Xenophobic South Africans base their beliefs on apartheid-like differences such as people from elsewhere on the continent have darker skins. Photo: Photo: Hanna Brunlof (file)
The rising xenophobic violence and exclusion of Africans from outside of South Africa is an emotive issue. In the “Trumpification” age we live in today, truth-telling and evidence are secondary or even irrelevant and loud, smart-sounding opinions rooted in lies and misinformation spread online.
Some have used statistics to show that foreigners make up roughly 4% of our population, which is significant, but not enough to account for our rising unemployment and difficulty in accessing social services such as education and healthcare. The cause of this is rooted in our incomplete revolution, in coloniality, where resources and land were left in the hands of the white oppressor in exchange for peace. It is rooted in corruption and poor governance.Yet many bury their heads in the sand and opt to believe foreigners are our single greatest problem.
Many others have turned to history as a reminder of how African countries, in different ways, aided our armed struggle and apartheid resistance, and warned that we might need the continent but we will have alienated these countries if South Africans continue down the path of xenophobia.
Others have turned to politics and economics to show us the importance of having strong economic ties with other African countries to ensure growth and development.
We saw this in part historically with the European Union and we see it today with the rise of Asian markets like China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others. Some of the pluralistic approaches to the rapid growth of many of these Asian markets is in relaxing borders to enable the flow of people, ideas, technology, money and resources.
But South Africans continue to respond by fighting for the isolating barriers put up by apartheid to strengthen their inhumane policies.
Structures such as Operation Dudula and March on March seldom march to white schools in the suburbs to demand that white people prove their citizenship and belonging. They do this in predominantly black or mixed areas, applying a self-imposed apartheid-like dompas system that limits black people’s movements.
They ignore the fact that many South Africans themselves are undocumented because of historical and contemporary issues and struggles related to accessing important services from the home affairs department. They base many of their strategies on hateful stereotypes such as the belief that foreigners are darker than South Africans, cannot speak South African languages or they pronounce specific words differently.
The ideas around what it means to be South African are usually linear and often prioritise Nguni culture and languages. So, if you are not a light skinned South African of Zulu/Nguni descent and don’t have your ID with you, you find yourself at risk of being harmed or being denied important services like healthcare in an emergency.
We are too quick to forget the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic; illness does not care who you are, what race or nationality you are. It spreads and places all of us at risk. Denying foreigners access to healthcare, while many of them live in overcrowded black townships, puts black South Africans in harm’s way and can lead to a public health crisis in areas where people have long struggled to get healthcare.
Silence and inaction of our leaders
Noticeable in this whole mess is the silence and inaction of our leaders. The violent and harmful actions of South Africans can in part be explained by their desperate state stemming from poverty, unemployment and violent crimes experienced today. The tensions can in part be explained by a lack of adequate awareness of the diverse historical and contemporary importance of the continent and our neighbours for our own growth and development. The overwhelming silence of our leaders is hard to make sense of.
Many of these leaders were themselves either born or raised in exile or started their own families outside of the country and were the direct beneficiaries of the kindness and sacrifice that many African countries showed us during apartheid.
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leaders remain among the few leaders who condemn this violence and call for a united Africa. It is believed this stance even cost EFF supporters in the 2024 elections, but they still continue to hold this important ethical stance, while more prominent leaders shy away from the issue.
In this new climate of having to prove “South Africanness” and therefore belonging, many of them would have their belonging questioned. But rather than call out the violence and put protections in place, while creating awareness on diverse complexities that create “South Africanness”, our leaders are silent.
And, perhaps more startling, is that our government is partly made up of a political party that ran its election campaign on the hatred of foreigners. Including political parties such as the Patriotic Alliance in governance has helped formalise fringe ideas such as the “abahambe” slogan, which was a chant directed at Africans from other countries. The threats have materialised, and foreigners are having different kinds of violence enacted on them.
Afrophobia protects colonial borders
Many social commentators warned that the xenophobic utterances embedded in slogans such as “abahambe” coming from the Patriotic Alliance leader, of Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie, are deeply rooted in anti-black hate. The TikTok accounts of creators such as: Nikita Lexi, Tara Roos, Samantha Jansen, Kaapie in Korea, Romantha Botha and many others, have provided interesting and important context and caution with their historically rooted, evidence-based truth-telling that speaks to a plethora of contemporary South African issues, including race. McKenzie has now recently come under fire for posting old racist and sexist tweets, where the biggest frustration is over his repeated use of the “k-word”.
The minister’s actions raise a lot of questions about the intersecting links between Afrophobia, tribalism, hate towards blackness and self-hate as a psychosocial condition plaguing many black people and people of colour, especially in South Africa. What we learn from the minister’s tweets is that Afrophobia is often used to mask racism. It is concerning for a government minister to hold such views, while responsible for providing services to the predominately black people, and artists.
What might be perhaps the most damaging and harmful to us, as black South Africans, is that our Afrophobia disconnects us from valuable, self-affirming spiritual, social, historical, ecological and economic ties we have with the African continent. We protect the colonial borders that tore our families and cultural groups apart. Our hate is a worship of the colonial shackles that dismembered our ancestors, histories and experiences and that still stifle us today.
Dr Nombulelo Shange is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State.