State is complicit in xenophobic violence undermining the rule of law
2 September 2019
The Right2Know Campaign strongly condemns the recent spate of attacks on foreign nationals from other African countries in Gauteng and in KwaZulu-Natal earlier this year. The assaults on people and the looting of their property just because they were not born in South Africa can never be justified. These actions - which are criminal in nature - when combined with the targeting of the victims as belonging to a certain group, becomes a hate crime.
Apartheid was the experience of being stateless and homeless within one’s home country. Today, we find South Africans showing the same hatred towards fellow Africans that we ourselves suffered not too long ago. As hosts of the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, we recognised xenophobia (and the local Afrophobia) as expressions of racism; in 2008 we experienced how the deep roots of internalised oppression enabled us to turn our own experience of racism and oppression into actions that discriminated against, targeted and in some cases killed other Africans living in South Africa.
It is an issue of national shame that xenophobic violence has become a regular and highly visible feature of South Africa’s political landscape. Outsiders have been regularly attacked, killed and their livelihoods destroyed since the dawn of democracy in 1994. In April this year, major violent incidents occurred in Durban, when foreign nationals were attacked and displaced in five locations around the city. This past week in two of the three metropolitan areas of Gauteng - Tshwane and Johannesburg - Africans from other countries have been targeted and assaulted, their businesses and possessions looted and they have been displaced from their homes.
We recognise that there are many sources of the violence but it is also clear that statements of outrage and condemnation by state officials at all levels (Cabinet, Parliament, the Gauteng Province, SAPS and Metros) fuelled the actions of ordinary citizens who interpreted those statements to be licence to take the law into their own hands. The recent xenophobic attacks on non-South Africans can be directly linked to calls by politicians to ‘defend the sovereignty of the state’ and confirms a dangerous emerging trend of xenophobic populism which leads to attacks on foreign nationals. The xenophobic intent was and still very clear. It wanted to do what the state had failed to do: remove foreigners from the city.