Xenophobia on the Rise in Southern Africa Amid Covid-19 Outbreak?

 Amid widespread economic decline and the alarming lowering of standards of the political discourse in South Africa, opportunistic xenophobes are stoking the fire against migrants.This comes after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that reports of rising xenophobia and stigmatisation of refugees had been noted in Southern Africa with the global body adding that tensions were not only limited to health stigmatisation but also linked to increasing economic pressures in refugee-hosting areas amid the impacts of Covid-19 restrictions.

Rising Xenophobia Needs to Be Challenged 

In this difficult situation, there has been an alarming escalation of an increasingly crude nativist and xenophobic discourse. Much of it is driven by elites who are trying to exclude migrants from positions at universities and in corporations. And it is not just happening in WhatsApp groups or online.

The escalation and normalisation of xenophobic sentiment reached a new stage when the Sunday Independent published a vituperative article on its front page on 23 August under the headline, in capital letters, "SA UNDER FOREIGN CONTROL", with the word "foreign" in red. As one Facebook user commented: "Imagine a headline in a German newspaper in 1938 with the headline, in the same colour scheme, reading 'Germany under Jewish control'. Or a newspaper in Rwanda in 1994 with the headline, again in the same colour scheme, reading 'Rwanda under Tutsi control'."

In the article, migrants are referred to as "enemy agents'". The Sunday Independent is not generally considered a credible newspaper after its explicit support for the Jacob Zuma faction of the ANC, its withdrawal from the Press Council and the shenanigans of its owner, Iqbal Survé, who was massively enriched with public money during the Zuma years. Nonetheless, it is a deeply shocking headline and one that can be read as a deliberate incitement to violence.

The 'put South Africa first' rhetoric

The article suggests that the devastating levels of unemployment in South Africa are due to migration. This is plainly not the case, and it's an argument that leaves racial capitalism and ANC mismanagement off the hook while scapegoating people who are already in an extremely precarious situation. However, it is a view that has been shared by many xenophobes recently, including the All Truck Drivers Foundation, which used and encouraged vicious language against migrant drivers. More than 200 people - mostly migrants - have been killed in the violence plaguing the trucking industry. Many of those who are spewing the most dangerous xenophobic and chauvinistic statements online claim, much like President Donald Trump in the United States, to be acting out of love for South Africa and its people. Some xenophobes here have even adopted a version of Trump's slogan: 'Put South Africa First'.

The road to this increasingly steep descent of our public discourse into such dangerous forms of dehumanisation was paved by a number of public figures, including several ANC politicians as well as former mayor of Johannesburg Herman Mashaba, South African First's Mario Khumalo, and the African Transformation Movement's Vuyolwethu Zungula.