Abstract
Questions about gender and sexuality that were central to the colonial project where women
negotiated their connection to the nation through liaisons with men continue to be central to the
process of building postcolonial African states. The establishment of many African flag-democracies
for instance has been embedded in dense body politics that often exclude genders and sexualities
categorised as counter to citizenship. Exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa is evident in how black
lesbians and queers are ‘othered’ for being sexually different. Consequently, one’s gender, sexual
and racial identities serve as a source of violence and constant negotiation for belonging to this flagdemocracy
irrespective of the progressive constitution. The feeling of not being a ‘proper’ citizen is
equally evident in how nationals from the northern part of South Africa are in some spaces
constructed by fellow citizens as bodies that do not belong. These polarised constructions generate
outsider identities that are informed by notions of ‘inferior pigmentation and language’ vis-à-vis
‘dominant ones’. Such dichotomised images of citizenship are reinforced by ever-evolving grammas
and vocabularies about people foreign to South Africa, whose bodies and privacy warrant intrusion in
very violent nationalised, racialised, gendered and sexualised ways as evidenced by the 2008 and
2015 xenophobic attacks. Informed by my intersecting positionalities as a black foreign national who
has lived in South Africa since 2008, the paper analyses Zimbabwean migrants’ experiences of
constantly negotiating the politics of national belonging and difference in South Africa that emerged
during fieldwork engagements in Johannesburg between 2008 and 2015. The paper interrogates
subtle and overt institutionalised and everyday technologies of difference that not only force foreign
nationals to live through heavily patrolled black bodies marked as different within specific temporal
landscapes, places and spaces but are also core to the xenophobic grammar that frames
Zimbabweans as bodies that destabilise the very foundation and survival of the nation.