Earlier this month the ANC issued a discussion document outlining its vision for achieving peace and stability. Surprisingly, the department of home affairs is slated as the campaign’s standard-bearer and immigration control as a top priority.
The government may struggle to sell a plan that entrusts our security to a notoriously corrupt and inefficient — if somewhat improved — department. But few will dispute the government’s logic: controlling people’s movements and limiting outsiders’ economic activities are critical steps in promoting equality, health and security.
On this the ANC is not alone. At a recent book launch in Cape Town, the Democratic Alliance member responsible for higher education and former head of the immigration advisory board, Wilmot James, fretted that immigrants were placing an “unbearable strain” on the country.
It is hard to imagine how roughly 4% of the population — that is, those who are foreign-born — can possibly be responsible for the 30% unemployment, as well as homelessness, graft and poor services.
Nonetheless, our leaders have spoken: we must severely curtail people coming in and what they do when they get here.
Xenophobic attacks
The anxiety over migrants and immigrants was laid bare in the May 2008 “xenophobic” attacks and the government’s tepid response to them. Most of us remember the violence that killed more than 60 people and displaced about 100 000 largely as an anti-immigrant melee. A closer look at the record reveals that a third of those killed were South Africans; South African citizens killed because they, too, were outsiders — people from the wrong ethnic group, party or place.
Although we may feel — understandably, if wrongly — that immigration is likely to undermine South Africa’s economic aspirations, how do we make sense of these deep internal divides?
Whether it is foreigners booted out of houses in Alexandra, Pondos from the outskirts of Durban, or more subtle forms of exclusion in the country’s wealthy suburbs, large parts of the South African population remain uncomfortable with and fearful of outsiders in their midst. Others simply feel overwhelmed, a sentiment expressed in Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane’s State of the Province address when she spoke about the overwhelming strain of “health migrants” from other parts of the country.
Some progress has been made in curbing the most brutal attacks against non-citizens, but as long as we continue to view outsiders — both foreign and domestic — as inherently threatening our status, opportunities and institutions, street-level violence will continue.
Apart from closing the borders, what is the government doing to ease the tensions associated with the country’s endemic socioeconomic diversity? After nine drafts, the department of justice’s action plan to counter racism and xenophobia still fails to grapple with the foreigners living, working or seeking protection in South Africa. In fact, the most recent draft drops any discussion of xenophobia altogether. Moreover, it all but ignores the deep divides over ethnicity, gender, religion and politics that are reflected in people’s daily lives — in the townships and even in the boardrooms.
In overlooking these divisions, we have created a comprehensive narrative of transformation that, for all its grandeur, is far too narrow. Whether talking about labour, education, health or housing, the government talks about narrowing gaps. For the most part, the gap they mean is between a relatively homogenous black majority and the country’s historically advantaged white population. But this is not the gap that most directly affects most South Africans and framing it in this way is cause for concern.
Inequality between groups
For example, by continuously comparing black and white, we tend to overlook the inequality within these groups. If nothing else, we must understand why some of the previously disadvantaged — not just tenderpreneurs — are doing well, how we might replicate such successes and eliminate what holds others back. Social cohesion has become largely about race and immigration control when there is equally important work to do in countering inequity among the country’s black majority. These divisions may be apartheid by-products, but they did not disappear when Nelson Mandela took office.
So where to for the next century? At its founding 100 years ago, Pixley ka Isaka Seme dedicated the South African Native National Congress to all races and nations, many of whom “had been devastated by the demon of inter-tribal strife and jealousy”. One hundred years later, we have reason to ask whether we have exorcised that demon or merely traded it for another.
We will only be able to address discrimination, violence and in-equality when we reveal the dangers of dialectics — deserving disadvantaged blacks versus overly privileged whites, or South Africans versus foreigners — and build institutional structures that erode firm group divisions and promote alliances across boundaries.
This requires more than exhortations to social cohesion and borderline sabre-rattling. This will be a complex and difficult journey requiring care and balance. But it is a project whose time has come, in this year, when the ANC pays tribute to its founding vision.
Loren B Landau is director of the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University in Johannesburg. He is editor of Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa, published by Wits University Press