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Condemn xenophobic criminality locally and globally
Jeremy Cronin, Umsebenzi Online, Johannesburg, 23 April 2015
"South Africa is the shame of the continent and a deviant in the world",
Ranjeni Munusamy wrote last week in the midst of our most recent outbreak of
xenophobic violence. Munusamy's sense of shame was a common feature of many
voices on phone-in programmes and in the social media. This widespread
outpouring is, at least, a positive indication that, despite everything, a
great many South Africans haven't lost their humanitarian bearings.
Even fractious, opposing political parties in a special parliamentary debate
were united in condemnation of the violence, if not in their diagnosis of
its underlying causes. Pieter Mulder of the FF+ said, mystically, an "evil
force" was stalking through SA. Julius Malema, despite his professed
Marxist-Fanonist radicalism, declined to attach any blame on the dangerous
rhetoric of the Zulu king. Instead he evoked a thoroughly feudal view of the
state worthy of that monarch. "The state", Malema said, "being the elder for
the whole of society, becomes responsible for all the violence meted out
against our foreign nationals." In short, blame daddy.
The most cynical explanation for the violence came from the Institute of
Race Relations. Asked on SABC who or what was to blame, Mienke Steytler
provided a categorical response: "People must blame government". "Why?" the
interviewer asked. "Because government creates unemployment by failing to
implement a flexible labour market", she replied.
Steytler was clearly unaware (or uncaring) that one of the immediate
triggers for the latest flare up (apart from royal hate-speech) was the
employment of desperate (that is flexible) foreign nationals as
strike-breakers in an industrial dispute in Isipingo just days before the
violence.
Gareth Van Onselen, writing in the Sunday Times, claims xenophobia is
insufficiently discussed in SA. He attributes this to the invisible
parameters placed on South African debate requiring, he says, matters of
culture to be beyond scrutiny in the name of "respect". (Van Onselen clearly
means African culture, not neo-liberal culture, not the culture of the IMF).
He proceeds: "it is time for a look at the problems inherent to black
African nationalism as a political ideology. What is the long-term impact of
racial nationalism on identity and to what degree does it foster and
encourage an 'us' and 'them' mentality?"
Van Onselen's breaking of an imagined taboo tells us less about xenophobia
in SA and more about white prejudices that in turn have spawned a reluctance
to use the term "xenophobia" in ANC circles. But the replacement term
"afrophobia" also misses the mark. It's not just foreign nationals from
Africa ("our brothers and sisters"), but also Pakistani and Bangladeshi
traders who've been targeted.
Like all political ideologies, African nationalism, narrow or broad, creates
an "us" and a "them". Our eminently liberal constitution itself establishes
us-citizens and them-non-citizens and this is where the nub of the current
issue lies. The 1994 democratic breakthrough brought citizenship rights to a
majority of South Africans who'd never enjoyed them before. But, for the
poor and marginalised, citizenship has not lived up to expectations.
Instead, democracy has also brought an incoming flood of millions of
desperate migrants, some legal many not. The majority are fleeing poverty,
civil war, economic and environmental collapse - much of which relates to
decades of structural adjustment programmes with Africa exporting more
capital to the developed West than received in aid or investment.
There is the terrible, face-to-face butchery we've seen on newspaper
front-pages with the poor bashing the poor on the grounds that "they" are
taking away "our" jobs, "our" trading opportunities, "our" citizenship
rights. Last week it resulted in thousands of displacements and seven deaths
(three of them South Africans). In the same week 400 refugees drowned in the
Mediterranean, over the weekend another 700. There's the horror of
inter-personal violence and there's structural violence, the market-driven
violence of Adam Smith's "invisible hand". The invisibility of the latter
renders the beneficiaries of globalised, structural violence equally
invisible and seemingly blameless.
And this is where Munusamy's claim that SA is a global "deviant" is
misdirected. While it must never detract from our outright condemnation of
local xenophobic criminality, we need also to appreciate we're dealing with
the local impact of a global reality. We must deal decisively with our own
challenges (rapid prosecution of perpetrators, for instance). But we also
need to locate these challenges in a wider context.
One billion migrants now cross national borders every year, and the number
is growing. There is a deep hypocrisy in the way in which global capitalism
handles migrancy. On the one hand, the most weaponised international border
in the world (the US-Mexico border) acts, like the Mediterranean, as a
deadly buffer to staunch but not block the migrancy flow. Weaponised borders
appease populist electorates at home, but little effort is devoted to
inspecting work-places. Meanwhile, the dangers of crossing, and the
difficulties of obtaining legal papers, serve to create a large pool of
right-less, desperate workers, a key mechanism for maintaining low-wage,
flexible labour markets for Californian fruit-growers, Walmart retailers,
and the hospitality and fast-food chains. In Guy Standing's inimitable
phrase, migrants are "the light infantry of global capitalism."
. Cde Jeremy Cronin is SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary. To the courtesy
of the Cape Times, Left Turn Column, 22 April 2015 which first published
this piece.
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