Introduction

Pakistan has one of the largest diasporic communities in the world, with over five million first-generation Pakistani emigrants living all over the world, and the number of Pakistani children born outside Pakistan pushing that number up to about seven million (Ratha et al. 2011, p. 3), despite the fact that Pakistan was only established as a nation in 1947 as an independent Muslim territory separate from India and the Hindu-Muslim conflict which has existed there for centuries. After the civil war in 1971, which resulted in the secession of East Pakistan into what is now known as Bangladesh, the country’s history has been marked by military rule, political instability and continuing conflicts with India. Issues of overpopulation, terrorism, religious extremism, poverty, illiteracy and government corruption have also contributed to Pakistan’s ranking as one of the top ten diasporic communities in the world.

The largest Pakistani diasporic communities are in America, Europe and the Middle East, while about 1 per cent live and work in Africa. Almost 40,000 live in South Africa, a country rich in diasporic history. While South Africa has a multitude of diasporic communities currently living here, in large part due to the Chinese, Indian and Arabic migrations of free and indentured labour during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of colonial rule, Pakistani migrancy has little to do with the historic British need for cheap plantation labour. Reasons for Pakistani emigration are more contemporary, with social issues of poor health care and educational opportunities, lack of utilities, development issues, poor political leadership and lack of security are frequently mentioned as reasons for the working class to leave Pakistan (Khan et al. 2012, p. 94). The “push and pull” syndrome of migrancy is prevalent in every country, and the subsequent negative effects of migration are well known: loss of a labour force, fewer people driving scientific and economic growth and so on. But in a country that is as underdeveloped as Pakistan, it becomes a more serious issue, as the loss of skilled and semiskilled labour as well as human capital becomes detrimental to the development of Pakistan. However, many Pakistani people are still determined to leave, and to seek better opportunities in places such as America, Europe and the Middle East, as well as South Africa and the Far East.

Pakistani people in South Africa, and in Durban in particular, have a rich and vibrant community, and it is the lives and stories of some of these people which this chapter wishes to examine. This chapter will first report the findings of each of the interviews, and then examine the common themes and shared experiences of people who come from different walks of life but who all share the same cultural heritage and national history. I will also briefly examine some of the contentious aspects surrounding the use of oral history as a methodological tool for historical analysis as well as a way of informing people about the lives and stories of ordinary historical narratives which do not conform to the “Great Man Tradition” of oral history.

The Formation and Significance of the South Asian Diaspora: The Pakistani Experience

The South Asian diaspora, which forms part of the Indian Oceans historiography, is a relatively new area of historical exploration. The study of diasporic or “deterritorialised” or “transnational” communities, that is, those communities that have originated in countries which differ from those within which the community resides and whose political, social, cultural and economic affiliations cross national and geographic borders, remained relatively unexplored. In recent years, the emerging recognition of these displaced populations has brought the study of the diaspora to a supplementary or, as James Clifford argues, potentially equal standing to the discourse of the minority group (Vertovec 1997, p. 277), with all its variables and factors—social, economic, geographic, racial and so on. “However, the current over-use and under-theorization of the notion of ‘diaspora’ among academics, transnational intellectuals, and ‘community leaders’ alike which sees the term become a loose reference conflating such categories as immigrants, guest-workers, ethnic and ‘racial’ minorities, refugees, expatriates and travellers” (Vertovec 1997, p. 277) has made the study of any single diasporic community more difficult. The lack of theoretical framework within which to frame research, as well as the relatively smaller number of academics looking at transnational groups as compared to, for example, contributions towards the discourse of minorities, leaves little room for structuring and contextualising research.

Vertovec proposes in his work that three definitions of “diaspora” can currently be applied to any historical work seeking to contribute to the narrative of displacement which is becoming increasingly common in the larger globalised community. He hypothesises that diasporas occur as a form of social displacement ; as the result of physical transplantation; as a type of consciousness, wherein the sense of self becomes displaced and often takes on a paradoxical or dual nature which is often influenced by experiences in the country of settlement; and as a mode of cultural production, as a result of multiculturalism and cross-cultural communications which result in new ethnic groups who either re-traditionalise or creolise their cultural, social and religious identities to reflect the essence of original texts and cultural practices or to engage with their present situations and localities.

Transnational migration in the context of Indian oceans historiography and particularly in reference to South Asians can be imagined and analysed as two major migratory patterns: the indentured labour and passenger Indians of nineteenth-century colonial plantations and the migrant workers attracted to urban spaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While labour migration on a large scale has occurred frequently throughout history, largely as the result of the development of an increasingly capitalistic world economy, and exacerbated by European colonial expansion, considerably more attention has been paid to the Atlantic systems of labour migration which began with African slavery. Comparatively, the study of Indian and Chinese migrants, along with the deterritorialisation of other minority communities, remains an area of limited historical analysis. While fewer South Asians were displaced by imperial expansion and indenture, and represent only a fraction of displaced ethnicities, South Asian communities are divided into their own subsets—based on communal factors of religion, caste, linguistics, geography and so on—and their impact on the formation of larger, more racially and culturally pluralistic societies, that is, their significance as a mode of cultural production, can only be understood if examined through a study of migratory intersectionality. Major features of the analysis of South Asian groups must then take into consideration not only colonial and postcolonial contexts but also “the salience of race and culture versus class, the role of race and religion as keys to identity, the scope of civil rights as the basis for ethnic incorporation, and the relationship of gender roles to class and race differentiation” (Clarke et al. 1990, p. xix).

This is not to say that the patterns of development of South Asian diasporic communities are not without their commonalities. Hans Speckmann determined in 1965, in his work on Suriname Asian Indians, several trends which could be used to analyse the trajectory of South Asian transnational groups. These five trends include (Clarke et al. 1990, p. 3):

(1) immigration (causing social disarray…); (2) acculturation (a reorientation of traditional institutions and the adoption of new ones); (3) establishment (growth in numbers, residential footing and economic security); (4) incorporation (increased urban social patterns and the rise of a middle class); and (5) accelerated development (including greater occupational mobility, educational attainment, and political representation).

While this methodological framework of analysis is not without limitations, it provides an excellent practical starting point for an analysis of any diasporic community and migratory trends which impact the development of transnational communities, being essentially an analysis of the reasons for migration and experiences of settlement, assimilation and creolisation of the religious and cultural identity, and how the life experiences of the individual and community differed in the country of origin and the country of settlement.

The importance of citizenship and religion, as well as gender, to the formation of the transnational psyche cannot be stressed enough, and much of the diasporic dialogue is centred on this sense of displacement and identity formation, which contributes to a larger understanding of the political and mobilising dimensions of societies formed under conditions which are simultaneously pluralising and isolating. In particular, the South Asian diaspora is significant for the emphasis it places on international migration as a contemporary issue, but also for the way it highlights the fragmented and different contexts, experiences and trajectories of the development of South Asian diasporic communities around the world, and emphasises the importance of the widely divergent historical contexts which shape these differing experience (Van der Veer 1995, p. 1). However, Werbner (2002, p. 119) argues that while diasporas may be heterogeneous in their geographic or cultural development, there remains a sense of homogeneity in the concerns of all transnational communities which moves the diasporic dialogue to a level deeper than the analysis of life histories as proposed by Speckmann and implies that there are larger lessons to be taken from the larger transnational experience.

Despite the fact that contemporary diasporas are marked by their heterogeneity, diasporic communities located in democratic nation-states do share a commitment to struggle for enhanced citizenship rights for themselves, and for co-diasporics elsewhere, often lobbying Western governments to defend their human rights. This may well be a defining feature of postcolonial diasporas in the West,

albeit one which is not dealt with in considerable detail in this chapter, as much of the research surrounding this phenomenon places these diasporas in first world western countries, rather than in the developing South Africa within which this chapter is focused.

The South Asian diasporic experience is one which showcases the complexities and contradictions which exist in any transnational space where constantly shifting historical contexts work to continually redefine geo-political social spaces which work towards identity formation. With major political powers such as Britain and the United States enforcing stricter immigration laws and strengthening their borders to keep illegal immigrants out, while treating legal migrant communities with suspicion and fear, particularly in a post-9/11 context, it is hardly surprising that much of the focus of diasporic discourse focuses on the relationship between these powers and the desires of transnational communities as outlined by Werbner.

Methodological Concerns and Constructions

This chapter is about crossing borders—not just the national borders which define and demarcate Pakistan and South Africa, but also those lines of division of ethics and power relations which so frequently come under fire in the field of oral history. The significance of the voice as a tool for empowerment and subsequently of oral methodologies as a tool for reconstructing historical discourses to reveal hidden narratives cannot be disregarded, for all the criticisms of oral methodology (some very valid) which exist. The origins of history lie with the oral traditions of African and Native American tribes, with the storytelling practices of cultures and communities stretching back to the beginning of human civilisation. Modern oral methodological techniques are a reflection of that ancient technique, emphasising the underlying principle of the voice as the medium of exchange and as the central way to place the individual at the centre of a narrative. Storytelling has for centuries provided people with a link to the past, a tangible connection to their ancestors and subsequently to the foundations of their communal cultural identities, and as with the oral traditions of the past, modern orality is a great tool for mapping the self in a historical sense by putting “the participant’s experiences and perspectives centre stage” (Willemse 2010, p. 1) and allowing the speaker to direct the story in a way which is not based on western academic constructs and presuppositions. Through reading and writing against the grain, biographic narrative and, by extension, oral testimonies can be analysed for their articulated points, as well as their silences, gaps and hidden meanings, giving study to not only what is said but how the past is narrated. The move away from the assessment of people as predetermined composite objects defined by the group experience into the theory of how intersections influence the self reflects a growing understanding in academia that the interrelation of external and internal factors (race, gender, class, religion, etc.) is reflected heterogeneously in different experiences, and subsequently, that a homogenisation of personal experiences into a collective identity can distort historical narratives. Traditional recordings and interpretations of history have largely favoured the conquerors and the colonisers, and methodologies and historiographical evidence preserved by the powerful as a vindication of their power. Even now, political parties all over the world would like to revise history to suit their own purposes—South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), has tried to rewrite South Africa’s resistance history into an ANC propaganda machine which places their leadership at the centre of the resistance in a way which does not reflect reality, in order to maintain popularity and power (Hyslop 2010, p. 104).

The ethics and power relations which shape these encounters are difficult to navigate, and while the goal of social history—to uncover the hidden histories of previously marginalised communities—seems like a noble one, particularly in a country with a history of blatant secrecy and disempowerment as pervasive as colonial and apartheid South Africa, at what point does this drive to uncover hidden histories become an invasion rather than a tool of empowerment? When historians need to write articles in order to support themselves, when there is a demand by universities for an ever increasing research output, the line between empowerment and exploitation of the life histories of communities for financial and academic gain becomes more difficult to define when faced with intransigence from communities and universities alike.

Social historians view their work as an attempt to find “hidden histories” which lie in the lived experiences and life histories of previously marginalised groups in an attempt to recover their agency and to democratise historical narrative, records of which have previously been used to support and legitimise hegemonic power structures. Tim Keegan, while acknowledging the potential unreliability of human memory—“given to error, misconception, elision, distortion, elaboration and downright fabrication”—also believes that it is an “indispensable source of evidence at the historian’s disposal” which shows “some of the major forces of history at work, large social forces that are arguably the real key to understanding the past” (Minkley and Rassool 1998, p. 91) as it is narrated through personal experiences in ways which can allow for a more equal understanding of history. Paul Thompson argues that history provides a focus for people to understand the “upheavals and changes which they experience in their own lives: wars, social transformations like the changing position of youth, technological changes like the end of steam power, or personal migration to a new community” (Thompson 1988, pp. 21–22). History then becomes the lodestone by which identity and community can be formed and rooted, particularly during times of social upheaval. While oral history has significant contributory capacity in areas of political and economic history, it is social history in particular which benefits from the application of oral history paradigms and methodologies to the creation of historical narratives. One of its more significant uses as a tool of change is its cross-dimensional nature: “it can break down barriers between teachers and students, between generations, between educational institutions and the world outside; and in the writing of history” (Thompson 1988, p. 22).

Without the interview to provide a fuller, richer, more comprehensive family history, much remains lost to historical understanding and what can be gleaned is often distorted, shallow and without much meaning (Thompson 1988, p. 25). That is not to say that the interview process is without problems, some of which I have discussed earlier, and which Dr. Willemse, in her work on Islamic women in Darfur, also expands on. While the demographics of her interviewees differ from mine in several ways, there are several points of intersection between her experiences and mine, not only in the interview process, but also in terms of ideology. A common criticism she has encountered comes from feminist critics of life histories who believe that the format of the biography is inherently western in nature and as a result can potentially distort a narrative since the power dynamic between the interviewer and interviewee is fraught with complexities and inequalities—the need to cross boundaries of educational, religious and cultural differences, the reliance of the interviewer on the information provided by the interviewee and the reticence of the interviewee to subject their personal narratives to scrutiny, analysis and sometimes unfavourable or misrepresentation by the interviewer. Each of these individuals has an agenda, and both must be taken into account when considering the interview as a viable resource for constructing historical narratives.

The kind of history I want to write is not hagiography or praise poetry. The kinds of historical narratives which turn the complex and complicated characters of the past into saintly icons or dastardly villains—tropes and archetypes—and which only chronicle great deeds is not the kind of history “which is respected in critical and academic circles; that kind of history is written by people on the payroll of interested parties, politician or the rich and famous; or it becomes the fuel of myopic politics of nationalists; or it has little interest outside a small circle of readers” (Waetjien 2016), a view which echoes the concerns of historians such as Hyslop (Hyslop 2010). That is not the objective of social historians and that is why I am going to talk about three people in a port city at the southern tip of Africa who are part of a larger story—a transnational diasporic community that came about as the result of blurred lines between politics and ideology, war and religion and social and economic failures in a country on another continent which have been continuing for as long as Pakistan has existed.

While this chapter is not an analysis of interview techniques, or a treatise on the viability of oral history as a historical methodology, I feel that these are important considerations for anyone who is starting out in oral historiography, as I am, and so I have provided a brief overview here of some of the considerations—positive and negative—which have shaped how I have approached this chapter. These are significant in this context because the struggle to find willing interviewees, the need for external validation from a third party and the othering one feels in a culture and society which one seeks to analyse but with which you have little association can highlight the importance of attempting to cross these self- and externally imposed barriers which can make contact difficult, and in which differences in age, religion, educational and life experiences between the interviewee and interviewer can be both daunting and jarring. The dynamic of being a supplicant and subsequently having power of representation on the part of the interviewer and the reversal of that situation on the part of the interviewee can make for a powerful point of consideration when researching for and writing a chapter.

I have interviewed, for this short chapter, two men and one woman, all of whom migrated here from Pakistan. Finding interviewees who were willing to talk about themselves was particularly difficult during this time, and it was only due to the personal recommendations of a mutual acquaintance that introductions were made and connections established. I have gathered, from my experiences, that the Pakistani community is one that is close knit, and uninterested in the questions of a history student. It is because of this that I am presented with an interesting dilemma. I am a student steeped in social history who believes in the importance of recording the narratives of ordinary people in ordinary situations as a way of empowering the marginalised and re-establishing a sense of history separate from previous “Great Man histories” which give no indication of social and cultural factors which facilitate change outside the beliefs and actions of the ‘chosen few’ who have dominated our history books for so long. But at the same time, what can an oral historian do when faced with a community that has little or no interest in becoming articles for journals, or even accessible to the probes of analysis?

Findings

The first of my interviews is with Hamza, a 28-year-old man born in 1986 who emigrated from Pakistan to South Africa five years ago (Rai 2015a). Mame, my second interview, is a 46-year-old man from Pakistan who has been in South Africa for almost 30 years (Rai 2015b). My third and final interview for this chapter is with a woman, Fatima, who came to South Africa in 1994 and has, over the years, brought over 32 members of her family to South Africa (Rai 2015c). What the rest of this chapter intends to do is first share the experiences narrated to me by each of these individuals, and then identify common themes and elements of contention within each of these, and from that, try to establish a conclusion about the lives of the Pakistani diasporic community in Durban, and how this relates to the larger transnational diaspora.

The interview schedule focused primarily on issues of demographics and the experience of migration, with several experiences being the same and many of them reflecting those of the larger diasporic community—particularly with issues in the home country. However, as there is comparatively little literature available on the Pakistani experience in South Africa, with most of the studies reflecting the lives of migrants in Europe, and particularly in Britain, framing the interviews within the larger Pakistani diaspora becomes more difficult.

Interview 1: Hamza (28)

Hamza, an unmarried 28-year-old man with no children, left Pakistan because of the violence he experienced there, particularly in light of the bombings which occurred frequently. He was and remains a practising Muslim and has experienced no changes in his religious observances. His family, with whom he lives, are also practising Muslims, despite having migrated to South Africa from different places. His grandmother is from Patala, India, and his grandfather from Amritsar. It is because of the large number of Pakistani people who originated from India that Pakistan also has a caste system, and he is of the “Arain” caste, but unlike in India, he says the Pakistani system is not graded, nor is it considered as significant to social interaction as it is in India. The Arain caste is historically exclusively Muslim, and people from this tribe are mostly found in the Punjab province. Hamza claims that his life in South Africa is easier, but without the help he received from his uncle when he arrived, it would have been difficult to start his new life due to having no foundations in a new place. His first time in a taxi by himself left him lost in central Durban—a pattern which continued several times by himself. However, he notes that he has never experienced any racial or cultural violence in town, even during the periods of xenophobic violence which made international headlines earlier this year. His migratory experiences were positive, as he felt nothing but excitement on the journey, having never been abroad before. Even the weather is considered favourable in comparison to that of Pakistan. The people of Durban, Hamza says, are welcoming, friendly and easy to communicate with—a fact eased by his attempt to assimilate with local cultures by learning local languages, including Zulu—and they do not discriminate against him for either his Islamic faith or his immigrant status. In the five years he has been here, he has had very few problems.

Interview 2: Fatima

Fatima has been in South Africa since 1994 and has over the last 20 years brought 32 members of her family to South Africa from different areas of Pakistan. Not only is she responsible for facilitating their migration, she also employs them in various capacities in her company “Vanilla Music” where she retails various musical and audio supplies. Her business is supported by her community to the point where she now has five branches open across South Africa, and she enjoys strong trade with the African community who are particularly interested in Bollywood and other Indian movies. Her children were born here, one at King Edward VIII Hospital in Umbilo, Durban, and the other at McCord Hospital. Her brother’s children are also natural South African citizens, as is his wife. Fatima describes South Africa as a welcoming place full of friendly people, and her family is much happier here than in Pakistan. Unfortunately the economic crisis of 2003 forced her to close one of the then six branches of her company, and while business is still good, she enjoys less financial success than previously. However, she still loves South Africa and while she has travelled around the country, she prefers Durban to places like Johannesburg and Cape Town. She has not learned any of the local languages but nevertheless has strong friendships within the community. One of her children is going to marry a white woman while the other is going to marry a Gujarati, and despite the religious and cultural differences, there is little friction or opposition within the family.

Interview 3: Mame

Mame is a 46-year-old married man from Pakistan who came to South Africa to escape the political instability of life in Pakistan as well as the frequent bomb attacks. He graduated from Karachi English Medium School with the equivalency of a matriculation at 20 and went to Digri College in Sindh where he graduated at 22, after which he moved here. He married at 25 to a South African woman who was of a different caste than his Pathan caste. However, while caste exists in Pakistan, it is not the mark of difference that it is in India, and is only significant in arranged marriages. However, his marriage to his wife was both arranged and a love match and so their different castes did not pose an issue. Starting over in South Africa was difficult, but his brother—who also lives in Durban—helped him with the language differences when they worked together. Mame had heard of the violence in South Africa and for several months was afraid to leave his home for fear of being killed and worked from home for that period. However, he soon found the threat of violence to be a falsehood as he has experienced no problems with personal safety in either public transport or the central business district, and he is now able to navigate his way confidently and without concern. He has experienced some “shouting” at his workplace but nothing on a social level and has friends of all races. He has, however, experienced several robberies at his place of business which have impacted poorly on his already unstable finances and which made his pattern of sending money to his family in Pakistan more difficult. His lifestyle here differs in several ways including dress and religion. While in Pakistan both were enforced more strictly, things are more liberal in South Africa, though he remains a staunch Muslim and is active in the Muslim community who helped him during the early years of his transition. His faith also helped to make his assimilation into his new community easier. He is also raising his child in the Islamic faith, performing his five Salats daily, and he prays at the mosque frequently. He has no particular preference for his mosque other than convenience. His family and business lives have now stabilised, and he enjoys the independence South Africa offers him. He says that he has every intention of staying.

Analysis

In her book Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1997), the famed women’s and gender historian Gerda Lerner talks about her experiences as a Jewish migrant and as a part of a Jewish diaspora that has for centuries been continually displaced as the “other.” In her work, she characterises the Jewish historical experience as one of the continued diasporic displacements: “What it means to be a Jew—having to look over your shoulder and have your bags packed” (Lerner 1997, p. 15). In her narrative, Lerner talks not only about displacement and diaspora but also about the different ways Jewish migrant groups integrated into and interacted with their larger communities while coping with their designation as a “deviant out group” (Lerner 1997, p. 13). She describes the process as being one of the three possible responses, and while the comparison is not exact given that she talks about Jewish immigrants and refugees while this chapter is a study of Muslim migrants from Pakistan, there remain certain similarities which are becoming more prevalent given the recent rise in rampant Islamophobia and anti-immigration positions being taken by numerous countries in today’s politically unstable and post-9/11 world.

The response patterns elucidated by Lerner are described as follows: cultural separatism, denial through assimilation and acculturation. Cultural separatism involves embracing the designation of “other” and engaging in a self-imposed isolation whereby a group associates only with its own members and equates their difference to a sense of superiority to those groups from which they are isolated. Denial through assimilation is “an effort to fuse with the majority and ultimately to give up all distinctiveness” by embracing the new culture and accommodating new values of tolerance, humanism and international multiculturalism, often at the expense of traditional practices and ideologies. Acculturation is the third and most realistic of the three responses. By adapting to the new social environment it “embraces the demand for integration in regard to rights and opportunities” (e.g. through acquired citizenship) without losing one’s group or cultural identity (Lerner 1997, pp. 13–14).

Of these forms of adaptation, the one which is most common among Pakistani migrants in Durban appears to be acculturation, with all three of the interviewees in this chapter exhibiting traits of adaption and social integration into their communities while still retaining their religious identities. While Fatima has not learned much of the local languages, she possesses a thriving business and has strong ties in the community with many friends from different racial and religious groups. Similarly, both Hamza and Mame have integrated into their communities and embraced their South African identities, and both have actively tried to learn local languages. All three retain a strong Muslim identity, and Mame in particular indicates that he is still an active member of his Islamic faith, tying his religious identity very strongly with his identity as a transnational migrant. The close-knit relationships that these individuals have with their families both here and in Pakistan, with all of them either sending money to family there or finding ways to bring family members to Africa and then helping them in making the transition a success, are a clear indication of their identifying as South African Pakistanis rather than giving up their transnational identities in favour of total assimilation. In the formation of this new transnational identity, we see combinations of the elements of Vertovec’s (1997) definitions of diaspora: physical transplantation between Pakistan and South Africa; a social recombination of Pakistani and South African culture seen literally through the intercultural, racial and intercaste marriages which the interviewees spoke of as well as their own acceptance of South Africa as their home and the place where they build their communities; and as a mode of cultural production wherein rather than keeping to the traditional dress, caste and social roles of Pakistani Muslims they embrace the more liberal South Africa. For example, Fatima is a businesswoman and a matriarch in her family, many of whom she is responsible for bringing to South Africa, rather than a housewife, and Hamza has been able to broaden his identity and explore the creation of his dual identity as the result of his transnational experiences. Even something as simple as Mame’s embracing a new style of dress which differs from the stricter Pakistani code is indicative of the formation of a new identity which goes beyond that of a Pakistani migrant in South Africa and gives rise to the idea that factors which influence the formation of diasporic communities differ according to different geographical and historical contexts, as outlined by Werbner (2002). Both Hamza and Mame have praised the weather in Durban as being preferable to that of Pakistan, and it is statements like these which can contribute to a more nuanced and personalised understanding of diasporic communities. This both goes beyond and contributes to the understanding of a transnational discourse in that it supports the idea of heterogeneous factors influencing the creation of differing diasporic communities while also giving a sense of the scope of multiplicity of the factors that can influence the developmental trajectory and historicity of a community. The idea that “universal notions of culture and self, fail to explain the challenges accompanying the acculturation process” (Bhatia and Ram 2010, p. 226) in an increasingly transnational and globalised world where local and global identities and cultures are merging to form new zones of contact wherein diasporic communities interact according to different developmental trajectories is deeply significant to scholars who study the developmental psychology of diasporas through a “dynamic, multi-voiced and a dialogical notion of self” (Bhatia and Ram 2010, p. 226), particularly when coupled with Speckmann’s trends of the trajectories of Asian transnational groups.

One of the reasons I have included a framing of the social integration of these individuals in the context of Lerner’s discourse of displaced othering, rather than focusing solely on the theories of Vertovee, Peach, Clarke (1990) and Werbner (2002), is the similarity between the anti-Semitic treatment of Jewish migrants and the persecution faced by Muslims in the wake of Islamophobia. While this treatment of Muslim migrants is not the focus of this chapter—given that South Africa is more prone to attacks of xenophobia than any particular anti-Islamic sentiment and that none of the people I have interviewed have experienced any racial or religious violence—it is still a significant factor to consider when engaging with the larger discourse of displacement and transnationalism, and becomes significant when considering the direction in which academic discourse about diaspora and Pakistan has gone.

Conclusion

I have spoken earlier in this chapter about the dearth of discourse on South African Pakistani migrants, and perhaps this can be attributed to the late inception of Pakistan as a country and that many of these migrants are the first generation of a relatively recent diasporic community. However, this then arguably opens up the opportunity to study—through the use of oral methodology and life histories—how and why these transnational communities engage with their larger societies and explore the formation of a dual consciousness and its impact on the developmental psychology which impacts on the formation of not only the diasporic narrative of the migrant group but also the psyche of the migrant and how the individual experiences of Pakistani migrants in South Africa and migrants as a whole are able to acculturate themselves to new communities and navigate identity creation. I feel this will become increasingly relevant as new global and historicised challenges of race, religion and culture continue to emerge and evolve as the borders which traditionally demarcate identity-nationalism, race, religion and so on are blurred and crossed. In using the life histories of three ordinary first-generation Pakistani migrants in South Africa, I have attempted to contribute towards the idea that diaspora and diasporic communities can impact deeply on how we understand and interact with an increasingly globalised society.