Migrant labour, sexual networking and multi-partnered sex in Malawi

This paper shows the possible connections between migrant labour, multi-partnered sexual activity, sexual networking and the spread of AIDS in Malawi. It focuses on the economic, social, cultural and mobility factors, and their effect on the spread of the disease. Migrant labourers, like truck drivers, itinerant traders, and prostitutes, are a high-risk group both at the place of their work, and especially in their areas of origin. The paper also looks at the difficulties of research on HIV and AIDS among the returned migrants. The sensitivity of the topic, and the political nature in which it is often understood in Malawi, are factors that limit its objective and effective analysis. Another limiting factor is the consideration of human rights issues when interviewing actual or potential HIV patients. The information on which the paper is based comes mostly from field interviews with returned Malawian migrant mine workers to South Africa

Dancing toward repression: popular culture and politcal repression in Malawi, 1960's - early 1990s

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 199

Land use and extension services at Wovwe Rice Scheme, Malawi

Over the last one-and-half decades Malawi has experienced frequent food shortages due to droughts, the effects of the influx of refugees from neighbouring Mozambique, and official policies that emphasised export-oriented cash crop production. To enhance the country's food security, and to give increased opportunities to small farmers, there has been a shift to small-scale irrigation schemes in selected areas of the country. Evidence from a rice scheme in the northern part of the country suggests that small-scale irrigated operations are characterised by high turnover rates, seasonal variations in patronage, under-utilisation of the key facilities provided, and incessant political tensions. They create fissures in the social structures and in the traditional farming systems. This article thus concludes that small-scale irrigated schemes cannot be regarded simplistically as a panacea to food security and increased agricultural production at the local community levels. The argument that the small operations result in the fast delivery of services may also be exaggerated. In fact, they are quite bureaucratic, and associated with the state's patronising attitude and control of resources.

Securitisation from Below: The Relationship between immigration and foreign policy in South Africa's Approach to the Zimbabwe Crisis

The political and economic debacle in Zimbabwe has led to a large-scale influx of Zimbabweans into neighbouring South Africa. This article argues that there is a complex and significant link between the domestic response to this immigration influx and South Africa’s foreign policy towards Zimbabwe. South Africa’s foreign and security policy elite preferred to use an immigration approach of benign neglect as a tool to promote its ‘quiet diplomacy’ approach towards the Zimbabwean regime, treating the influx as a ‘non-problem’. But increased xenophobic violence, vigilantism and protests in townships and informal settlements against Zimbabwean and other African immigrants, culminating in widespread riots across the country in 2008, contributed to a change not only in immigration policy but also in the mediation efforts towards the Zimbabwean parties. I argue that this foreign policy change was pushed by a process of ‘securitisation from below’, where the understanding of Zimbabwean immigrants as a security threat were promoted not by traditional security elites but by South Africa’s marginalised urban poor