ABSTRACT
Ethnic politics, in its local form, has been a regrettable topic to which to return. While the case here is South African – more specifically Zuluness as political ideology and politicised identity – the generalisable argument is that ethnic mobilisation continues to tempt political entrepreneurs in the contemporary world, towards different ends, all divisive and with massively skewed consequences and long-term implications. Ernesto Laclau pointed this out decades ago. Ethnic mobilisation relates closely to populist, nationalist, racist and religious calls, into mobilised forms and there are numerous examples of these globally. It also provides motivation and explanation for gendered, patriarchal ‘customs’. At the time of writing, the anti-immigrant, nationalist massacre at Christchurch (New Zealand), of all the world’s places, was unfolding in the news, utilised immediately by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to mobilise on nationalist and religious grounds for forthcoming elections. Ethnic mobilisation, sharing essentialising cultural dimensions with these other forms, is as potent as all of them are. They trump class and gender, and sideline widely shared social, material and environmental problems that confront the globe and all its living things. The embedding, in daily life and state templates, of these identities mirror that of race because the practice carries similarities and is equally dangerous in relentless political utilisation (see, for example, Maré 2014).
