Objetivos de área:

Neocosmos has used Fanon’s theorisation of the pitfalls of national consciousness to explain xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. His book From “foreign natives” to “native foreigners” attempts to provide a comprehensive and rigorous explanation of the horrific events of May 2008 in South Africa. The core of this book argues that “xenophobia should be understood as a political discourse. Its historical development, as well as the conditions of its existence, must be explained in terms of the practices and prescriptions which structure the field of politics” (Neocosmos, 2010: 11). Neocosmos argues that in “South Africa the history of xenophobia is linked to the manner in which citizenship has been conceived and fought over during modern South African history” (2010: 11). Xenophobia in South Africa is a problem of post-coloniality: a phenomenon that Fanon squarely connects to the politics of the dominant groups in the period following independence (2010: 9). Thus, the “prevalence of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa is an effect of the hegemony of a particular form of state politics; a politics which reduces citizenship to indigeneity and to a politically passive conception of citizenship” (Neocosmos, 2010: 17). “It is as a consequence of such politics (a particular kind of nationalism of the bourgeoisie) that for Fanon chauvinism and xenophobia grip the masses, which feel entitled to claim national resources as their own” (2010: 11). Within the context of such politics, what provides you with the “power to claim these resources is indigeneity” (2010: 11), hence xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa, is very much like the xenophobia noted by Fanon’s theory of the pitfalls of national consciousness. In both cases, xenophobia is “directed against those foreigners in positions of political weakness” (2010: 11). The hegemony of this mode of politics was secured because of a “failure to sustain an alternative popular- democratic political discourse which had stressed a different understanding of citizenship and

the nation” (2010: 18). Such liberal state politics has remained largely unchallenged. Following Fanon’s theory, Neocosmos proposes that alternative conceptions of politics and citizenship be sought beyond state forms of politics. Like Fanon, he is pessimistic about the role of political leaders in combating xenophobia. Such pessimism is eloquently elucidated in Neocosmos’ statement he makes that “Despite proffering their abhorrence at xenophobic violence, few politicians are likely to take the risk of leading a vigorous anti-xenophobic campaign, given their need for re-election by a xenophobic populace […] xenophobia must [therefore] be understood as very much embedded in the politics of interest which govern local politics” (2010: 18). Fanon’s theory is central here as it asserts that post-colonial leaders have a tendency to grab power for their own selfish interests at the expense of the masses of the people, who are then left impoverished or even worse off than they were pre-independence (1961).

Nigel Gibson is another scholar who has applied the Fanonian perspective to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa as a “promised land”. He argues that we “cannot talk about ethnic or xenophobic violence in South Africa without thinking about the geographical layout of post-apartheid society as an expression of what Fanon calls incomplete liberation” (2011: 5). One symptom of this incompleteness is the exclusion of people from full citizenship. This gives rise to “ethnic chauvinism and nativism, which are legitimized via claims of indigeneity while simultaneously reproducing a politics of political, social and spatial exclusion rooted in apartheid racial classifications” (2011: 6). In this context, Gibson argues that “South Africa’s incomplete liberation is evident in the xenophobic violence of May 2008, which quickly spread across the country’s urban shack lands” (2011: 6). He observes that though the specific grievances that led up to the “anti-foreigner attacks might have been unemployment, lack of housing, as well as frustration with failed government policies, the fact of the matter is that frustration and discourses of ethnic and national chauvinism did not arrive out of the blue” (2011: 6). Instead, they emerged from the politics endorsed or at least channelled by factions of local and also government elites, as well as civil servants (2011: 7). Thus, the violence of the lived experiences of the poor who are continually told that African “aliens” are to be blamed for their situation finds expression in the restricted urban spaces where “natives” are permitted to live in the form of black on black violence (Fanon, 1961). For Gibson, although the spread of violence across shack lands in May 2008 was publicly decried by politicians, this “kind of violence was still contained and held acceptable by the elites” (2011: 8).

In sum, Gibson argues that the xenophobic violence of 2008 is a “product of pauperization but it is also a consequence of the state and non-governmental organisations’ silencing of alternative voices – what Fanon would consider a suppression of politics and oppositional discourses that allow the poor to organize and make their own demands” (2011: 12).

In addition to Fanon, I also rely on the work of Neocosmos (2010) and Gibson (2011). Both scholars have applied the Fanonian theorisation of the pitfalls of national consciousness in their analysis of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, these scholars study xenophobia specifically within the South African context in an era where one of the worst outbreaks of xenophobic violence in the history of this country has occurred.