Abstract
The present article fleshes out the observation that in actuality what is circulated in journalistic and scholarly literature as xenophobia in South Africa is systemic and structural racism that is rooted in colonial and apartheid history. As such the term xenophobia, as it denotes the fear and also hatred of foreign others by native nationals of South Africa, tends to conceal rather than reveal that systemic and structural constructs of racism at a world and local scale produce and locate black Africans of other countries in South Africa as alien and foreign others that are in the receiving end of nationalist and ultimately racist passions of hatred and violence. In a country that has not fully recovered from the homeland racist nationalism that placed black natives of South Africa according to geographic and ethnic lines, the black Africans from other countries take the place of racialized and excluded outsiders who become candidates for hatred, discrimination, and violation. In this way what is termed xenophobia is actually racism and the coloniality of being and belonging that accompanies it. This article, therefore, provides a decolonial understanding and interpretation of xenophobia as racism in South Africa.
Highlights
In the ideological life of language, what is said tends not to be what is meant, and when that happens truth but ethics and social justice suffer, especially where such terms as xenophobia are concerned, where being and life are at stake
This paper argues that apartheid racism and nationalism constructed and produced political identities that made black Africans, especially those from other African countries, vulnerable
Before this paper focuses on xenophobia as racism in the South African context, it is important to examine how racism produces and is part of xenophobia in the world system
Summary
Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. William Mpofu is a researcher in the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a founding member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network. His main research interest is decoloniality, especially the philosophy of liberation
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