(Re)writing xenophobia: Understanding press coverage of cross-border migration in Southern Africa

Abstract

Xenophobia – although difficult at times to disentangle from other psychological and structural influences such as racism, nationalism and ethnocentrism – refers specifically to “a deep dislike of foreigners” (Oxford Concise Dictionary).This definition describes a discrete set of attitudes that manifest themselves in the behaviours of governments, the general public and the media.This is certainly true in South and southern Africa where xenophobia is distinctive and widespread (albeit uneven across the region) and where the print media in particular has been accused of exacerbating the phenomenon. In a previous article, Danso and McDonald (2001) reviewed English-language press coverage in South Africa from 1994 to 1998 and argued that reportage and editorial comment on cross-border migration was largely anti-immigrant and unanalytical.Not all such treatment of the issue by the media was negative and superficial, and there did appear to be gradual improvement over time, but the overwhelming majority of newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor employed sensationalist, anti-immigrant language and uncritically reproduced problematic statistics and assumptions about cross-border migration in the region. The purpose of the current paper is threefold.First, it updates the previous study to determine what, if any, changes have occurred in South Africa with respect to xenophobia in the press by looking at English-language newspapers from 2000 to early 2005 and comparing the results to the former survey.Second, and more im portantly, the paper poses a series of hypotheses as to why press coverage in South Africa is xenophobic (or not) and where we might expect to see trends developing in the future. The paper also expands the analysis to other countries of the region – namely, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia (with the emphasis on the first two due to the relatively small sample sizes of news material available for the latter). An analysis of these additional countries helps to expand our understanding of the regional aspects of xenophobia in the press and places our study of South Africa in empirical and theoretical perspective.The variations across the region serve to highlight important theoretical differences, which show that there is no