By Richard Pithouse / Globetrotter
Xenophobia is
a global crisis, but in South Africa, it takes a
particularly violent form. The day-to-day accumulation of
insult and harassment from within the state and society
periodically mutates into open-street violence in which
people are beaten, hacked and burned to death. If there is a
useful point of global comparison, it may be with the
communal riots that rip Indian cities apart from time to
time.
The state has tended to stand down while a
neighborhood is roiled with xenophobic violence. When it
does move in, after the destruction, removal of people from
their homes and killing have stopped, it usually arrives to
arrest migrants rather than the perpetrators of the attacks.
It is overwhelmingly impoverished and working-class African
and Asian migrants who must face this pincer movement from
the mob and the police.
The severity of the situation
in South Africa first came to global attention in May 2008
when xenophobic
violence, sometimes intersecting with ethnic sentiment,
took
62 lives. At the time, the country was ruled by Thabo
Mbeki, a man with deep and genuine Pan-African commitments.
But by the end of 2007, Jacob Zuma’s path to the
presidency was clear, and the ethnic chauvinism he had
introduced into the public sphere was rampant. The limited
social support offered by the state was increasingly
understood to be tied to identities such as ethnicity,
nationality and claims to be part of long-established
communities.
By the time that Zuma took the presidency
in May 2009, it was common for party officials in his home
province of KwaZulu-Natal to tell impoverished people that
they had not received houses, or other entitlements, because
of an “influx” of “foreigners” or people “from
other provinces”—a euphemism for ethnic identity.
There were cases where people, seeking the approval of
political authority, began to “clean” their communities
themselves.
Now, almost 15 years since the 2008
attacks, the situation is much worse. Most South Africans
have lived in a state of permanent crisis since the colonial
capture of land, cattle, and autonomy. But for most young
people, that permanent crisis no longer takes the form of
the ruthless exploitation of labor under racial capitalism.
Last year, youth unemployment hit 77.4
percent, the highest
out of all G20 countries. As Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian
philosopher who writes from Johannesburg, argued
in 2011, the intersection of race and capitalism has
rendered people as “waste.”
The pain of young
lives lived in permanent
suspension is often turned inward. There is a massive heroin
epidemic, depression and anxiety are pervasive, and
rates of violence, much of it gendered,
are terrifying.
In this crisis of sustained social
abandonment, there are attempts, sometimes extraordinarily
courageous, to build forms of politics around the
affirmation of human dignity. They have often met serious
repression, including assassination. But unsurprisingly,
there are also attempts to build
forms of popular politics around xenophobia, some of
them with fascistic elements. Young people, mostly men, are
summoned to the authority of a demagogic leader, given a
rudimentary uniform in the form of a T-shirt and the
opportunity to exercise some power in the name of
“cleaning” society. Perversity is dressed up as
virtue.
At the same time, all the major political
parties, including the ruling African National Congress
(ANC), have moved sharply to the right and have become
increasingly xenophobic. In government, the ANC has always
run a highly exclusionary migration regime and is now moving
to end the permits, established more than 10 years ago, that
gave around 178,000 Zimbabweans the right to live, work and
study in South Africa.
Its rhetoric has also moved
sharply to the right. The party’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe,
recently declared
“open season on all illegal foreign nationals,” adding,
“we can no longer guarantee their safety.” The party’s
policy conference in early August proposed
“a well-coordinated strategy for tracking down illegal
foreigners.” That strategy explicitly included the
recommendation that “ANC branches must take the lead in
this regard.”
Many analysts take the view that the
ANC, which has already lost control of many of South
Africa’s major cities, will not be able to win the next
national election in 2024. As the party faces the prospect
of losing power for the first time since the end of
apartheid, the temptation to scapegoat migrants for its
failures is escalating. Alarmingly, the new parties taking
the political space opened by the rapid decline in support
for the ANC are more or less uniformly forms of
authoritarian populism centrally organized around
xenophobia.
Former business mogul turned politician
Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA party, which is making rapid
electoral advances, mixes hardcore neoliberalism with
xenophobia. In 2018, Mashaba staged a “citizen’s
arrest” of a migrant and then tweeted,
“We are [not] going to sit back and allow people like you
to bring us Ebolas in the name of small business. Health of
our people first. Our health facilities are already
stretched to the limit.” This conflation of a vulnerable
minority with disease evokes the horrors of historical forms
of fascist mobilization.
Public
speech from the state, government and most political
parties routinely conflates documented and undocumented
migrants as “illegal foreigners,” “illegal
foreigners” with criminals, and, in recent days, following
a horrific gang rape on the outskirts of a decaying mining
town, rapists.
When the police come under pressure to respond to concern
about criminality, they frequently arrest migrants, often
including people with papers rather than perpetrators of
actual crimes.
The mass-based organizations of the
left, with political identities rooted, to a significant
extent, in the factory, the mine or the land occupation have
often opposed the turn to xenophobia, and it is common for
migrants to hold positions of leadership in these kinds of
organizations. But while they can provide nodes of refuge,
they lack the power to effectively oppose the rapidly
worsening situation at the national level.
With no
national force with the vision and power to offer an
emancipatory alternative to the poisonous politics,
sometimes with fascist elements, that turns neighbors
against each other, the country is on a knife
edge.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Richard
Pithouse is an academic and journalist in South
Africa. He is the coordinator of the Johannesburg, South
Africa, office of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research; the director of the
Forge, a cultural space; and the editor-at-large of Inkani
Books.
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