The (mis)Representation of “Illegal” Migrant Life: Counter-narratives of Undocumented Zimbabwean Migrants in South Africa

Migration is often framed as a journey of opportunity, but for undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa, such imaginaries are undermined by the structural precarity of everyday life, marked by insecure work, deportability, and social exclusion. This paper examines how migrants strategically navigate this contradiction by constructing counter-narratives of success to maintain kin recognition and social legitimacy at home. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in eMalahleni, the study explores how undocumented migrants selectively curate their self-presentation through aesthetic displays of fashionable clothing, fancy gadgets, and social media performances, while suppressing accounts of hardship. These sanitized accounts, often embellished with falsehoods, challenge the dominant discourse of migrant failure, exemplified by the metaphor of nhava izere mhepo (a bag full of air), and rework the moral economy of migration within transnational kinship networks. This paper argues that these practices of (mis)representation are not merely deceptive but constitute relational strategies of dignity preservation, status work, and affective labour under conditions of legal and economic marginality. By tracing how migrants manage visibility to audiences back home, the paper contributes to wider debates on undocumented migrancy, moral economies, and the politics of self presentation in post-apartheid South Africa.