Bordered Voices: Cross-Border Zimbabwean Traders, Vernacular Community Radio and Urban Citizenship in Musina, South Africa

This article examines how vernacular community radio shapes cross-border Zimbabwean traders’ urban citizenship practices in Musina, South Africa, where migrants are central to the local economy yet marginal in formal politics. It asks how traders’ voices and listening practices configure their claims to belonging, visibility and protection in a tightly policed border town. Drawing on an integrated theoretical approach that combines urban citizenship, border studies and community media scholarship, the study analyses ethnographic observation in markets, semi-structured interviews with traders and broadcasters, and discourse analysis of selected programmes and call-ins. The findings show how programming formats, language choices and talk about “foreigners” simultaneously enable information access and reproduce bordered hierarchies of worth. Conceptually, the article develops “bordered voices” to capture uneven possibilities for mediated participation and advances communication theory on African urban citizenship by linking media infrastructures to everyday bordering.