"Xenophobia" in South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of Witchcraft

Abstract

This article explores the violent, anti-immigrant riots that swept through informal settlements in South Africa in 2008, during which more than sixty foreigners were killed and more than one hundred thousand displaced. In the first part of the paper, I draw on research conducted in informal settlements around the city of Durban to argue that many people’s perceptions of foreigners are informed by ideas about witches and witchcraft, which articulate with widespread anxieties about rising unemployment, housing shortages, and a general crisis of social reproduction. These ideas provide a semiotic environment in which anti-immigrant violence becomes thinkable. In the second part of the paper, I argue that these ethnographic data help us interrogate existing theories of xenophobic violence, which tend to see it as a reaction to the cultural confusion and social anomie that globalization allegedly triggers. This dominant approach relies on assumptions about order and chaos that are native to Euro-American culture and thus do not necessarily apply cross-culturally. I show that these assumptions have a long and troubling history in South Africa, where colonial administrators and mid-century social scientists drew on them in their attempts to manage African populations.

Displays of Masculinity and Rituals of Display: Congolese Immigration and Xenophobia in Johannesburg

“…From that standpoint, Benita Moolman encourages us to view xenophobia in South Africa as being driven through masculinised struggles; as being characterised by “the persistent tension of scarce resources and ultimately the competition between different categories of Black men based on geographic, cultural and linguistic differences” (Moolman, : 97‐98). Jason Hickel has written that Black South African men “suffer from a crisis of masculinity, having been expelled from the path to manhood that was encouraged under apartheid” (: 105), which, to follow on with Moolman's hypothesis, can lead to “[r]acialized masculinities in South Africa [being] then reconstituted through ‘the foreign other’” (Moolman, : 99).…”

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

“…The disdain with which black South Africans were regarded by whites is thus transferred to the exotic black other, through a South African black psyche that is still wounded. Adding to the complexity of the conceptualisation of violence against African foreigners, others like Hickel (), argue for a folk understanding of the violence meted out against black African transmigrants, asserting that African immigrants’ employment and their relationships with South African women are cited as evidence for African transmigrants’ practise of witchcraft. Hickel argues that anti‐immigrant violence is not merely a response to the pressing demands of the neoliberal moment in South Africa, but rather part of a re‐ordering of social relations where African immigrants are accused of illegitimate social reproduction.…”

“…Hickel argues that anti‐immigrant violence is not merely a response to the pressing demands of the neoliberal moment in South Africa, but rather part of a re‐ordering of social relations where African immigrants are accused of illegitimate social reproduction. As Hickel (, 121) contends, “the figure of the immigrant represents the ideal neoliberal subject: individualized, kinless, uprooted, cheap, flexible, enterprising, maximizing, and risk‐taking. Residents of Cato Manor refuse to celebrate this kind of personhood and cast it as cultureless, dangerous, unstable, and destructive; in sum, as bare life, devoid of the characteristics that make a person fully human.” Anti‐immigrant violence is thus meant to order South Africans’ social reproduction, which includes employment, and the creation of stable livelihoods that undergird further social reproduction.…”

Leaving No One Behind?: Informal Economies, Economic Inclusion and Islamic Extremism in Nigeria

“…Charles Gore (: 71) refers to this as a ‘Faustian bargain’ that buys global consensus at the cost of abandoning the core development goals of social and economic equality. However, it is a bargain that also glosses over the growing risks of paradigm maintenance, expressed in a rising tide of xenophobic riots, religious extremism and other forms of violent unrest among those that inclusive markets continue to leave behind (Hickel, ; Khanna, ; Osterbo, ; Resnick & Thurlow, ). The post‐2015 agenda needs a stronger focus on the losers in inclusive markets, or they will find other ways to make themselves heard.…”