The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Wordsmiths like all other manufacturers of weapons can be powerful as much as they are dangerous. Weapons may cause as much as mass destruction while words may cause mass deception. Whether they come as academics, journalists or artistes, traders in words can use the power and the beauty of words sometimes to conceal rather than reveal meanings.
In reference to South African contemporary history, the word xenophobia which has been deployed by journalists and scholars to describe the hatred of and attacks on foreign nationals, immigrants and refugees in South Africa does not, in several ways, capture and articulate the true experience of foreigners in South Africa. The word xenophobia, in my view, does not even describe the attitudes, psychological and sociological factors that press some South Africans to see foreigners in South Africa as enemies, pollutants, parasites and other irritants. Simply described in one dictionary, xenophobia means “unreasonable fear, distrust and hatred of strangers and foreigners.”
In the case of South Africa, I observe, there are historical, sociological, political and even intellectual factors that have been occasioned to make the fear and hatred of foreigners seem reasonable and commonsensical. In a very strong way, the ordinary South African has been conditioned to fear and hate foreigners, and socialised to explain his or her misfortunes in life as connected to the presence of other black Africans in South Africa. As it is mobilised and deployed in the media and scholarly literature, the word xenophobia exonerates the criminal, it masks rather than reveals the true cause of violence against other black Africans by South Africans. Even worse than xenophobia is the word Afrophobia which suggests that black Africans, under no influence from anyone, are low life brutes who are sold to hating themselves and each other. Briefly and quickly, this column intends to take a helicopter view of some of the causes of the hatred and attacks on black African nationals in South Africa.
The toxicity of apartheid
When it came into force with the victory of the National Party in 1948, apartheid as a system of racial segregation and a philosophy of exclusion and marginalisation had been preceded by a British system of segregating blacks by putting them into reserves. The Afrikaners erected a system of Bantustans or homelands where they were groups and located by order of their tribal and cultural identities.
That history has given South Africans a strong homeland sensibility and mentality that has not broken more than two decades after the end of administrative apartheid. Some identity and cultural friction between South Africans from different former homelands remains, and this conflictual attitude becomes even more hostile and often violent towards those blacks who come from beyond the South African borders. Further, colonial and apartheid racism of the British and the Afrikaners in South Africa classified people according to a racial and cultural hierarchy; in that stratification blacks were located at the bottom as objects next to animals. Easily, those dehumanised and animalised South African blacks take the opportunity to dehumanise and animalise foreigners as well, and feel a little more human by having their own lower beings to discriminate.
British and Afrikaner nationalisms, in their racism, cultivated an attitude of South African exceptionalism. They created a sustained illusion that South Africa is a piece of Europe in Africa. Through education and socialisation, South African blacks swallowed this sensibility of South African exceptionalism and they tend to see blacks from other African countries as people from the real dark Africa coming to the civilisation of a piece of Europe in Africa. As a result, even that South African who did not go to school feels that a high school teacher from Zimbabwe, a waitress from Malawi and a barber from Mozambique are opportunists that have stolen his job and his business opportunities. He sees his poverty and misery as directly connected to the presence of the Zimbabwean security guard by the street corner.
The economic squeeze
Apartheid turned South Africa into a cruelly and criminally unequal society. Those who have, the whites, have indeed and those many blacks who do not have access to resources and wealth are poor indeed. Separated by a thin road, Sandton and Alexandra in Johannesburg dramatise the inequality of a heaven and a real hell. The fierce scramble for the little bread that remains available for black people creates a real dog eat dog struggle.
Foreigners in this scramble are easily labelled as late comers and opportunists who are not supposed to be part of the game of life in the first place.
When in the scramble for survival these foreigners seem to win, they start earning better, buying clothes, food, homes and cars and throwing parties and speaking loud in their “inaudible” languages, anger mixes with green jealousy among the locals. Socially, these most times hard working late comers then attract and are attracted to the best available of the young men and young women of the land, leaving local losers injured and very unhappy.
The political squeeze
Throughout history, South Africa has had Koi and San nationalism, British nationalism, Afrikaner nationalism and the recent Bantu nationalism of the Rainbow Nation and Ubuntu philosophy after 1994. The British and the Afrikaner nationalists racially discriminated Africans and had no agenda for African unity as they wanted South Africa to be a piece of Europe in Africa. Sadly, the Bantu nationalists and their Ubuntu philosophy did very little political homework to cultivate Pan-African solidarity as a political consciousness among South Africans. South African exceptionalism and essentialism are still having a firm hold in the collective political psyche of South Africans.
Except briefly under Thabo Mbeki and his African Renaissance philosophy, South Africa pays lip service and plays diplomatic pretenses towards Pan-Africanism; as a result South African nationalism is a nationalism that is bereft of African consciousness but full of Eurocentric sensibility and pretensions. Other black Africans are seen from that sensibility and consciousness as aliens and strangers. The South African struggle for liberation involved sabotaging the apartheid regime and as conceptualised by the ideologue Oliver Reginald Tambo, “rendering the country ungovernable” by burning and looting, protesting and demonstrating. Sadly, two decades after supposed liberation, some South Africans still burn schools, torch lecture rooms, burn buses and trains to render the country ungovernable.
They have not unlearnt violent sabotage or learnt a sense of ownership of their own country, and burning a foreigner does not look like such a crime if burning their own country is thinkable in the first place.
A political scientist in South Africa, Michael Neocosmos concludes that xenophobia is ingrained in South African politics and law as a national culture. If as large a political figure and as an informed cadre as Jacob Zuma himself can laugh at “some roads in Malawi” on national television, what will an ordinary South African do?
The intellectual squeeze
Like all other stereotypes, it is false and unfair to believe that South Africans are lazy and that they are jointly and severally not gifted at schooling and learning. Some of the industrious and gifted intellectuals and academics are South African and black. The culture and ethic of Bantu Education that was introduced in 1953 cultivated within the South African education system an attitude to education as punishment and an unnecessary burden that has to be endured rather than enjoyed. As a result, some South Africans still look at education as a burden that was introduced by government and not their own personal and collective development. Most South African students do not have a going to school attitude but they carry a sent to school attitude. The drive for intellectual excellence is imposed by parents and society and not driven from inside the learner. African and South African history is not privileged in the curricular and the syllabi, leading to young people knowing more about Europe and America than about their own immediate history and condition.
As a result, the foreigner comes with more academic gravitas and drive to excel, eclipsing the local, getting employed, promoted and hated by locals as a thief of opportunities. At work in any industry, a South African out of a strong sense of the self-will takes a week sick leave to nurse a common cold, while a determined Malawian will keep sneezing at work but keep going. Bantu education as an imposed system created among the Bantu an attitude to work that instils a sense that all work is done under protest, even if it is one’s own work. Foreigners do it differently and win the hearts of employers. In short, what is simplistically called xenophobia and Afrophobia are not exactly that, but a culmination of historical and political processes of apartheid and racism. The fear and hatred of foreigners in South Africa is a direct result of racist apartheid.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who is based in South Africa. [email protected].
