Xenophobia as Racism: The colonial underside of nationalism in South Africa

by Dr William J Mpofu, Wits University

The present article fleshes out the observation that in actuality what is circulated in journalistic and scholarly literature as xenophobia in South Africa is systemic and structural racism that is rooted in colonial and apartheid history.

As such the term xenophobia, as it denotes the fear and also hatred of foreign others by native nationals of South Africa, tends to conceal rather than reveal that systemic and structural constructs of racism at a world and local scale produce and locate black Africans of other countries in South Africa as alien and foreign others that are in the receiving end of nationalist and ultimately racist passions of hatred and violence.

In a country that has not fully recovered from the homeland racist nationalism that placed black natives of South Africa according to geographic and ethnic lines, the black Africans from other countries take the place of racialized and excluded outsiders who become candidates for hatred, discrimination, and violation.

In this way what is termed xenophobia is actually racism and the coloniality of being and belonging that accompanies it. This article, therefore, provides a decolonial understanding and interpretation of xenophobia as racism in South Africa.

When I heard some accuse my people of xenophobia, of hatred of foreigners, I wonder what the accusers knew about my people, which I did not know.

The dark days of May which have brought us here today were visited on our country by people who acted in criminal intent.

What happened during those days was not inspired by a perverse nationalism, or extreme chauvinism, resulting in our communities violently expressing the hitherto unknown sentiment of mass and mindless hatred of foreigners – xenophobia – and this I must also say – none in our society has any right to encourage or incite xenophobia by trying to explain naked criminal activity by cloaking it in the garb of xenophobia. (Mbeki, 2008, p. 4)

Perhaps it has always been this way.

Perhaps democracies have always constituted communities of kindred folk, societies of separation based on identity and on exclusion of difference.

It could be that they have always had slaves, a set of people who for whatever reason, are regarded as foreigners, members of a surplus population, undesirables whom one hopes to be rid of, and who as such must be left completely or partially without rights, this is possible. (Mbembe, 2016, p. 23)

Racism is a global hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human that has been politically and economically produced and reproduced for centuries.

The hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the lines of the human can be constructed through diverse racial markers.

Racism can be marked by colour, ethnicity, language, culture and or racism and/or religion. (Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 10)

Introduction

In the ideological life of language, what is said tends not to be what is meant, and when that happens not only truth but ethics and social justice suffer, especially where such terms as xenophobia are concerned, where being and life are at stake.

The disconnection, deliberate or mistaken, between terms and their meaning is cause for political and ethical degeneration (Žižek, 2011, p. 709).

The term xenophobia in reference to hatred of and violence against black foreign nationals in South Africa is largely ideological in as far as it conceals more than it reveals the racist origins and nature of the hateful violence. Frequent violent xenophobic attacks on black foreign nationals in South Africa are not just hateful violence but are also part what Allan Johnson (2006, p. 2) calls "the trouble we are in" as human beings in a world where human differences that include differences of nationality are usable for discrimination, domination, exclusion, and many kinds of oppression.

In many ways the global refugee crisis where the developed world seems not to know what to do with multitudes of foreign others proves that being of different nationality and geographic location can be a kind of crime in the present world.

In the public media and academy in South Africa the term xenophobia is largely used to denote what is condemned as black on black hatred and violence.

And that violence and hatred is prevalently not connected, by journalists, scholars, and other commentators, to the history of apartheid and its racism.

The journalistic, scholarly, and political concealment of the racist nature and genealogy of what is referred to as xenophobia and black on black violence in South Africa is at best innocent and at worst naïve in its post-political sensibility.

The innocence and naiveté of post-politics is in its negligent denialism and apology for the true causalities of antagonism and violence in politics (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 2–3).

The post-political denial that what is called xenophobia in South Africa is connected to nationalist politics (Mbeki, 2008:4) of apartheid and the black struggles against it is also a concealment of how nationalism in Africa has frequently degenerated to the same racism that it sought to fight (Fanon, 1963).

In an apartheid and racist way, even democratic nations have proven more than capable of ideologically constructing and producing hated and dispensable others (Mbembe, 2016, p. 23), such as black foreign nationals in South Africa.


In its racism, South African apartheid political ideology structured the country geographically and culturally into ethnic and national homelands.

In that racist and nationalist country of homelands black foreign nationals were to be aliens and in many political ways stateless and vulnerable.

This paper argues that apartheid racism and nationalism constructed and produced political identities that made black Africans, especially those from other African countries, vulnerable.

The end of administrative and juridical apartheid did nothing to allow the deconstruction of those apartheid constructed and produced political identities.

The black foreign other, it seems, is at the bottom of the pyramid of being and belonging in the South Africa post-apartheid order of things.

That the principal problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line (Dubois, 1969, p. 1) cannot be denied.

What can be denied is that the colour line was the only line that was used to criminalize human difference and punish the weaker others.

Part of the expanded and deepened understanding of the world and the political pathology of racism that decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation has made is that there are more markers to racism than skin colour.

Notable is that racial discrimination and oppression has other telling markers such as ethnicity, language, culture, and even religion, besides skin colour (Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 10).

Black Africans from other countries are marked out for hatred and violent attacks in South Africa based on their nationalities, languages, cultures, religions, even as they share the same black skin colour with everyday South Africans.

What makes black foreign nationals in South Africa stand out from the national crowd as targets of hate and victims of attack is not exactly the colour of their skin, but their nationalities, ethnicities, languages, and the expressions of their culture and religion in dress and other performances of sociality.

What fundamentally distinguishes the national from the foreigner is a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority that is constructed, produced, and maintained by the history of apartheid and its racism, a history of homelanders, nationals, and then foreigners and aliens.

Under apartheid, whites were citizens and all blacks were subjects (Mamdani, 1996).

Where black South African nationals remain marginal from mainstream economic life of the country after apartheid and its geographic and cultural homelands, black foreign nationals continue to be outsiders first to the homeland and next to the nation and country, and they are vulnerable. In that way, the racism of colonialism and apartheid finds reproduction in communities of the Global South where those who enjoy the privilege of nationality and indigeneity "reproduce racist practices against ethno/racial groups where, depending on local/colonial history, those considered inferior, below the line of the human can be defined or marked along religious, ethnic cultural or colour lines" (Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 10). The world of the colonizer and the colonized (Memmi, 1974) that was created by apartheid and its racism in South Africa put black foreign nationals, not only below the line of the human but at the bottom of the hierarchy of being, and at the receiving end of racist nationalism. As much as apartheid in its racist political mentality and sensibility used blacks as scapegoats to be condemned and blamed for crime, spreading disease, immorality, and laziness (Coetzee, 1991), black foreign nationals in South Africa are frequently accused of being the cause of social ills and maladies. Racial scapegoating and rationalization of hate that was a product of apartheid racist nationalism gets reproduced and transmitted against black foreign nationals in present South Africa.

Racism as Xenophobia in the World System

Before this paper focuses on xenophobia as racism in the South African context, it is important to examine how racism produces and is part of xenophobia in the world system.

Those scholars of the Global South that have engaged with the State as an artefact and also symptom of the modern colonial world system have not failed to observe that the origins of the nation-state and its very life are in racism and its many violences. The modern state as it was formed and constituted in 1492 with the defeat of the last Islamic city in Christendom resulted in the violent expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Granada by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in Spain (Mamdani, 2004, p. 5) and its ideologization for conquest, domination, and exclusion.

The birth of states that were organized under national identities that were exclusionary and discriminatory to other identities and religious beliefs was the beginning of the racism of statism and nationalism in their combination.

Nation-states were born, in modernity, with a birthmark of racism and violence: in that way "the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race" (Mamdani, 2004, p. 5).

In the observation of Mahmood Mamdani, the nation-state had two types of victims, those that were inside and were considered not enough part of the state and the nation and those that were outside and were considered outsiders and foreigners, who could be kept out or be conquered and dominated in imperial expansion.

The insiders of the nation-state who did not belong enough and the outsiders that were foreigners were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of being and belonging and became vulnerable to hate and violence.

The Edict of Expulsion that Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand legislated to allow the expulsion and discrimination of some by others in the nation-state was much like apartheid legislation in the logic of statism and nationalism, ideologies that have their insiders and outsiders.

Even democratization, as Mbembe (2016) insists, has not alleviated the punishment of foreigners that come in shape of refugees and other immigrants.

Notably, decolonial scholars have put emphasis on how, since 1492, the world political and economic system came to be organized around the idea of race and violent practice of racism.

Source - Dr William J Mpofu, Wits University