Give a description of a recent 2016-2018 example of how xenophobia has displayed itself in your community
Answers
7 September 2018 - Loren B Landau
Foreign nationals have, yet again, been attacked, displaced and had their shops looted in South Africa.
This is an unfortunate – but entirely unsurprising – way to mark the anniversary of the 2008 xenophobic attacks during which tens of thousands were displaced and more than 60 people killed.
Even before 2008, a handful of scholars and activists were urging the government to do more to protect those targeted for violence because of their geographic origins. Only after the 2008 melee did the government join civil society and international organisations in committing to ensure that such bloodletting would never happen again. But, it has.
Why? Firstly, both the government and civil society are culpable. The government continues to sideline xenophobic violence the same way it does most violence affecting poor South African communities. It has naturalised anti-outsider violence by blaming it variously on criminality or the natural resentment poor South Africans feel towards those they perceive as “stealing” opportunities from them.
Civil society efforts have fared little better in arresting the violence. Many organisation, foreign and domestic, have responded in a classic “garbage-can” fashion, matching ready-made solutions to problems they only poorly understand. The results include innumerable marches, education campaigns, rights awareness symposiums, and social cohesion summits. Various bodies, including the one I work for, regularly document the abuse of migrants at the hands of police, authorities and neighbours.
The solution doesn’t lie in simply doing more of the same. What’s required is to recalibrate how xenophobia is covered, particularly how stories are told about migrants – their rights, suffering, and their relationship to the citizens around them. The way it’s currently done is doing more harm than good.
South African coverage of migrants falls into what the president of the global Ethical Journalism Network, Aidan White, recently noted was a trend towards “victim journalism” in global migration coverage.
But changing course means going against the grain of the dominant narratives. It means destabilising the language and approaches used to speak about violence and immigration. This is as true in South Africa as it is elsewhere in the world.
When one does this, as Tanya Pampalone and I have tried to do in the book I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in Africa’s Great Metropolis. the stories are often difficult to digest. They are uncomfortable because they upset easy binaries and accusations. They also point to new opportunities to build communities that are inclusive and safe...