kagablog

by Michael Neocosmos, Hydrarchy, 5 June 2008

photo by nadine hutton, see more here

Reflecting on the causes of the recent xenophobic pogroms in the country, it is striking how most commentators have stressed poverty and deprivation as the underlying causes of the events. Yet it requires little effort to see that economic factors, however real, cannot possibly account for why it was those deemed to be non-South Africans who bore the brunt of the vicious attacks. Poverty can be and has historically been the foundation for the whole range of political ideologies, from communism to fascism and anything in between. In actual fact, poverty can only account for the powerlessness, frustration and desperation of the perpetrators, but not for their target. After all why were not Whites or the rich or for that matter White foreigners in South Africa targeted instead? Of course it is a common occurrence that the powerless regularly take out their frustrations on the weakest: women, children, the elderly… and outsiders. Yet this will not suffice as an explanation. The systematic and concerted attacks on those deemed to be foreign according to popular stereotypes requires more of an explanation than powerlessness can provide, however important a factor that may have been.

In order to provide a more inclusive explanation one should first recall the observations of Frantz Fanon in the immediate post-independence period in Africa: “the working class of the towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen … line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans…From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked…” The collapse of nationalism into chauvinism, Fanon observed, was fundamentally occasioned by the new post-independence elites to grab the jobs and capital of the departing Europeans, while the popular classes only followed in their footsteps in attacking foreign Africans. This suggests that a politics of nationalism founded on stressing indigeneity lay at the root of post-colonial xenophobia. To what extent is Fanon’s account applicable to post-apartheid South Africa?

There is little doubt that the politics of grabbing and enrichment among the post-apartheid elite have been both brazen and extensive. So-called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has enabled the development of a new class of so-called ‘black diamonds’ whose newly found wealth is not particularly geared towards national accumulation and development but primarily towards short term quick profits in a country where estimates put the poor at half the total population. Reports of corruption among state personnel from the national to the local levels abound and are obvious for all to see. Few get prosecuted let alone convicted in a hegemonic culture which extols the virtues of free-market capitalism, which equates private enrichment with the public good and quick profit with development. Yet how do we logically move from this to scapegoating the ‘foreign other’? In order to provide an answer, we must shift our focus from economic to political hegemonic ideologies.

I have argued at length elsewhere that xenophobia must be understood as a political discourse, the result of political ideologies and consciousnesses - in brief political subjectivities - which have arisen, and have been allowed to arise in post-apartheid South Africa, as a result of a politics of fear prevalent in both state and society. This politics of fear has at least three major components: a state discourse of xenophobia, a discourse of South African exceptionalism and a conception of citizenship founded exclusively on indigeneity. This politics of fear which finds its origins fundamentally within the apparatuses of power, has been complemented since the 1990s by a fear of politics, ie. the unwillingness or the inability of popular politics, with a few exceptions, to break away systematically from a state politics of fear.

There is a name for the kind of political activity which we have witnessed over the past few weeks: the politics of (ethnic) cleansing, made infamous in the ex-Yugoslavia of the 1990s and then repeated in several parts of the continent, Rwanda and more recently Kenya being the most infamous. The notion of ‘cleansing’ with all its dehumanising connotations of dirt and purification is a common leitmotif of all these politics irrespective of their historical specificities. The notion of ‘cleansing’ was also used in the recent South African pogroms by perpetrators. It should be clear that the term ‘cleansing’ is the name of a politics of fear, of violence, a politics of war against those who are seen to be different for whatever reason. To counter these politics, an active politics of peace is necessary, but for this to develop we need first to understand the politics of fear and the fear of politics which prevails in South Africa today.

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