Policing the pandemic: migrants in South African cities during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

On March 5, 2020, South Africa recorded its first official case of COVID-19 when a South African returning from holiday tested positive. The number of excess deaths is over 300,000. The policy response to the pandemic is regarded as among the most draconian in Africa. In 2020, the government imposed a stay-at-home lockdown for 100 days, which was enforced by armed police and the army. Breaching the lockdown was a criminal offence and arrests were widespread. By April 2021, over 400,000 had been apprehended. In his 2021 book, One Virus, Two Countries, Steven Friedman suggests that government containment and punishment measures had a negative impact on the country's urban poor, a population that includes many internal migrants, several million international migrants, and refugees. This chapter discusses South Africa's militaristic policy and policing response to the advent of COVID-19, and how this impacted migrants in the urban formal and informal economy.