ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 brings us back to South Africa. I look at some of the contradictions of what, after the first democratic elections, Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu optimistically called the rainbow nation. The borders of the South African rainbow have been thrown into relief by the waves of xenophobia directed at African migrants and, in some cases, at South African Black ethnolinguistic minorities – hence the labels “Afrophobia” and “Negrophobia” – that have followed one another since 1994. This history is introduced by the juxtaposition of the xenophobic attacks of 2008 with the soccer World Cup of 2010: how to reconcile the violent manifestation of chauvinism and anti-Black hatred represented by the former with the celebrations of both national and Pan-African pride that defined the sporting event? To answer this question, I fall back on political theory. I argue that exclusionary state prescriptions about nation and citizenship have turned formerly anticolonial nationalism into a regressive ideology. I use this argument to make sense of the strident contrast between post-apartheid xenophobia and the radical declaration, included in the Preamble to the South African Constitution, that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it. Starting from there, I take stock of the vast South African archive of media representations, literary texts, feature films and documentaries that focus or touch on xenophobia. Among these, I discuss creative interventions that strive to imagine a post-identitarian politics that transcends national and ethnic identifications: from the inclusive cosmopolitanism promoted by Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) to Akin Omotoso’s feature film Man on Ground (2011) and the social media campaign that accompanied its release, titled “We Are from Here.” I argue that translating the idea of a shared common humanity into politics entails dealing with concrete issues tied to border regimes and contestations about citizenship rights.
