To Stay Here Is to Suffer, to Return Home Is to Perish - Entangled Zimbabwean Migrants, Precarity, and the Crisis of Return in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract This paper examines the lived experiences of Zimbabwean migrants in post-apartheid South Africa, focusing on the crisis of return, identity negotiation, and precarious citizenship. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted among Zimbabweans in various cities in South Africa, the study reveals a striking condition of double disenfranchisement: migrants are rendered precarious in South Africa’s increasingly xenophobic environment while simultaneously excluded from political and economic recovery in Zimbabwe, a state marked by collapse and authoritarian stagnation. Across interviews and observations, a recurring refrain echoed – “I want to go back home” - capturing both an emotional longing and a political impossibility. Framing the analysis through Judith Butler’s theory of precarity, Hannah Arendt’s notion of statelessness and the “right to have rights,” Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, and transnational migration theories (Glick Schiller et al.), the paper argues that Zimbabwean migrants inhabit an extended condition of existential suspension. While many express a strong desire to return “home,” structural realities - hyperinflation, political repression, and a failing economy - make this return unattainable, producing a temporal limbo of deferred futures. Older, more established migrants and newer arrivals experience these dynamics differently: the former leveraging fragmented social capital accumulated over time, the latter facing deepening economic exclusion and systemic harassment. Additionally, aspirations to migrate onwards to Europe, Australia, and Canada are increasingly visible, reflecting emerging South-North migration imaginaries shaped by chronic precarity and disillusionment with South Africa’s post-apartheid promises. This Zimbabwean migrant experience highlights broader postcolonial crises of citizenship and belonging in Africa: neither fully included in host societies nor securely anchored in their countries of origin. I argue that sustainable solutions to forced migration must not only reform host country policies but also demand urgent political and economic reconstruction in sending countries like Zimbabwe. Without restoring democratic governance, stabilizing economies, and investing in human development, sending states will continue to externalize their crises, forcing citizens into precarious exile.