Kudakwashe Vanyoro

Kudakwashe Vanyoro is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa interested in migration, temporality, borders, humanitarianism and governance in Africa.

He has worked on migration and health systems as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Migration and Health Project Southern Africa (maHp) (hosted at ACMS), with a particular focus on mobility between Zimbabwe and South Africa and issues related to medical xenophobia, referral, and harmonisation of treatment protocols across the two countries. His doctoral research explored how temporal disruptions at international borders shape (im) mobile bodies’ experiences and modes of waiting by focusing on irregular Zimbabwean migrant men at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border who have arrived in South Africa but are restricted in moving further into the interior. Through this inquiry, his work reveals how waiting is a component of both governing Zimbabwean migrants as well as seeking agency through the relationship between time, space, and humanitarianism in the Zimbabwe-South Africa border regime. He is currently writing a book on governing immobilities at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border (Bristol University Press, 2023). Kudakwashe has experience consulting on issues of violence (xenophobia, violence against women and children) for the Institute for Security Studies (Justice and Violence Programme and the Violence Prevention Forum) as well as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Kudakwashe’s essay Decolonising migration research as engagement in and with time won the Mixed Migration Centre Alternative Voices Competition Prize for writers under 30.

Kudakwashe has 7 years of experience in research, research communication and capacity building in issues of labour migration, migration and health as well as xenophobia. At ACMS, Kudakwashe is responsible for stakeholder engagement in South Africa and is called upon to brief decision-makers in government and civil society, including the creation of synthesis documents and other communication products to make evidence more accessible and applicable. He also manages the centre’s overall communication strategy across various projects like maHp and Xenowatch.