Mere ‘be-nice’ appeals and marches will not address the root causes of xenophobia in South Africa. Jacob Zuma’s ANC government is at fault not only for neoliberal, pro-corporate, job-killing policies, but for tightening immigration regulations, compelling refugees to live under illegal informality. That requires resistance.
Political
symbols in South Africa are here today, gone tomorrow, but oppressive
political economy endures. At surface level, an explosion of anti-racist
activism amongst the most enlightened South Africans – up-and-coming
Black scholars trying to break various ceilings of residual apartheid
power – is occurring at the same time as xenophobic implosion is
wreaking havoc on the bottom socio-economic ranks.
In mid-March at the University of Cape Town (UCT), undergraduate
politics student Chimani Maxwele threw a bucket of excrement onto the
statue of colonial mastermind Cecil John Rhodes, catalysing a revolt
against white-dominated power structures there and beyond. Less than
three weeks later, a revolt by the poorest urban South Africans in the
country’s two other major cities – Durban and Johannesburg – was aimed
at a layer just as poor and oppressed: immigrants, mostly from elsewhere
in Africa.
At least ten thousand people were displaced within days. With South
Africa hosting an estimated five million foreign nationals living within
its 53 million residents, terror has struck those with darker skins and
the misfortune to live in the lowest-income areas: urban-peripheral
shack settlements or near inner-city migrant labour hostels.
RHODES FALLS BUT HIS BORDERS KEEP RISING
The #RhodesMustFall campaign caught fire at UCT, the main site of South
Africa’s bourgeois class reproduction, with protesters demanding
curriculum changes, racial equity in the professoriat and the
resignation of university leadership. They were quickly victorious
against at least one telling symbol: a huge statue of Africa’s most
notorious English looter. The bronze Rhodes was removed from a central
campus base within a month, carted off by university authorities to what
will eventually be a lower-profile setting.
The campaign set the emergent 1% elites of UCT against the old 1% power
structure. Historical recollections of Rhodes’ diamond monopoly-making
fortune surfaced, leaving bourgeois commentators and news organs like
Business Day rattled.
Rhodes, after all, helped establish many early systems of exploitation –
including migrant labour (and women’s role in cheap labour provision),
illogical African borders, dependency upon minerals extraction, land
grabs, environmental destruction and the ultra-underdeveloped rural
Bantustans – that persist today. Indeed they are now often found in even
more profitable and amplified forms (casualised labour, mining house
prerogatives), fully endorsed by South Africa’s current political and
economic rulers no matter their skin hue.
However, the 99% versus the 99% in the shack settlements also frightened
South Africa’s top 1%, mainly because of the hard-hitting impact on the
national ‘brand’, a source of repeat elite panic. World public opinion
is frowning on Pretoria, and, encouragingly, the rest of the continent
has taken this long-overdue opportunity to channel myriad grievances
against the regional hegemon.
Across Africa, broadcast and print media remind audiences of how the
Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini had set off the pogroms when on March 20
at a ‘moral regeneration’ rally, he referred to immigrants as ‘lice’ and
‘ants’: “you find their unsightly goods hanging all over our shops,
they dirty our streets. We cannot even recognise which shop is which,
there are foreigners everywhere… We ask foreign nationals to pack their
belongings and go back to their countries.”
Within ten days, that call had been taken up by Zulu loyalists in
Durban, including the president’s son, Edward Zuma (born in Swaziland),
who claimed immigrants “are the reason why there are so many drugs in
the country” (he was prosecuted for illegal tobacco importation and tax
fraud last year). Backed by most politicians, Zwelithini went into
denial, first, complaining of media misinterpretation, and claimed he
meant no harm against legal immigrants.
Yet the mass meeting of 10,000 mainly male Zulu traditionalists he
assembled at the main Durban stadium on April 20 reverberated with
xenophobic chants and booing of ambassadors from Africa. Zwelithini told
the gathering he wanted an end to violence. But to achieve that
required much more: Zuma finally deployed the army in Durban and
Johannesburg hotspots the next night, as the police were proving
incompetent.
BACKLASH
The fakery behind the image of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ was unveiled, as
happened in 2008 and 2010 when xenophobia also reached critical mass.
But for many years prior, the rest of the continent already knew South
African predators. Grievances include exploitation by Johannesburg
mining houses, retail chains, cellphone businesses and breweries, and
the difficulty of getting a visa to even visit South Africa, especially
from Kenya and Nigeria, the two main Anglophone competing powers on the
continent. (Diplomatic-level tit-for-tat is one reason.)
Popular disgust across Africa at how little the South African state was
doing to protect immigrants reverberated especially strongly where the
refugees mainly hailed from: Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria,
Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In many capital cities across Africa,
the 99% lined up in marches, protests and boycotts against Africa’s
sub-imperialist 1%.
On more than a dozen occasions, the targets were South African High
Commissions and the branch plants and shops which transfer profits back
to Johannesburg corporations. In some cases, like the South African
shops that Walmart uses to penetrate Africa, the profits go further away
still. In Mozambique’s natural gas fields, more than 300 South African
workers employed by the oil company Sasol had to flee home as local
residents complained the firm didn’t give jobs to locals.
Back in Durban and Johannesburg, immigrant resistance to
lumpen-proletariat proto-fascism is uneven. In Durban, the city centre’s
Congolese, Nigerian and Zimbabwe immigrants attempted a non-violent
march against xenophobia, which was viciously broken up by municipal
police on April 8.
As a result, hundreds of immigrants armed themselves and briefly
skirmished with police and xenophobic mobs in Durban’s Point zone a few
days later, just a few blocks from the city’s world-class aquarium and
water park. Some even threatened urban guerrilla war. In Johannesburg’s
Hillbrow inner-city zone, the immigrants’ geographic density was too
intimidating for mobs from nearby (Zulu-dominated) migrant labour
hostels to penetrate.
But in less concentrated sites in shack settlements, mainly in the
Durban residential periphery, xenophobic attacks occurred repeatedly.
Even now, nearly a month later, it appears unsafe for most immigrants to
return to homes and businesses. As a result of ongoing danger, more
than 1000 have been voluntarily repatriated to neighbouring countries.
There is nothing more tragic than witnessing the long-distance buses
load up from refugee camps, choc-full of traumatised people who have
lost everything.
SOUTH AFRICA’S 1% DON’T GET IT
Yet South Africa’s state leaders repeatedly demonstrated they hadn’t
really internalised the crisis. On April 24, President Jacob Zuma
claimed to immigrant groups, “South Africa’s moral high ground still
remains intact.” The same day, the secretary-general of the ruling
African National Congress (ANC), Gwede Mantashe, repeated a
controversial suggestion: “Refugee reception camps must be used to make
sure that everyone who comes to South Africa is registered, they should
be screened and get vetted,” though he admitted, “I know that the idea
has been attacked viciously.”
Also that day, Deputy Police Minister Maggie Sotyu revealed how stressed
South Africa’s elites had become, when she pleaded, “There are worse
things happening in other countries but you will never see them in the
media. The media is part of the community, so please, it must be biased
when it comes to South Africa.”
These remarks reflected the widespread public shaming of Zuma’s
government and its defensiveness. Indeed Zuma initially did very little
to resolve or even properly band-aid the situation. State-supported
anti-xenophobia media adverts, marches, speeches and campaigning
generally missed the point: the impoverished young men doing the
attacking had little patience for sanctimonious preaching.
On the one hand, a few middle-class NGOs and religious faith leaders
provided vital emergency charity aid to refugee camps; in combination
with some labour leaders, their anti-xenophobia marches during April
briefly reclaimed central city spaces. On the other hand, the
petit-bourgeois moralistic politicians and public commentators had no
obvious way to get messages through to the lumpen-proletariat. One
reason: an inability to analyse, much less address, the underlying
conditions.
JOBS, HOUSING AND RETAIL COMPETITION
Immigrants from the rest of Africa and from Asia (especially Pakistan,
Bangladesh, India and China) in search of work are typically young males
with networks that give them entry to residential areas, sometimes to
informal employment, and sometimes even to shop-keeping opportunities.
Because wives and children typically stay behind, the male migrants can
at least temporarily accept much lower wages than local residents who
usually must support larger families.
They also can save money by quadrupling up in small inner-city
apartments or township shacks – often sleeping in shifts – which puts
upward pressure on rental rates. Unscrupulous employers or landlords
increase their own power by threatening to tell authorities about the
illegal immigrants, as a weapon of super-exploitation often used
especially on farms to avoid wage payments.
Another structural cause of xenophobia is excessive township retail
competition: “overtrading.” This results from immigrants – especially
from Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Bangladesh – using home-country
syndicates to gain collective credit and bulk purchasing power from
wholesalers. They then easily undercut the spaza shops run by local
residents, and their operations have efficiently spread to nearly every
corner of South Africa.
Internecine battles between petty capitalists soon move from price wars
to physical intimidation, mostly against the immigrant shops. Scores of
“service delivery protests” by communities against their municipal
governments have turned into xenophobic looting sprees against
immigrants.
These root causes can be solved only by redirecting state resources
towards meeting needs (like housing) and creating jobs. Corporate taxes
could be raised and vast budgets shifted away from white elephant
infrastructure projects: a $30 billion coal export railroad, a new
(unneeded) $25 billion Durban port, $100 billion for nuclear reactors
and the like. Without a massive attack on inequality, the daily
degradation of life for the 54% of South Africans who are below the
poverty line will continue.
Zuma’s ANC government is at fault not only for neoliberal,
pro-corporate, job-killing policies, but for tightening immigration
regulations the last few years, which compels refugees to live under
illegal informality. Zuma has continued his predecessors’ sub-imperial
policies in the region in order to secure contracts for favoured
corporations, including his nephew’s $10 billion oil deal in the eastern
DRC, not far from where 1600 SA army troops are deployed against rebel
competitors.
Zuma also gives continual fraternal support to repressive regimes in the
region such as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the Swazi tyrant monarch
Mswati and the corrupt Congolese regime of Joseph Kabila. More refugees
result.
WHAT PRESSURE CAN REVERSE THE ROOT CAUSES?
Mere ‘be-nice’ appeals and marches are not making any dent in the root
causes of xenophobia or in state policies. What would be needed to
change the Zuma government’s approach? What power can activists
leverage?
The most obvious factor in recent weeks was the reputational damage
(including to tourism) that the government and big business are feeling.
Apparently only such damage can compel Zuma to act.
As Bandile Mdlalose from the Community Justice Movement wrote in Pambazuka,
the continent’s main ezine, “We in Durban civil society should consider
a boycott campaign.” With Durban the only candidate for the 2022
Commonwealth Games, she argued that one target should be a “Commonwealth
decision, expected on September 2, to give the 2022 Games to our
undeserving city.” Durban authorities say they will also bid for the
2024 Olympic Games.
Protesters in many other countries are tackling South Africa at this
level, so as to force the Pretoria regime to adopt more humane policies.
The question is whether, pitted against ANC politicans, local
corporations and fast-rising Zulu ethnicism, a still-stunned layer of
South African progressives can join the debate how best to shift from
mere moralising towards standing up alongside African protesters.
* Prof Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for
Civil Society in Durban, South Africa. This article was originally
published in teleSUR.