Guest Post: Xenophobia Paves the Dangerous Road Ahead
Today's the day that far-right groups have given as a deadline for migrants to leave South Africa. Richard Pithouse's explainer is required reading.
If you can, please support - as I have - the emergency campaign that Progressive International have set up to help get people to safety as the far right groups sweep through neighbourhoods. Richard Pithouse’s substack, where he posted the analysis below, is here.
We don’t know how today – the day of the ‘deadline’ given by March and March – for ‘illegal immigrants’ to leave South Africa will unfold.
What we do know is that the politics of collective sadism that has been actively cultivated in the lead up to today has never had anything to do with a concern for the law. It has repeatedly taken unlawful and often criminal forms, and its targets have included people with and without documents, including South Africans from ethnic minorities.
We know that neither the people blockading hospitals and schools, the men in balaclavas whipping people in the streets nor the people coordinating the mobilisation of the amabutho and the often bot and influencer driven online attacks in a pincer movement are, as the media has so often said, participants in a ‘civil society organisation’.
We know that the language of fascism – of cleaning, criminalisation, animalisation, disease, poisoning and conspiracy is everywhere. Reflecting on German fascism Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘Part of the mechanism of domination is that one is forbidden to recognize the suffering which that domination produces’ so that ‘everyone in one’s own ethnic group can convince themselves they don’t hear the screams of pain’. This is a central aim of the work of dehumanisation.
We know that the reason why the people who have and are suffering from xenophobic terror, and who will suffer it in the days to come, seldom appear in our public sphere as people whose humanity is not in question is because instead of breaking with the idea of a graduated humanity after apartheid we merely sought to rearrange aspects of that graduation.
We know that in recent weeks tens of thousands of people have been terrorised, forced from their homes and had their means of livelihood seized, shut down or destroyed by armed mobs. People have been insulted, threatened, beaten, made destitute, and killed. Families are being split and children who were born here, speak our languages and have lived their whole lives among us are in desperate flight with their parents. Thousands of people have fled the country, thousands remain scattered into parks, community halls and derelict buildings and many more wait in that state of vigilant and brittle but strangely energetic exhaustion that carries people through times like these.
In Durban, documented refugees forced from their homes by the mob, and then beaten by the police and attacked by thugs from March and March and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), have been sleeping outside the Home Affairs office on Che Guevara Road for more than five weeks.
We know that the atmosphere is febrile, heavy with cruelty and fear. We know that it will not lift at the end of today. We know that there will be more blood.
Aimé Césaire: ‘When the world shall be a tower of silence, we shall be the prey and the vulture’.
National dissolution
As racial and ethnic identities are being asserted against the idea of a country belonging to ‘all who live in it’ some South Africans are being referred to as izinyane or ‘Shangaan’. The mob has also turned on South Africans deemed ‘too dark’ and, on at least one occasion, Muslims.
We should not forget that according to the official count 21 of the 62 people murdered in the 2008 xenophobic pogrom were South Africans.
The police deny that Nhlamulo Sambo, the young man, still a teenager, who was murdered in Mossel Bay, was the third person to be murdered in the xenophobic violence since March and March announced its ‘deadline’. They say that although he was murdered during the same weekend in which 55 shacks were burnt and two men from Mozambique murdered in a xenophobic attack – two men whose names do not seem to have been given in any reports – his death was just a matter of ordinary crime.
His mother, Mikateko, insists that he was murdered because he was Tsonga, that when he was killed ‘he was explaining that he was Tsonga and had an ID’. His aunt, Nomsa, said that he had told her that he had been told that he was a ‘Shangaan’ and not welcome in the community.
It is a plain fact that the police habitually lie about impoverished black people.
It is also a plain fact that in the shanty towns in societies that remain structured in colonial logic, societies such as South Africa and Brazil, elites tend to assume that, in Frantz Fanon’s words, ‘they die there, it matters not where, nor how’.
Fanon: ‘From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism’.
Deputising the mob
There has been systemic complicity with the mob by what are supposed to be democratic institutions, including the media and all the parties in parliament aside from the Economic Freedom Fighters. The state has not made any meaningful attempt to stop the terror and has often acted in concert with it. The police have often accompanied or watched the mob without intervening. In several instances, the police have taken people identified as ‘foreign’ by the mob into custody and our usually lethargic state has repeatedly moved with speed to check the papers of people targeted by the mob, including during its street actions.
The primary response of the state has, along with standing down while the mob does its work so effectively that tens of thousands of people have been driven from their homes, been to ‘verify’ the status of people who have been displaced and then rapidly move to mass deportation. Thousands of people have been moved out of the country with astonishing speed. The result is a highly effective working alliance between the mob and the state enabling rapid mass displacement and deportation.
The refugees on Che Guevara Road have been told to either leave the road or accept deportation to the counties they fled via the prison known as the Lindela Repatriation Centre. This is a gross violation of international law. Like the mob the state claims to embody the law while violating it.
The state has also arrested more than 50,000 people it claims are undocumented since January and deported more than 25,000. We have to say ‘claimed’ because the police continue to stop people for looking ‘foreign’, tear up their papers and take them away. At the same time, the state has moved to strengthen an already repressive although deeply corrupt and often ineffective migration regime.
While the mob – on the street and online – often uses gruesome rhetoric, including frequent death threats, the state speaks of humane repatriation without asking why people suddenly feel so panicked that flight is their only option. As we have moved closer to today the state has warned that there should be no violence on the planned marches and taken steps to avoid the kinds of organised looting and attacks on infrastructure that were carried out by the forces that have cohered around Jacob Zuma during the riots in the winter of 2021. The mob has been deputised but warned not to overstep the powers of the deputy.
Liberal democracy in decline
We must take full measure of the fact that South Africa is, in Fanon’s words, ‘a nonviable society, a society to be replaced’. The political arrangements in such societies do not and should not endure indefinitely. But, as we have seen in countries like Algeria and India, the loss of power by national liberation movements, and the wider collapse in the legitimacy of their projects, can bring far more dangerous, and even fascist, forces to power.
Now that the mob has been constituted and directed to take its place on the political stage – online, in the street and in the spaces abandoned by the state - it will not be withdrawn if it is not forced back. We can look to India to see what happens when the mob is given a permanent role in the national drama. We should not forget that the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat was a decisive moment in Narendra Modi’s path to power.
Authoritarian, demagogic and socially predatory, violent and ethnically inflected forces have been moving towards the centre of political life since Zuma’s rape trial. We are now a society in which extortion is endemic, and very dangerous people demand, in Fanon’s words, ‘to be part of the racket’. We have long been a society in which grassroots activists are assassinated when they stand against predatory forces. When Abahlali baseMjondolo adopted the slogan ‘socialism or death’ they did so without hyperbole. It was simply a plain statement of their situation. We have recently become a society in which professionals are assassinated when they do not cower before the same predatory forces.
There have been 16 reported political assassinations this month.
The uncontested hegemony of liberal democracy is behind us and the future that is rushing towards us is not just less liberal. It is also much less democratic and, for those who dissent, much more dangerous.
Now that authoritarian opposition to the form of democracy settled on after apartheid appears to have been rendered popular and predatory political forces have developed a capacity for armed street thuggery it seems highly unlikely that liberal democracy will not be further weakened, or that this will not happen with a velocity that will surpass the capacities of the law and the institutions of democracy to contain it. It will swiftly change the structure of society in ways that a new election with a different outcome will not be able to undo. There will be many more political funerals in the years ahead.
These dangers are most acute in KwaZulu-Natal.
The terror that, in a few weeks, has swept tens of thousands of people from their homes, and many thousands out of the country, is a form of organised and systemic cruelty that must be rejected without qualification or compromise. The often-repeated fact that all states regulate migration in some way does not legitimate dehumanisation and cruelty, or the effective legitimation of forced expulsions by the mob. It is a basic ethical principle that everyone everywhere should be received as a person among other people, as a fully and equally human person.
Abahlali baseMjondolo distilled this commitment to a universal humanism into an axiomatic statement, first developed in a discussion to formulate a principled and programmatic response to the beginning of the xenophobic pogrom in May 2008: ‘A person is a person wherever they may find themselves’.
It is also a basic ethical principle that we are called to conscience and action most urgently when humanity is called into question. We are in such a moment.
This is a time to accept risk and act with courage, a time to seek out new people and organisations with whom principles can be affirmed and lines held. New forms of solidarity must be built and sustained as we traverse the hard road that lies ahead. These new forms of solidarity cannot only be defensive. The only real alternative to the violent, predatory and ethnic politics in rapid formation is a politics that, building the power of the demos against the mob, works for the emancipation of all prioritising the worst off among us.
Books mentioned
Aimé Césaire – The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)
Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1976)
Theodor W. Adorno – Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005)