Xenophobia,'stakeholders' and human rights in Grahamstown

Paddy O'Halloran, The Daily Maverick

Grahamstown’s month-long unresolved xenophobic crisis has finally gained international attention. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) will convene a meeting in Grahamstown on Monday morning to address the needs of displaced spaza shop owners and their families. They have been in limbo since looting on 21 October, receiving insufficient support, with many unable to go back to their shops in town.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: A historical view

Paddy O'Halloran, The Con

Almost three weeks have passed since the start of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown that left 500 “foreign” shop owners and family members—most of them South African citizens—with nothing, and more than half of them displaced from their homes. Although looting sputtered out a week ago, and shops in and near the centre of town have opened again, most of the affected people remain displaced, and most shops remain shut. There is no viable plan for the people”s reintegration into the community.

Living Politics in Grahamstown

Sanele Ntshingana and Paddy O’ Halloran, The Con

The room is walled with grey, cracking plaster, and the ceiling is sagging. Its only adornments are angular burglar bars over the single window and a tilted picture on the wall. A dozen women, maybe more, sit or stand, shoulder to shoulder. They are shouting: not to be heard, but because what they have to say can only be said in a shout. They are some of the women whose shops and homes have been emptied in five days of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown, whose families are left with nothing.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: 'We are not leaving!'

Kate Janse an Rensburg, Mikaela Erskog & Fezokuhle Mthonti, Daily Maverick

Picture by Kate Janse van Rensburg

At Masifunde, a local nongovernmental organisation in Bathurst Street, Grahamstown, six women are sitting on and around the staircase. Two women talk urgently on the phone as they relay information to various stakeholders. This concerns the bedlam that has descended upon the city since Wednesday 21 October. One week has passed since a xenophobic outbreak, fuelled by the rumour mill, began in the City of Saints.

Xenophobia in Grahamstown: Police Fail the Community

Paddy O'Halloran, Daily Maverick

On Monday 19 October 2015, Grahamstown police reinforced by officers and equipment from East London twice dispersed protesting students at Eastcape Midlands College (EMC). Students at the college were protesting corruption by their institution’s administration. They had been joined by students from Rhodes University, down the hill, who had shut down their institution early in the morning as part of the national protest against unaffordable tertiary education. The police threw stun grenades and, in the second dispersal, chased students with a water cannon using chemical water that caused severe itching. When the students retreated to the Rhodes University campus, the police gathered in force at the campus entrance until the vice-chancellor went to the police station to officially request that they stand down. Elsewhere in South Africa so far this week — in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, and Port Elizabeth — protesting students and academics have been met with arrest, tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. With the exception of Rhodes, the reaction by state and universities has been to break the protests using force.

Urgent Request for Intervention in the Crisis in Grahamstown

26 October 2015

Press Statement from Voices of the Foreigners’ Wives

Urgent Request for Intervention in the Crisis in Grahamstown

We are all wives of men who came to South Africa from other countries. There are more than a hundred of us. Our husbands come from Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Most of us are Muslims. We pray at the Mosque on the university campus. People call us ‘the kwarra wives’.

Understanding and Overcoming Xenophobia: A One Day Colloquium - Presentation by Michael Neocosmos

Understanding and Overcoming Xenophobia: A One Day Colloquium - Presentation by Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba

Thapelo Mohapi (Abahlali baseMjondolo) speaks to issues of anti-xenophobia solidarity

Understanding and Overcoming Xenophobia: A One Day Colloquium

UHURU PRESENTS:

UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING XENOPHOBIA

A ONE DAY COLLOQUIUM

At the present moment, xenophobic practices in South Africa are taking a number of nefarious forms from the exclusion of foreign students and staff from universities through the denial of visas, to the systematic unleashing of mob and state violence against the weakest sections of our population. This violence in particular has gone so far as to invade the sanctuary of churches and has included the deployment of the military and not just the police against poor communities thus treating the latter as potential enemies. It has recently become clearer in fact that xenophobia is not a problem of poverty but primarily a problem of identity politics endemic to South Africa, a kind of politics which state institutions and their agents have been pursuing since the early 1990s. Most analyses reduce the question of xenophobia to one of criminality and poverty and deplore xenophobic practices without offering much in terms of ideas for a solution.

Liberating ourselves from our liberators

Chielozona Eze, Africa is a Country

Yes, April was the cruelest month in South Africa in recent history. In the mid weeks of the month, too many pictures stirred up bad memories. A black man in his late twenties kissing a sparkly machete. A young man crouching by the side of a wall, holding a sharp knife, ready to use. A group of angry black men brandishing hatchets. Three white policemen pointing their guns at a bloodthirsty mob. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the last one is a dictionary. Three white policemen ready to shoot black men, who were after other black men in South Africa. There can be no greater irony. You can hear Queen Victoria saying: I told you so. These people needed to be protected from themselves.

South Africa in the Twilight of Liberalism

Richard Pithouse, Kafila

South Africa was supposed to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere else.

There was a mass movement that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism, apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the ‘rendezvous of victory’.

Achille Mbembe writes about Xenophobic South Africa

Achille Mbembe, Africa is a Country

“Afrophobia”? “Xenophobia”? “Black on black racism”? A “darker” as you can get hacking a “foreigner” under the pretext of his being too dark — self hate par excellence? Of course all of that at once! Yesterday I asked a taxi driver: “why do they need to kill these “foreigners” in this manner?”. His response: “because under Apartheid, fire was the only weapon we Blacks had. We did not have ammunitions, guns and the likes. With fire we could make petrol bombs and throw them at the enemy from a safe distance”. Today there is no need for distance any longer. To kill “these foreigners”, we need to be as close as possible to their body which we then set in flames or dissect, each blow opening a huge wound that can never be healed. Or if it is healed at all, it must leave on “these foreigners” the kinds of scars that can never be erased.

Belonging – why South Africans refuse to let Africa in

Sisonke Msimang, Africa is a Country

Any African who has ever tried to visit South Africa will know that the country is not an easy entry destination. South African embassies across the continent are almost as difficult to access as those of the UK and the United States. They are characterised by long queues, inordinate amounts of paperwork, and officials who manage to be simultaneously rude and lethargic. It should come as no surprise then that South Africa’s new Minister of Home Affairs has announced the proposed establishment of a Border Management Agency for the country. In his words the new agency “will be central to securing all land, air and maritime ports of entry and support the efforts of the South African National Defence force to address the threats posed to, and the porousness of, our borderline.”

Pallo Jordon on the recent outbreak of xenophobic violence in Port Elizabeth

Pallo Jordan, Business Day, 19 September 2013

THE shocking attacks on Somali-owned shops in the Port Elizabeth townships this weekend are an indictment of our failure as South Africans. Walking through our cities, it is clear SA has become an attractive destination to millions from our region and beyond. There are parts of Johannesburg where French and Portuguese are the languages one hears on the streets. In the towns of the Eastern Cape, one often finds that the local shop owner is from the Indian subcontinent. Until recently, the 7-Eleven I frequent in my Cape Town neighbourhood was run by a Congolese woman and her daughters.

From May 2008 to 2011: Xenophobic Violence and National Subjectivity in South Africa

by Judith Hayem, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2013

This article examines the recurrence of xenophobic attacks in 2011 in the light of the events of May 2008. Using archives and secondary data, examining slogans and discourses heard at the time and reflecting on the author’s own involvement as an activist alongside foreign residents displaced by the 2008 attacks, it is argued that the xenophobic attacks demonstrated a shift in the national subjectivity or conception of citizenship, from an inclusive notion implying participation in the future South African society to a dialectical representation of nationals against foreigners. It is further argued that, in its mismanagement of the 2008 crisis, the South African government contributed to the emergence of such attitudes and did nothing to stop the violence; hence its repetition. The notion of human rights that has emerged in South Africa is one of the keys to an understanding of the representations at stake: whereas human rights used to be a universal and founding notion in post-apartheid South Africa, they are now seen as a national privilege regarding access to basic needs. The article shows that the humanitarian management of the May 2008 crisis by the South African Government contributed considerably to obscuring the notion of ‘human rights’. In order to oppose such a dangerous policy, there is an urgent need to revive the political debate in South Africa.

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Jacques Rancière

Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today. Verso

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.

Review: From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’

by Catherine Cunningham 

In From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Michael Neocosmos traces the events which led up to the May 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. In doing this, Neocosmos uncovers the manifold ways in which ‘citizenship’ has been defined, in South Africa, over time. For Neocosmos, despite the inclusive definition of citizenship which was made manifest throughout the liberation struggle, a more exclusive understanding has now become dominant. Such a conception of citizenship is not spontaneous, however, but is reinforced by discourses originating from multiple actors such as: government officials, the media, civil society and society at large. These discourses overlap and reinforce each other, culminating in what Neocosmos calls ‘a politics of fear’. It is this fear, rather than economic deprivation and an influx of foreigners, which helps to explain the events of 2008. In order to counter this widespread fear, Neocosmos suggests that we need to reaffirm an inclusive understanding of citizenship in order to transcend fundamentally oppressive categorisations.

On the Pogroms in South Africa

On the Pogroms in South Africa by TigersEye99

The Racism of the Intellectuals,

by Alain Badiou, Le Monde (translated by Democracy & Class Struggle)

The extent of the vote for Marianne Le Pen is surprising and overwhelming; we look for explanations–The political class comes out with a handy sociology: the France of the lower classes, the misled provincials, the workers, the under-educated, frightened by globalization, the decline in purchasing power, the disintegration of their districts, and foreign strangers present at their doors, wants to retreat into nationalism and xenophobia.