Rehearsals of genocide in South Africa: thinking with and beyond Francis Nyamnjoh and Michael Neocosmos

Abstract

How do we know when a state is rehearsing genocide? This question has been answered in spectacular fashion in contemporary Africa: the veiled language of the Biafran war in Nigeria, which masked mass murder; the state-sponsored near-annihilation of the Tutsis within 100 days in Rwanda; the unbridled love for power by Islamic militias in Somalia that has rendered the country stateless; and the violation of Darfurians with impunity in Sudan. Such obvious cases make Africa appear to be a place where anything that can go wrong will destroy social norms overnight. Such instances also mask the violations of humanity occurring in neoliberal democracies such as South Africa. For example, the xenophobic attacks on resident black Africans from elsewhere are the product of the revived neurosis of separate development in the aftermath of 1994. South Africa's black middle class condones xenophobia and colludes in the state's failure to deliver real independence to the masses of unemployed South African blacks. Many of South Africa's black academics collude in the popular discourse that accuses black foreigners of taking their jobs and their women. The persecution of black foreigners, derisively known as Makwerekwere in South African official and local parlance, is also a consequence of the contradiction of globalisation and its bounded citizenship. Some have suggested ordinary South Africans have their own parochial biases, even though both local and national leaders have inspired them to assault and berate black foreigners. I draw on Francis Nyamnjoh's book, Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), and Michael Neocosmos' work, From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Citizen and Nationalism, Identity and Politics (2006), to discuss how xenophobia choreographs everyday life in South Africa. The paper argues that beyond the role that South African leaders and the masses continue to play in persecuting individual and black foreigners, other African countries have not stood up against South Africa's chauvinistic behaviour and its crimes against humanity. Whatever the source of this silence from the rest of the continent, the South African state and a significant portion of the country's population has felt free to deploy its resources to persecute, undermine and exploit foreign blacks without censure either from the African Union or from the United Nations.