Xenophilia in Muizenberg, South Africa: New potentials for race relations?

Abstract

Since the advent of democracy in 1994 race relations in South Africa have not improved substantially. The arrival of transmigrants from other African countries has emphasized a wounded South African psyche, as various xenophobic attitudes and attacks attest. However, a lesser known reality is the expression of xenophilia by South African women. In this article I argue that an intimate relationship between a South African coloured woman and a Congolese black man scripts a different potentiality for multiracial relations in the private and public spaces of urban Cape Town, South Africa. [Coloured; Congolese; Xenophilia; South Africa; Race; Love; Transnationalism]

Making Life Liveable in an Informal Market

“…We highlight Francis Nyamnjoh's (2017: 258) concept of "frontier Africans" to argue that migrants in the Workshop Market "constantly seek to bridge various divides in the interest of the imperatives of living interconnections, nuances and complexities made possible or exacerbated by the evidence of mobilities and encounters. " African migrants may also actively engage with South Africans through the sharing of cultural and culinary practices as well as "embodied performances" through which friendships have been built (Murara 2020), or through forms of "ordinary" intimacy and "xenophilia" (Owen 2016) between South Africans and other African migrant groups. Henrietta Nyamnjoh (2017: 242) argues that conviviality for Cameroonians in Cape Town is prioritized over "individuality, " leading to "interconnections and interdependencies of relationships that are woven in their ontological security, personhood and everyday lives to reduce vulnerability. "…”