Paperless

Buntu Siwisa (South Africa-at-Large & St Peter's 2000) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg. In an extract from a longer interview, Buntu describes the inspiration for his novel, Paperless, about African immigrant communities in Oxford, published in 2024 but written during his time in Oxford.

I remember having a conversation with a South African woman who was complaining about her ex-boyfriend at that time who was Ghanaian British. Apparently this guy had promised her that she was going to kind of legalize in a way through some sort of a union, a marriage or whatever. But then the guy had absconded and then she had complained about being “paperless”. I thought then that this would be a pretty good idea for the title of a novel.

This was during Blair’s time when deportations were quite common; you'd be talking to a friend on a Thursday and the following Tuesday, you hear that he's deported. I was really quite struck by the pains of these immigrants, you see them struggling, you see them hiding from the police, and you see them getting into all manner of schemes just to survive. So I thought that I should chronicle these experiences, particularly taking place in a place like Oxford where normally one would not expect to observe these kind of experiences. I felt that there's a sense of this uniqueness about the context of where this is taking place.

I wrote it during that time while I was doing my PhD and then published it much later.
I'd never heard of anyone talking about so many South Africans, and particularly Black South Africans, living and working in Oxford illegally. And of course, the best way to capture this has to encapsulate emotions, has to encapsulate feelings, has to encapsulate fears and hopes. You cannot do this in an academic paper or in a non-fiction book. So why not write a novel? 

At that time, I was actually quite busy with another novel, but it was not really getting anywhere, it was rather quite manufactured, quite convoluted. And I thought, let me rather focus on this because it is a unique experience in the sense that the type of Oxford that we are traditionally presented with is this pristine academic Oxford, particularly the Oxford before you get to the Cowley Road roundabout at the end of High Street. You have this establishment Oxford, and then you have the working class Oxford beyond the Cowley Road, which is a fascinating and very cultural vibrant Oxford. But then also you had this illegal Oxford, attracted by the manufacturing base and the trading base in Oxford. Oxford is quite different from Cambridge because Cambridge doesn't really have this strong manufacturing background that Oxford had. And I thought, so you have these three Oxfords.

What was also interesting at that time when I think back about it, was that we had pre-Brexit indications that I could see at that time, but I couldn't really interpret. Oxford also attracted a huge number of Eastern Europeans and quite a lot of the British working class were bothered by this. More bothered really than by the traditional immigrant class coming from the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, because these, in a sense, came in less working class, more commercial class kind of people ready to set up business, threatening the kind of existence that the British working class was used to.

It is partly autobiographical; one of the ways that that comes out in the novel is in the exactness of the landscape that I draw of Oxford, and the experiences. I spent quite a lot of time particularly with South African immigrants and other African immigrants. I observed a lot of their experiences living with African students, living with some Eastern European students. You get to experience the working class experience, which is quite shockingly exciting, if I may say. But at the same time, the class experience is quite deeply felt even within the immigrant population. “You are part of the intelligentsia; we are working class,” and that is a more of a marker and a definition than the immigrant status or than the racial status, There's no sense of cohesion either within the immigrant population - there are always all of these personal class divisions, ambitions that tend to separate people, which is, I suppose, quite a normal human experience.

So I bring all these concepts together: identity, belonging, exile class divisions - how establishment African Oxford and illegal Oxford coexist in one city, and how the city views all of these people.