Waiting for Years and Feeling Stuck: The Burdens of Navigating the Asylum System in Contemporary South Africa

Abstract

The meaning of time, timing, and space determines whether an asylum seeker lives or dies, as these factors present threats of persecution in the home country and during flight. In South Africa, asylum seekers’ social existence encompassing their joys, fears, hopes, and aspirations hinges on time—when they arrive in the host country, when their documents are processed, when they are interviewed, and when a decision is made. It is also how asylum seekers access and interact at Refugee Reception Centres (RRCs) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). In the asylum system, time places asylum seekers in a state of permanent temporariness, in an environment characterized by the sordid experiences of refugees at RRCs and in South Africa. In this article, I analyze interviews with refugees, asylum seekers, interpreters, and Refugee Status Determination Officers (RSDOs) to understand how forms of bureaucratic violence operate through time and space, placing asylum seekers in a state of waithood and stuckness. I argue that immobilizing asylum seekers through bureaucratic violence is a political strategy that aims to frustrate, control, and contain an imagined migration problem, or to render asylum seekers illegal and expose them to arbitrary arrests. However, the forms of bureaucratic violence create opportunities for asylum seekers to exercise their resilience and agency, which are expressed in creative and imaginative ways, to either live illegally or to change their permits and remain in South Africa.