Mikaela Erskog
In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’:
Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa - Citizenship and
Nationalism, Identity and Politics, Michael
Neocosmos explores the ways in which xenophobia came to be a pervasive
political discourse and practice in post-apartheid South Africa. By combining “theoretical sophistication with historical sensitivity”, Neocosmos
(2010: ix) proposes that there exists abounding xenophobic attitudes that can
be traced to state politics and their various apparatuses.
Aside from xenophobia being an issues
in itself, Neocosmos points to the fundamental betrayal of the post-apartheid state
politics to the will and national consciousness of the anti-apartheid struggle
as by looking at the treatment, legislation and praxis of migrant labour in
South Africa, it is clear that the way in which the state conceives of
nationality (and subsequently its practical articulation in citizenship)
implies an exclusionary politics that disregards the humanity of ‘native
foreigners’ (foreigners who have supported the anti-apartheid struggle and the
post-apartheid state economy, and have come to identify with South Africa as
either their home or supportive community) and even ‘foreign natives’
(‘indigenous’ South Africans being branded as foreign because they either do
not comply with the limited state politics (Abahlali base Mjondolo) or whom
‘look’ stereotypically ‘foreign’ and therefore are somehow are deserving of
abuse).
Neocosmos (2010: 142-143) argues that
the state facilitates a “politics of fear” that is:
(1) Hegemonic and exclusionary to the point that “to be a
foreigner, particularly a poor Black foreigner, is in itself a crime."
(2) Continually articulating a South African
exceptionalism which proposes “a South African nationalism around an urban
culture and a pro-Western ideology of unabashed neo-liberalism… [that has entrenched]
a continuity with the apartheid ideology according to which South Africa is
understood as existing apart from, and superior to, the rest of the African
continent" and;
(3) Based on an ideology of indigeneity and nativism.
Combined with South African exceptionalism, there is “the dominant perception
that indigeneity is the only way to acquire resources, jobs, and all the other
goodies and entitlements which should be reserved for native peoples only. This necessarily leads to a debate on who is
more indigenous, and hence [ironically] to nativism, the view that there is an
essence of South Africanness which is to be found in ‘natives’."
Neocosmos sees as the very crux of xenophobic discourse
and endeavors to identify each aspect that makes this politics possible in
order to understand how best to counter it.
***
So how does Frantz Fanon enter this
conversation?
From ‘Foreign Native’ to ‘Native Foreigner’ seems to be a critical articulation of something Fanon anticipated: that
after independence, if African states’ national bourgeoisie became to absorbed
in maintaining an unaccountable, singular power, there is then a basis for
which a particular kind of politics may arise that tends to emulate oppressive,
exclusionary conceptions of nationality that then could lead to
“a permanent seesaw between African unity, which fades quicker and quicker into
the mists of oblivion, and a heartbreaking return to chauvinism in its most
bitter and detestable form.” (Fanon, 1963: 163).
Much like Neocosmos’s position on South African state
politics as proponents of a narrow nationalism that facilitates xenophobic
discourse and his discussion of the subsequent lack of constructive political
exchanges between state and people (which he suggests points to such
problematic ideologies as neo-liberalism and African Renaissance that disallow
for a real exchange between state and population), Fanon (2004: 103) held a
similar attitude towards the elite nationalism/national bourgeoisie:
“From…
chauvinism to… tribalism, there is but one small step. And consequently, wherever the petty-mindedness of the
national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable
of enlightening the people as a or have been unable to put the people first,
wherever national bourgeoisie has proven to be incapable of expanding vision of
the world, there is a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as
ethnic tensions triumph. Since the only slogan of the bourgeoisie is “Replace
the foreigners,” and they rush into every sector to take the law into their own
hands and vacancies, the petty traders such as taxi drivers, cake sellers, and
shoe shiners follow suit and call for the expulsion of the Dahomeans or, taking
tribalism to a new level, demand that the Fulani go back to their bush or back
up their mountains.”
***
"[Our] mistake — has been, under pretext of fighting
"Balkanization," not to
have taken into consideration the pre-colonial fact of
territorialism. Our mistake
has been not to have paid enough attention in our analyses to this phenomenon,
which is the fruit of colonialism if you like, but also a sociological fact
which no theory of unity, be it ever so laudable or attractive, can abolish. We have allowed ourselves to be seduced by a
mirage: that of the structure which is the most pleasing to our minds; and,
mistaking our ideal for reality, we have believed it enough to condemn
territorialism, and its natural sequel, micro-nationalism, for us to get the
better of them, and to assure the success of our chimerical undertaking."
- Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, (1963: 158)
Neocosmos
does the work of paying attention to the phenomenon of xenophobia as something
that, as Fanon points to, has its roots in the colonial state structure. As
such, it only makes sense that Fanon is subsumed in the text. As, being that
Neocosmos finds xenophobia to be a ‘symptom’ of a colonial state politics, it
points to the same issue Fanon faced half a century ago: of completing the
decolonising of Africa.
Having a
similar mission then, Neocosmos proposes a ‘Fanonian’ approach to dismantling
hegemonic and oppressive state politics by advocating a politics of the people through
"a rethinking of citizenship as an active political identity that could
begin to re-institute political agency, and hence, begin to provide alternative
prescriptions to the political consensus of state-induced exclusion."
(Neocosmos, 2008: xii).
Here again,
we see Fanon and Neocosmos reconceiving of a political subjectivity whose
prerequisite is the recognition of “the open door of every consciousness” (Fanon,
1967: 181) (emphasis added).
Neocosmos (2010: 146) then suggests that on the premise of recognising
the capacity of all individuals to think and act, and therefore the equality of
every human subject, a means of reimaging citizenship would be that "rights must be based on the place of labour”,
whereby ones contribution to society as a living part of it should be the basis
of citizenship. Furthermore:
“It is this simple observation which provides the basis for a completely
new conception of citizenship in a country which after all, is made up of
people who migrated over many years in different waves, precisely to work and
in doing so built a nation, as in fact used to be recognised during the
struggle for liberation itself. " (2010: 146).
***
Neocosmos is not pessimistic about the future of politics as by looking at
the past examples of inclusionary politics in the case of the United Democratic
Front and the Industrial and
Commercial Union, he proposes that the only way to change politics in South
Africa is, not to restructure state form within, but for the people of the
state to engage and disavow state politics. He (2010: 56) points specifically to the popular movements of the 1980s as promoting
“an active conception of citizenship while it gave, in its practice, a
universal content to these prescriptions which were absolutely clear to all
within the popular nationalist politics of the time.” As such, like Fanon, he
argues that national unity can only be real when we decide to conceive of it in
unitary, inclusionary terms.
When faced with the state tells you
to go ‘clear out’ your community of foreigners and you, as a ‘recognised’ South
African, stand with those who are being abused, you take the first step in
creating a different space for a more humanist politics to flourish.
Bibliography
Fanon,
F. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press: London, 1967
Fanon, F. Wretched of the Earth,
Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press: New York, 1963
Fanon, F. Wretched of the Earth,
Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press: New York, 2004
Neocosmos, M. From ‘Foreign
Natives’to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South
Africa - Citizenship and
Nationalism, Identity and Politics, CODESRA: Dakar,
2010
