The Sunday News
The “South Africa First” slogan with all its populist grip and political voltage is not unconnected to Donald Trump’s “America First” political catchphrase that catapulted him to power in the USA in 2016.
Far right-wing populist political reason, in the United States, Europe and the Global South is a true world phenomenon that should worry all of us. Cultic political parties chanting populist slogans about the dangers of foreigners and refugees are popping up all over the world and are rallying crowds of the poor, hungry and angry behind them.
As dangerous as these political parties and movements are their messages which are extremely popular with crowds, especially collectives of the poor and hungry that have always waited for objects to vent their anger on.
In foreigners and refugees, they find perfect scapegoats and victims that can conveniently be blamed for all the problems that confront them.
Everywhere foreigners and refugees have become political capital and there are immense political profits that are harvested from attacking them. The refugee and the foreigner have become the true anti-christ of modernity.
A threat to modernity
There was an awakening in the USA when a mob of angry right -wingers stormed the Capitol protesting the electoral victory of Joe Biden and demonstrating their support for the loser, Donald Trump.
This event was metaphoric and telling in how it happened, where it happened and why it came to be. Democracy was being rubbished and chaos elevated in the heart of a country that claims democratic exemplarity.
Right wing groups such as the Proud Boys and the Earth Keepers brandished their political teeth for the whole world to see. If the storming of the Capitol happened somewhere in Asia or in Africa it was going to be highlighted as one of the strange but normal things in the Third World. The event, for a moment, exposed the true nature of the American character of intolerance to difference.
After more than 50 people were gunned down in several Mosques in New Zealand in the not-so-distant past, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden remarked that: “There is no question that ideas and language of division and hate have existed for decades, but for their own form of distribution, the tools of organisation—they are new.”
The social media that have turned everyone into a journalist and a publisher of news and ideas have helped the spread and growth of hate.
Hate and violence against different others, foreigners and refugees, are not a threat to modernity but are part of modernity itself.
Slavery and colonialism were, after all crimes against the humanity of natives of the Global South as foreign others that were constructed as animals and legitimate victims.
The world inter-state and international system, with its maps and borders, is a system built against and not for foreign others.
Foreigners and refugees are the ultimate victims and enemies of the world-system. They are the by-products of the violence of globalisation and villagisation combined.
Foreigners and refugees now exist in what Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘state of exception,’ outside the perimeters of law, in some political no man’s land.
And that condition of theirs is tragically normalised. Leaders that come up and articulate anti-foreigners hatred become instant heroes and shoot to electoral victory.
In 2010 Viktor Orban became the Prime Minister of Hungary based on alarmist speeches he delivered sensationally claiming that Europe was being taken over by foreigners and something needed to be done urgently.
Similarly, in 2014 Narendra Modi shot to the leadership of India ridding on the populist propaganda that India was a Hindu country that needed to be defended from domination by foreigners and other strangers, even if those strangers were authentic Indians. Being a foreigner, after all, is a construct. It can be given and taken away.
The allure of nativism
It is interesting that Donald Trump a post-Second World War immigrant from German, through his father, would lead the war against foreigners in the US.
This is as interesting as that Herman Mashaba who still has family and relatives in the Tete Province of Mozambique would become the champion of “South Africa First” and watch mobs weeding out foreigners from Johannesburg, some of them Mozambicans.
There is a nativist temptation in most right-wing thinkers and activists to think that everybody else is a foreigner and not themselves.
The nativists claim authenticity of citizenship and nationality and are disgusted by aliens and foreigners yet most of them like most of us came from somewhere.
Native Americans in the USA and the Khoi and the San in South Africa are a good example of indigenous people and natives that are silenced and erased from history while foreigners fight each other on their land.
True indigenous people and natives frequently do not perform xenophobia but accommodate the arrivants.
South Africa: The right moment
Racism, tribalism, xenophobia and nativism are the true ideologies of otherness. They are joined by nationalism which frequently uses the love of the nation as an excuse to hate and harm those that are not of the nation.
In its non-racist vision that culminated in the Freedom Charter of 1955 South Africa led the whole world in its accommodation of settler colonialists that even called themselves Afrikaners.
“South Africa belongs to all who live in it” is a statement of the Freedom Charter that has no equivalent in any country in the world.
The late Desmond Tutu explained it as Ubuntu philosophy which allowed different people to live together differently but harmoniously.
Perhaps South Africa had no choice but understand itself as belonging to all who lived in it because it is a country of migrants, settlers and arrivants. The present upsurge of right-wing populism flies against everything South African in essence.
The right-wing political moment in South Africa is an imitation and reproduction of European and American xenophobia that have become a signature of the present world system.
Xenophobia like its cousin ideologies racism and tribalism are creatures of colonial borders, colonial maps and colonial divide and rule stratagems.
It is a monumental scandal for instance, to think that black Africans have stolen the economy from black South Africans.
The truth is both black African nationals and black South Africans are common victims of colonialism.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected] .
