the South African system due also to lack of documentation.
It is noted that while visibility and invisibility are produced and sustained by technologies of migration governance and executed by the Department of Home Affairs on migrant children that are orchestrated to make them feel visible, the end goal seems to be a systemic and calculative way of rendering them invisible. Invisibility and visibility play a complex role for the government’s Department of Home Affairs. It is further noted that migrants have appropriated these concepts, and it has become a mechanism of freedom and agency for unaccompanied migrant children and teen brides who choose to self-label, how they want to be visible.
The case study approach used highlights not only the extent of protraction of bureaucratic capture but also shows the intentionality of the systemic structures in foreclosing children and their rights.
The findings reveal that second-generation Ethiopian children born in South Africa are born into invisibility. The invisibility of these children is not an accident but by design.
Systemic invisibility of children born in SA automatically assumes the undocumented status of their mothers irrespective of whether the father has a section 24 document, which is a Refugee Permit document issued to people who are granted asylum in South Africa for a specified period. Such invisibility is perceived as a deliberate attempt to keep these children mostly absent from the political and policy debate in South Africa. Social and psychological invisibility gives rise to self-labelling and change of age to pass for adults, hence child brides and thus girl children become invisible to social workers but visible to prospective husbands. The former creates social structures that inform categorisation, systemic invisibility, and exclusions.
This shows how the normative binary visibility and invisibility are not sufficient to understand the position of migrant children or child refugees in South Africa. The children’s visibility and invisibility are layered and should be understood from a multifocal point of view.
– Henrietta Nyamnjoh,
Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town