Why is South Africa still so anti-black, so many years after apartheid? By Panashe Chigumadzi
A recent spate of violent attacks led to an anti-xenophobia protest on
9 March. About 200 locals and foreigners, under the banner of the Coalition of
Civics against Xenophobia, took to the streets of Pretoria calling for an end to the
violence against foreign-born Africans and South Asians in South Africa’s
townships and inner cities. Today Shoshozola has a
painful irony as migrants find themselves no longer welcome in post-apartheid
South Africa
Having been born in
Zimbabwe and lived in South Africa for as long as it has been a democracy, I
was as warmed by the solidarity as I was upset by the violence. I am reassured
especially to see reports of the march acknowledge that “issues of
unemployment‚ housing and crime are central” to the attacks.
Understanding and
acknowledging the root causes of the violence has been largely missing from the
public discourse here in South Africa. Too often the attackers have been
dismissed as “irrational”, or provoked calls for more “hospitality that defines our democratic order”, in the words of
the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Both reactions seem to miss two key facts: South
Africa isn’t anti-immigrant, it’s anti-black, and this violence is evidence
that the “miracle” has failed the very people it should have uplifted – poor
black South Africans.
Explaining why the
violence is specifically anti-black or Afrophobic, the University of South
Africa professor Rodney Tshaka described xenophobia as the fear of the other,
while “Afrophobia is fear of a specific other: the black other from north of
the Limpopo river [in other words, from Zimbabwe or Mozambique and beyond them,
the rest of Africa]. If foreigners generally were the main target, those who
are anti-foreigner would no doubt have sought out all foreigners and made it
known that they are not welcome in this country.”
The fact that Africans
bear the brunt of the violence isn’t simply about the numbers, though over 75%
of international migrants living in South Africa come from the rest of the
continent. Foreignness, or the notion of “other”, has a long, anti-black
history in South Africa. Until 1994’s elections, black South Africans were not
citizens of South Africa, but of “homelands” or “Bantustans”, areas where the
black population was resettled under apartheid. The South Africa of
postcards was the preserve of the white settler minority, who did not see
themselves as part of the African continent… read more:
