Cape Times: SA citizens swept along by politics of fear

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more xenophobic attacks predicated
SA citizens swept along by politics of fear

June 03, 2010 Edition 1

Michael Neocosmos

A few weeks ago it was announced that Tanzania, one of the poorest countries on the African continent, had granted full citizenship rights to 162 000 refugees from Burundi who had fled their country 38 years ago. In contrast, in South Africa, provincial police commissioners in a briefing to Parliament in March invented fanciful stories regarding three million illegal immigrants in Gauteng who are apparently stretching police resources, thereby constituting a threat to security.

How can a poor country like Tanzania conceive of African foreigners as potential citizens, and a rich one like South Africa can only think in terms of an “Afrika gevaar”?

Can this fear be seen as an indication of a “neo-apartheid” – a form of racial and ethnic exclusion – which, while exhibiting some similarities with the version we have tried to overcome, is not simply a left-over but a new product of post-apartheid society? How can nationalism, an emancipatory ideology in the context of a struggle for freedom turn itself so rapidly into a chauvinistic one which expresses a denial of freedom?

The answers to these questions are anything but obvious or easy, but we need to address them. According to the Human Rights Commission, we could soon be faced with another series of xenophobic attacks when South Africa is no longer basking in the spotlight after the excitement of the soccer World Cup has abated.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported that the Red Ants vigilante group is being deployed by the Gauteng provincial department of transport to “beautify” the roads around Ellis Park stadium by violently removing “foreigners”. One of the Red Ants members was quoted as saying: “It’s our land and we have the right to help the authorities move them on. If the municipality asks us to destroy these cockroaches, then we’ll do that and flatten their homes to dust.” But they have no such “right”; under the law what they are doing is illegal. The language of the cleansing of cockroaches is identical to that used in Rwanda in 1994 and elsewhere.

We should also know, as the evidence for this is overwhelming, that not only are the police inflating numbers to suit their purposes (at most, foreigners amount to little more than 580 000 in Gauteng, according to calculations by Wits University’s Forced Migration Studies Programme), but also that suspected foreigners are a source of easy income for cash-strapped policemen. This is both because vulnerable African migrants – legal or illegal – are used as “mobile ATMs” and fleeced of their money regularly through rackets set up by all-powerful cops, but also because police officers can thereby easily increase their tally of arrests on which their promotion depends. The law which has not broken with a tradition of ethnic and racial exclusion, the police, the Department of Home Affairs whose border immigration controls are notoriously corrupt and whose processing of applications for asylum are notoriously arbitrary, along with parastatal agencies such as the Red Ants and the Lindela Detention Centre all add up to an overwhelming state apparatus of oppressive controls on migrants whose attempts to earn a living has thus been criminalised.

This does not mean that there are no professional people working for these institutions, but simply that a culture of xenophobia predominates. Particularly after May 2008, it has been the poor who have been blamed for acts of violence against foreigners. But, reports suggest that they have often been incited by local power brokers, councillors and other community “strongmen” keen on exploiting fears that foreigners are “stealing” jobs or houses and even “our freedom”, for their own power needs. Blaming the poor has become a regular pastime today when service-delivery protests are seen as an expression of community frustration with the absence of resources; yet, at the same time it is notoriously the case that the police find it easier to police and harass the poor often in conformity with the wishes of local and regional politicians, than to police crime. criminals are often armed and able to resist; the poor are not. In poor communities, police are less the agents of the law and more the agents of crude political power.

Xenophobia is, however, not a disease of the poor alone, nor is it an effect of poverty or of “lack of service delivery”. Tanzania is a much poorer country than South Africa. Even if we were to agree that there is a “culture of violence” in South African townships inherited from apartheid, why should the target of that violence be those deemed to be foreign among the poor? I say “deemed to be”, as simple prejudice has been the determinant of “foreignness” with the result that many South Africans who “look foreign” have also been targets of violence.

In any case, why are the poor not targeting other sectors of the population, such as the rich? Or Whites?

The answer is connected to the fact that the politics of nationalism in this country have been oriented since the early 1990s around a discourse for which “foreigners” are understood to be outsiders who are a threat, who come to take – not contributors who come to give and provide – they are thus to be feared. It is related to the fact that a stress on political nativism and indigineity has been a dominant way of accessing economic resources. Finally, it is also linked to the pervasive South African view inherited from white colonial racism that this country is superior to the rest of Africa.

The actions of the police and other state agents are governed by fear, but this fear has its sources far beyond the police force and other organs of state. It has its roots in the politics of the public domain, in the manner in which non-South Africans have been referred to, talked about, addressed in public discourse, interpellated in legislation and mentioned in the press.

Already 10 years before the pogroms of 2008, Human Rights Watch had noted that “South Africa’s public culture has become increasingly xenophobic, and politicians often make inflammatory statements that the ‘deluge’ of migrants is responsible for the current crime wave, rising unemployment, or even the spread of diseases”. It continued by noting that such prejudiced remarks were common among politicians of all shades of opinion, and that a public climate was thus being created in which the abuse of foreigners was seen as legitimate. To the verbal and physical abuse perpetrated by state power were added exhortations to South African patriots to root out illegal foreigners in their midst, before this was stopped with the removal from office of former Home Affairs minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi in 2004.

At the Lindela detention centre, reports by NGOs have demonstrated the widespread use of beatings, extortion and arbitrary punishments being meted out on foreigners waiting to be deported without many perpetrators being held to account.

The regular statements in the press notoriously associating “illegal immigrants” with crime along with fanciful statistics regarding immigration, have also abounded although most of the press has exercised some restraint since 2008.

More sober assessments have shown that the majority of foreign Africans are legally in the country and do not propose to stay; hence, they are for the most part legal migrants and not illegal immigrants. The press, of course, switched from talking about “Nigerian drug dealers” in the 1990s to “Zimbabwean refugees” in the 2000s as that country imploded. But, in all cases, such migrants were said to be a drain on our resources and social services without a shred of evidence to that effect ever being adduced.

The use of nativist and indigeneity claims to access resources for accumulation is a post-apartheid phenomenon. Only those with genuine claims to indigeneity – those with a particular phenotype – see themselves as entitled to have access to state resources for accumulation.

As Frantz Fanon recognised in the 1960s, this phenomenon was common among the rising bourgeoisie of newly independent African countries who wished to acquire the resources of departing Europeans by emphasising their racial or ethnic attributes.

Rather than following the Chinese example of subsidising and supporting small economic enterprises, the post-apartheid state chose to understand accumulation among the previously disadvantaged in racially exclusive terms thus leading to a group of well endowed, unproductive “tenderocrats” steeped in corrupt practices with connections to the state.

As a result, a tedious discourse on who is to be considered the more “native” has been pervasive in order to legitimise accumulation by some and the exclusion of others such as South Africans of Asian origin. As Fanon again recognised, this influences the small businessmen and unemployed who “start a fight against non-national Africans… these foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked”.

At the same time, it seems that the majority of South Africans do not visualise their country as part of the African continent. The arrogant exceptionalism of most South Africans vis-a-vis the rest of Africa is notorious. The continent is apparently a backward place of under-development and failed states, a place to be deplored, acted upon and visited by tourists in search of the authentic.

Apparently, most of its people wish to come to live in South Africa only due to their terrible living conditions – according to Home Affairs officials, anyway. If one asks Africans, they say that they don’t want to stay; they want to get out as soon as they are able.

The contempt towards Africans permeates public institutions of all kinds as well as many ordinary families. The African is the other; the poorer relative who is hanging at the door and who will do anything to steal the fruits of “our” democracy. Never mind the sacrifices made by the continent for South Africa to be free and the murderous raids of the SADF. Of course, again, there are exceptions, but the general orientation of popular culture is clear.

South Africans, according to attitude surveys, are among the most xenophobic people in the world independently of race, ethnicity, class, age and any other social variable.

Xenophobic racism has been produced since the 1990s as a politics of fear. The parameters of political thinking concerning the nation are heavily influenced by this state discourse. Such a state discourse in South Africa has continued reproducing and expanding apartheid prejudices, and people for the most part have simply followed.

How long will it take South Africa to catch up with Tanzania?

Professor Neocosmos is senior research fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. He is the author of From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa published by Codesria Press in Dakar, Senegal, 2010.