My key informants were invaluable and disclosed information to me that I could not get from anyone else.
Kofi from Burundi is 30 years old. He arrived in South Africa in 2005 as an asylum seeker, but now holds a refugee status. Kofi enrolled at UWC in 2009, where he registered for his undergraduate degree in Nursing, in the Faculty of Community and Health Science. Between 2005 and the time Kofi joined the university, he was working as a car guard, the kind of work
12 . UG stands for Under graduate
13 PG stands for post graduate (in this case both masters and PhD students).
14 Pvt accom is used to refer to those students who do not stay on campus, and not even in off-campus university residences, rather they stay in private accommodations.
48 that many asylum seekers and refugees are involved in, as a means of life as reported by my informants. I met Kofi the first time at the Unibel train station on my way to campus from Hector Peterson Residence15. I was speaking on the phone; when he heard me speaking in my mother tongue Kinyarwanda which is similar to his mother tongue Kirundi, and he smiled.
After ending my phone call he approached me and said “amakuru” (meaning “how are you”?), and I replied. I realised he knew that I speak his language when he heard me talking it over the phone. We had a long conversation on our way to campus, and I asked him if he could be a research participant in my study and he agreed. The second time I met him was in Parow16 at the Sanlam Centre where Kofi continues to work as a car guard on weekends.
Kofi sees himself struggling to make ends meet in South Africa. He expresses this:
As a refugee in South Africa, I am useless in the eyes of locals especially at school and even at the hospitals where we do our practicals. Registering at UWC with the Refugee papers is like a sin, I always register after a struggle after missing more than 5 classes. I have no source of money; I do the car guard over the weekend to be able to finance my studies. I could not even apply for accommodation on campus even if I know that they could not consider me because of my refugee papers, I cannot afford it I rather remain where I stay, we are 3 guys in the room so we share the monthly rental fee.
Marian is another key research participant I had, a wonderful young woman from Zimbabwe. Marian is 25 years old. She came to South Africa in 2008, for the purpose of study, and enrolled at UWC in the same year and she is now in her fourth year of a Social Work degree, in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences. Marian came to South Africa knowing no one in the country and at UWC. She really wanted to pursue her studies and be able to battle the socio-economic challenges that her country Zimbabwe is facing. As a mentor at the University for the Academic Year 2011, I knew this young woman from the Peer Mentoring Programme (PMP) where she served as a senior student coordinator, although she recently told me that she now quitted that programme. In January 2011, we both participated in the PMP training session that ran for two weeks. So I had a daily contact and conversations with Marian.
15 Hector Peterson Residence (HPR) is a University off campus residence located in Belhar, an approximate of 15 minutes walk to the campus, via Unibel station.
16 Parrow is a suburb around which has a mall (Sanlam center) where most of the HPR residents go for shopping.
49 I enjoyed her way of addressing issues during our daily conversations either with me or with groups of other people. She seemed so informed about the university and its managerial system though she had been here for just three years by then. Marian had been a Mentor in her second year, a head mentor in her third year and her current position mentioned above in her fourth year that she started in January 2011. During our informal discussion she told me more about the international students‟ experiences, probably because she engaged more with mentoring fellow students and representing students in any case.
During our interviews and conversations, Marian told me that she finds life in South Africa in terms of economic matters better than in her country, but at the level of socialising, she finds South Africans so unsociable. For all her past three years she has not made a single South African friend. I observed Marian closely, especially during the workshops organised by the UWC peer mentoring programme, and noted that she always greeted me with a smile and she introduced me to a number of Zimbabwean students, who all wished to have a conversation on their living experiences in South Africa particularly at UWC. She is a very friendly person who is admired by many people because of her kindness. She involves herself in various activities on campus. However she thinks she will be leaving the country as soon as she completes her studies because she does not like the treatment that she gets from the people around her (local national students and staff, and even by officials off campus).
Tumani is another one of my key informants whose inputs contributed a lot to my research.
She is a 45 year old woman, married Kenyan, a mother of three (one girl and two boys), and lives with her husband in Mowbray, in the Southern suburbs of Cape Town. Her husband came to South Africa before her and she joined him later in 2000. Tumani registered at UWC in 2003, for her undergraduate studies in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS). She is now pursuing her Masters course while also lecturing (part-time) in the Department of Information Systems. In her view, both the studying and working environments have never been friendly ever since she came to UWC. In her department, she experiences tension from both students and staff and she has none to tell her story, except her husband when she comes home in the evenings. Soon after my final interview with her, she thanked me and frankly told me that the interviews and further conversation we had were a psychological therapy to her. She then invited me for regular visits and conversations in her office especially at lunch hour. I was able to have more discussions with her on campus; I
50 even attended her huge class twice, observing her as a lecturer, to get a sense of what really happens on the ground.
Julius is one of the inspiring participants in this study. He is from Uganda and is in his early 40s. He came to South Africa in 2000 as a political refugee. He then enrolled at UWC, where he started his undergraduate, honours, masters and he is now doing his PhD in Geography.
Julius works with the Unity of Tertiary Refugee Students (UTRS) South Africa as an advisor.
He also works for the Agency for Refugee Education; Skills Training & Advocacy (ARESTA) based in Athlone, Cape Town as an Advocacy officer. He is very familiar with refugee issues and xenophobia in South Africa. Most of the time I had deep discussions with him; he always gave me more insights on the xenophobic experiences of migrants in the country. He personally saw various cases where xenophobic violence took place, and in 2008 he was one of those who went to the mountain to just pray for the xenophobia to cease, which was an organised activity by the university, he told me.
The UWC Student Representative Council (SRC) was another crucial source of the information that I needed especially from the institution managerial side. The idea of approaching the SRC (Deputy President) derived from understanding that, as a body that represents students from diverse backgrounds, I would be in a position to obtain complaints from students and non-South African students in particular and the response thereof. This information compliments to my analysis and it is reflected in chapter four.
The SRC Deputy President I spoke to is an African international student himself. He comes from Zimbabwe, and is a student in the Law Faculty, and he joined the SRC in September, 2010. By the time of our interview he was already familiar with what is happening in the system, and he even kept on updating me about some of the issues that arose after our interview.