An Encounter with Apartheid's Protest

This chapter frames #PutSouthAfricaFirst, a South African protest against “foreigners” of African origin, as an encounter with apartheid's protest. It traces direct ideological and empirical lines from primitive apartheid, when the National Party defended apartheid against foreign interference, to 2020, when South Africans took to social media to protest the presence of foreigners under the slogan “#PutSouthAfricaFirst.” The chapter demonstrates that #PutSouthAfricaFirst borrows from and reproduces the mechanisms of primitive apartheid exclusion. Instead of racial exclusion, #PutSouthAfricaFirst promotes national exclusion, but the structure is the same, suggesting that apartheid's sorting and classifying has evolved rather than ended. #PutSouthAfricaFirst is therefore not a break from primitive apartheid-era thinking, but its evolution.