Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- A Torn Narrative of Violence
- I Did Not Expect Such a Thing to Happen
- (Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners’
- Xenophobia in Alexandra
- Behind Xenophobia in South Africa – Poverty or Inequality?
- Relative Deprivation, Social Instability and Cultures of Entitlement
- Violence, Condemnation, and the Meaning of Living in South Africa
- Crossing Borders
- Policing Xenophobia – Xenophobic Policing: A Clash of Legitimacy
- Housing Delivery, the Urban Crisis and Xenophobia
- Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence
- Beyond Citizenship: Human Rights and Democracy
- We Are Not All Like That: Race, Class and Nation after Apartheid
- Brutal Inheritances: Echoes, Negrophobia and Masculinist Violence
- Constructing the ‘Other’: Learning from the Ivorian Example
- End Notes
- Author Biographies
(Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- A Torn Narrative of Violence
- I Did Not Expect Such a Thing to Happen
- (Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners’
- Xenophobia in Alexandra
- Behind Xenophobia in South Africa – Poverty or Inequality?
- Relative Deprivation, Social Instability and Cultures of Entitlement
- Violence, Condemnation, and the Meaning of Living in South Africa
- Crossing Borders
- Policing Xenophobia – Xenophobic Policing: A Clash of Legitimacy
- Housing Delivery, the Urban Crisis and Xenophobia
- Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence
- Beyond Citizenship: Human Rights and Democracy
- We Are Not All Like That: Race, Class and Nation after Apartheid
- Brutal Inheritances: Echoes, Negrophobia and Masculinist Violence
- Constructing the ‘Other’: Learning from the Ivorian Example
- End Notes
- Author Biographies
Summary
It is striking how great is the disconnect between popular and elite ‘common sense’ on the matter of ‘foreigners’. This xenophobia really is coming up from below – it is profoundly democratic, albeit in the majoritarian-popular sense rather than the liberal-constitutionalist one. The bottom-up character is confirmed by surveys, focus groups and other gauges. It is anyway obvious from, say, watching the huge and sceptical crowd that greeted Zuma during his firefighting trip to the East Rand town of Ekurhuleni or listening, as one cannot avoid doing in this country, to radio talk shows. ‘They’ – the urban poor – thus occupy a different universe of meaning to ‘us’ – people who subscribe to internationalist ideologies and enjoy some insulation from daily struggles for material survival.
Xenophobic violence is not coming from the elites – from neither the major parties nor major organised civil society actors, neither the Zuma faction nor the Mbeki one. In fact organisations claiming to be tribunes of the masses, like the Congress of South African Trade Unions, have proven out of touch with the popular pulse on this issue, failing to see recent events coming. (The one partial exception, it seems, is the South African National Civic Organisation, whose xenophobic utterances suggest that it is surprisingly ‘grounded’ in the poor despite frequently being written off as a ghost formation.)
The country's leaders may bear indirect responsibility through policy failure and acts of commission, but I see no evidence that the marauding crowds are taking their cue from government immigration policy or from corrupt cops who extort bribes from immigrants. We do not have the active anti-xenophobic leadership that we need, but at least there is no Jean-Marie Le Pen or Joerg Haider or Patrick Buchanan mobilising anti-immigrant grievance, at least not at national level. Or – to take examples closer to home (if we can still say that about Africa) – we do not have leading politicians manipulating anti-foreigner sentiment as they have recently done, with calamitous consequences, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ivory Coast. This matters: the absence of elite encouragement may be all that separates what has happened here from what happened in Rwanda.
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- Go Home or Die HereViolence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa, pp. 53 - 64Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2008