Yet when the Sunday Times visited Ramaphosa three weeks ago,
we tracked down an eyewitness who pointed out two of the main suspects in the
crime. The woman sees the killers at least once a week. Her recounting of
details surrounding Nhamuave's death has remained consistent for nearly seven
years, when she first revealed details of the murder. At the time she was
willing to speak to police. "But the police never came here. Now, I don't
trust the police here," she said.
On May 18 2008, Sipho was part of a mob intent on chasing
foreigners out of the settlement. "He's the one who stabbed him. He stood
over him when he was down and stabbed him, like this," said the witness,
motioning downward with a two-handed grip. The mob then wrapped their victim in
his own blankets and tried to set him alight. They failed. Bheki*, another
attacker, walked to the traffic circle, where a fire was burning, and returned
with a flaming piece of wood, which was placed under the man. "Then it
worked. He was on fire," the witness said.
Concerns about livelihoods seem similar to cases of
xenophobia everywhere else in the world where people seek scapegoats for their
deprivation. Unemployment rocketing from 13 percent in 1994 to 25 percent in
2013, or 40 percent by unofficial measures. According to the Economist, “half
of South Africans under 24 looking for work have none. Of those who have jobs,
a third earn less than $2 a day.” Since 1994, the number of people living on
less than one dollar a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million. Two
million people have lost their homes because of forced removals and inflated
rents, and the number of shack dwellers has increased by fifty percent, to the
point where today more than one quarter of South Africans live in shacks. The
argument holds that as livelihoods become ever more precarious, competition
over jobs, housing, and retail have reached extreme levels. In the face of this
mounting competition, people seek to leverage whatever social distinctions are
most readily available in order to lay claim to diminishing resources. In the
context of post-apartheid South Africa, those who believe they have the right
to benefit from the promised—but as yet unrealized—fruits of liberation draw
lines between themselves and the non-citizens who they believe should not have
such a right. The primary problem with immigrants according to local people is
that they undermine the economic opportunities of local citizens. According to
my interlocutors, they do this by both outcompeting South African–owned
businesses in the informal economy, and by undercutting the labor market by
working for rates far below the minimum wage, allegedly as low as R25 per day.
Thus the ubiquitous complaint that “foreigners are stealing our jobs.” The
strength of this xenophobia is the fear of the unknown”. Add to this the fact
that people are competing against their neighbors for scarce jobs in a context
in which livelihoods are increasingly precarious, and you have a recipe for
disaster. People are forced to establish claims to limited resources by
defining the others who do not belong, who should not belong, and who never can
belong. In other words, by xenophobia.
In addition to job
theft, the men also accused foreigners of stealing their women by wooing them
with cash, outdoing the local competition because they have fewer financial
responsibilities to kin. Marriage rates, down to less than half of 1960 levels,
so that today only 3 of 10 South African adults are married. With unemployment
rates as high as they are, most young men find it impossible to raise the
resources they need to pay lobola (bridewealth) and establish their own
legitimate, respectable homes. They suffer from a crisis of masculinity, having
been expelled from the path to manhood that was encouraged under apartheid—that
of becoming umnumzane, a respectable, working-class family man. Instead, they
find themselves in their thirties and still living with their mothers, earning
the social derision due to umnqolo—a “mamma’s boy.” Immigrants are accused of
being able to make do with very little money for wages because they come here
with no responsibilities. If they get R25 per day they have enough to eat. They
don’t have responsibilities. They don’t have wives. Residents accuse immigrants of hoarding their
money without reinvesting it in the community through exchange. People accuse
them of impregnating local women without paying bridewealth or cleansing fines
(inhlawulo). Immigrants are perceived to traffic in the pure commodity,
accumulating only for themselves while avoiding entanglement in relationships
of reciprocity, in stark contrast to South Africans who are increasingly
burdened by debt obligations. This representation is inaccurate, of course, as
most immigrants remit to their home countries and are deeply embedded in
transnational kin networks, while many young South African men father children
without providing for them. Yet the stereotype retains its power.
Why are foreigners so often killed by burning? Why are they
not lynched or beheaded? In the 1990s, young unemployed males burned
accused-witches while chanting the words “Die, you witch; we can’t get jobs
because of you!” Foreigners use witchcraft, or, in IsiZulu, ubuthakathi. Just
like witches, immigrants are said to participate in forms of accumulation that
are considered immoral and anti-social, enriching themselves at the expense of
others. This makes it not only thinkable for people to orchestrate violence
against immigrants, but also gives the violence the aura of legitimacy, for it
appears to be in the service of morality.
Taken from here
No comments:
Post a Comment