‘Performing Diversity’: Everyday social interaction among migrants from the Great Lakes Region and South Africans in Cape Town

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of everyday social interactions among and between migrants from the Great Lakes Region and South Africans, who live together as neighbours in a post-apartheid South African community. It focuses on the ways through which migrants who are diverse among themselves forge social relations with one another and with the South Africans in an urban township of lower middle class setting. It is an ethnography that interrogates the understandings of belonging and difference in concrete arenas of interaction in these two groups, and how they both mediate their diversity encounters in everyday life.