Browsing by Author "Mazani, Perfect"

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    Cross-border solidarity: migrant-led associations as spaces of epistemic resistance and food security innovation in South Africa
    (Scielo, 2025) Mazani, Perfect
    In the midst of closure and securitization of border regimes, climate-change displacement, and entrenched inequalities, migrant communities are not just surviving but creating new sites of resistance, creativity, and adaptation to their worlds in crisis. This paper explores how migrant-solidarity organizations function as epistemic spaces of invention and resistance in South Africa among Zimbabwean, Pakistani, and Cameroonian migrant communities in Parow Valley, Summer Greens, and Kensington (Cape Town). Based on 250 household surveys and 12 qualitative in-depth interviews, the paper explores how migrant-led social movements become sites of agency, social resilience, and resistance to marginalization habitually employed by state policy and academic scholarship. These forms of solidarity networks, which are essentially national in scope, maintain food security at a household level, access to livelihood, and socio-emotional well-being. Group savings, mutual support, and rotating credit associations enable these networks to build adaptive capacities to deal with uncertain migration status and socio-economic risk. They constitute resilient, informal social safety nets for food, income, and affective resources that go beyond what formal mechanisms can provide. By situating migrant practice and epistemologies, the paper challenges hegemonic discourses that position migrants as passive. Instead, it positions everyday solidarities at the site of politicized invention and resistance. It situates where these practices intersect with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 (zero hunger), SDG 8 (decent work), and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). It establishes a decolonial, plural migration knowledge positioning migrants as co-producers, policy entrepreneurs, and change agents.
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    Migration and hospitality in Cape Town: A case of Zimbabwean migrants and refugees
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Mazani, Perfect; Koskimaki, Leah
    Many studies on migrants and refugees have been undertaken in South Africa, with an emphasis on issues that have a detrimental impact on migrants and refugees in the country, such as xenophobic events, low wages, food poverty, and social and economic isolation. However, this study takes a different approach, examining the scope of what could be happening in terms of solidarity and hospitality for migrants and refugees in religious spaces in urban areas where they reside. This study used a qualitative research approach using data obtained from primary sources gathered by the researcher as well as secondary material from journals, libraries, reports, and book chapters. The case study area was Joe Slovo township in Cape Town. Data were obtained in phases, with the researcher focusing on semi-structured interviews with 10 migrants and refugees.