Responses to South African Xenophobia: Ten Arguments
1. The responses to the horrendous attacks on foreigners tell more about the South African national consciousness than the events themselves. The empty condemnations, the denial of xenophobia in favor of crime, the blame of victims and convoluted excuses of perpetrators are almost worse than the official silence and long-standing passivity about well-known xenophobic attitudes. Serious media and academic explanations of the hate-crimes are far too rational to grasp underlying psychological causes.
2. The very presence of thriving Somali shops insults unsuccessful, impoverished township dwellers. They endure daily exposure as failures. Envy breeds resentment. Perceived humiliation fuels extreme nationalism. Low self-esteem searches for enhanced identity. Powerless people empower themselves by attacking those below them. While the ruling party enriches itself by looting the state, the forgotten slum dwellers claim their share by collecting the crumbs from the vulnerable amakwerekwere.
3. Last year, the former South African Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, at the US-Africa Leaders Summit, declared South Africa "a moral superpower", able to teach the world the way Nelson Mandela managed conflict resolution. In this view, liberated citizens cannot be xenophobic if the image of a glorified rainbow nation is to be salvaged. How will the Soweto events, together with all the other maladies, affect the standing of the country? In a 2013 BBC poll of 22 countries tracked, the ‘moral superpower' ranked in the lower half with a 35 percent rating of "mainly positive" and 30 percent "mainly negative".
4. Hunger and poverty do not drive frenzied youngsters to rob stores. Drug addiction does. Most looters own cell phones and stealing airtime was a priority. The breakdown of family cohesion in mostly fatherless households has eliminated shame and neutralized moral inhibitions. Township teachers have utterly failed to install political literacy about the reasons for migration. Foreign teachers could function as role models, besides raising standards. However, the self-declared Marxist-Leninist teachers union (SADTU) does not welcome cosmopolitan non-nationals in its ranks, let alone be lectured on political education.
5. Competition for jobs by unemployed youth amounts to a cliché. Looting school children are not yet in the job market. Neither does alleged inequality between foreigners and locals explain the antagonism. Somali tenants mostly start from scratch with loans from relatives; they frequently employ locals; they extend credit to customers and pay rent on time. But they work longer, harder and sell cheaper, due to a small profit margin and "collective entrepreneurship"
6. Why can't locals emulate the foreigners and learn from them? Why can't they also buy wholesale? ‘We don't trust each other', answered many local respondents in our research. In an atomized space of marginalized people, mutual trust of responsible citizens amounts to a delusion. The very notion of community is problematic. At the most, an exclusionary solidarity exempts local shops from being looted, but not equally poor blacks from outside being attacked.
7. Some pundits have criticized ‘Home Affairs' for extending work permits to Zimbabweans, when so many locals are unemployed. Not only are the foreigners preferred by employers, because they go the extra mile, but how else could they survive when they have to fend for themselves? Pretoria should be criticized for supporting a tyrannical regime in Harare, not for easing the burden of their escapees. In contrast to the migrants in Europe, most Zimbabwean refugees would return home, if conditions were to improve.
8. A sad indictment in the xenophobic drama must be reserved for the police management. The commentator Justice Malala cites incontrovertible evidence: "The police, in large numbers, are aiding, abetting and even partaking in the looting", but mostly looking away. City Press quotes a story of police, ordering people to queue up to "loot in an orderly manner" by entering a shop four at a time. However, police merely reflect the attitudes of the population at large. Their training has not incorporated any lessons from the 2008 xenophobic outbreaks.
9. Victim blame abounds. Ignoring the attacks against foreigners, Home Affairs announces that their legal status would be investigated. Adding to the moral panic around outsiders, a ruling party leader blames weak immigration laws and their potential to give rise to terror organizations, such as Boko Haram.
The humiliating treatment of refugees by Home Affairs officials in the renewal of permits reinforces for an already suspicious population the need to guard against outsiders. Taxi drivers tell you a widely held belief that most crimes are committed by foreigners. Yet the government has never published statistics about national and non-nationals convicted.
10. Compared with the dramatic rise of xenophobia in Western Europe, South Africa differs in two respects: First, in Europe antagonism against foreigners is mobilized from above by populist demagogues; in South Africa the resentment originates from below and is condemned by all political leaders as ‘shameful'. Second, Islamophobia and anxiety about an incompatible religion plays no role thus far. Muslim Somalis are not attacked for undermining an entrenched homogeneous culture. The South African divided society has long learned to co-exist with diversity. That is the main hope to overcome xenophobia.
Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, two Canadian academics from Vancouver, recently published "Imagined Liberation: Xenophobia, Identity and Citizenship in South Africa, Germany and Canada" (Stellenbosch: SUN Press). Contact: [email protected]
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