Agenda motive in story on attacks

African Diaspora Forum members march in Yeoville for social cohesion following the looting of foreign-owned shops that started when a 14-year-old boy was shot by a foreign shop owner in Soweto. Picture: Dumisani Dube

African Diaspora Forum members march in Yeoville for social cohesion following the looting of foreign-owned shops that started when a 14-year-old boy was shot by a foreign shop owner in Soweto. Picture: Dumisani Dube

Published Jan 31, 2015

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It’s futile to deny they were xenophobic; we should condemn them and ensure the police play more effective role in community safety, writes Jeremy Cronin.

Johannesburg - WITH the awful spiralling of mob looting of foreign-owned shops in Gauteng, a nonsensical debate was recycled. Was it xenophobia or was it criminal? As if the two were mutually exclusive.

Gauteng MEC for Community Safety Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane didn’t help.

“We want to clarify,” she declared. “These are not xenophobic attacks but criminal attacks”.

It was a claim that didn’t make any sense in the face of the reality unfolding on the ground. Scores of shops owned by non-South Africans were being targeted.

There was footage of looters shouting abusive language, branding foreign shop owners as “dogs” to be driven out.

But the misdirected debate (xenophobia or criminality) was also fanned by a journalistic storyline in certain quarters.

Last Thursday’s The Times is a case in point. Its front-page story sought to pit the MEC’s views against those of the SA Human Rights Commission.

The Times said: “The SA Human Rights Commission has warned that the attacks should not be considered criminality as the targets have been foreign nationals.”

The commission never said anything of the sort. It would never have denied the criminality of these actions as the paper purported.

What the commission spokesman did say, however, was: “The fact that they target only foreign-owned shops has a xenophobic undertone which is concerning…”

If anything, “undertone” is an understatement. I suspect this wasn’t a case of sloppy journalism on the part of The Times, but rather an editorial agenda, seeking to exploit the unfolding tragedy, to play off a chapter nine organisation (in this case the commission) against the ANC-led executive.

But why would the MEC deny xenophobia?

Perhaps she was expressing more clumsily what the spokesman for the State Security Agency, Brian Dube, said in a more nuanced way?

These were indeed “acts of criminality”, Dube said, but not “systematic and planned xenophobic attacks on foreigners”.

I do not think that there is an extensive, relatively well-organised force in our communities with a strategic agenda of eliminating foreign-owned township traders.

Although in recent years there have been occasional reports of township traders issuing pamphlets against foreign traders, we don’t have the kind of organised anti-migrant, Islamophobic political mobilisation happening in Leipzig, or active in resurgent neo-Nazi parties like those in France and elsewhere in Europe.

It’s important to flag these European examples. But, in a sense, they are easy targets because they are (for the moment) largely outside of the hegemonic, global neo-liberal narrative which can recognise racial prejudice in neo-Nazi thugs, but can live self-righteously and unreflectively with Eurocentric racial prejudice dressed up as satire in Charlie Hebdo.

I suspect that part of the anxiety to deny the existence of xenophobia is connected to this and a post-apartheid South African cringe – the not unfounded fear among the global elite that criminality will be seen as “bad but normal”, while black township xenophobia will be cast as yet more evidence of the savagery of the Dark Continent.

In this respect, a knee-jerk xenophobia denialism bears a family resemblance to the tragic Aids denialism of the recent past, grounded, in part, in the belief that it was all a Western conspiracy to denigrate African male sexuality.

Daily Maverick columnist Ranjeni Munsamy plays directly into this self-denigrating narrative.

“The scenes of violence… in Soweto this week show us the evil streak in our society… Racism is innate in our society,” she adds, muddling up Zelda la Grange’s irrelevant tweets and the looting of shops.

“We are… a nation in decline.”

Her piece is rooted in another common narrative – nostalgia for a recent rainbow past that never was. It is a narrative based on exaggerated claims about the exceptionalism of apartheid (as if it were detached from a more general global pattern of colonial and neo-colonial oppressions); and the equally exaggerated claims of a miraculous Madiba-led reconciliation.

Let us not be in denial about ugly xenophobic emotions in many poor townships. Let us unambiguously condemn it. Immediate steps must be taken, like ensuring police play a much more effective role in community safety.

More generally, we need to understand the current violence less as some innate “streak of evil”, and more as a subset of futile and opportunistic violence, in which the poor turn inwards against the poor, whether as rival taxi associations, or as striking workers against fellow workers, or as desperate shack dwellers invading other people’s RDP homes.

Unless we understand and actively transform the structural violence that underpins these episodes of more or less spontaneous violence, we will not make great headway. And this means also rejecting storylines that mask this structural violence and the complicity of its real beneficiaries with their oh-so civilised refrain: “I’m not racist but… look what happens when THEY take over.” It’s a refrain that inevitably provokes a knee-jerk denialism: “Our people aren’t xenophobic.”

* Cronin is the Deputy Minister of Public Works and SACP deputy general secretary.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

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