Nearly three decades after the advent of democracy in SA it is clear that high levels of xenophobia are baked in and permanent. For as long as SA survives, so will the widespread hatred of Africans from other countries.
Few predicted this in 1994. Back then, generosity towards other Africans appeared to be part of our national spirit. South Africans were conscious, after all, that our neighbours had helped make freedom possible. So how did xenophobia become intractable?
Some argue that xenophobia is not just dark and ugly but irrational, and therefore in the profoundest sense unnecessary. People who are poor and desperate are easy to confuse, the argument goes; it is all too simple for the powerful to dangle a scapegoat in front of them. Foreigners substitute for real problems, like corruption, state failure and greed.
While there is truth to this, it does not begin to explain why xenophobia is quite so deep, so permanent, so ferocious. A more convincing answer, albeit extremely uncomfortable, is that xenophobia is an inevitable by-product of our democracy and will thus persist forever.
Why? Because the SA nation is such a precarious, barely believable construct; it only survives by carving out its borders with violence. The causes of the precarity of SA’s national identity are almost too numerous to list. It was not just the apartheid state that failed to imagine us all living together. So did the ANC. From the formation of its youth league in 1944, it never properly resolved whether true South Africans were the indigenous majority, or all black people, or black and white people together. The issue was in fact intractable, destined never to be finally resolved.
Albert Luthuli, arguably the most creative political figure in SA’s history, thought more deeply about this problem than most. “I am not prepared to concern myself with questions as ‘Where have you come from?’,” he wrote in 1958. “‘Do you come from the North? Did you come from Europe?’ It is not important. What is important is that we are all here.” His vision for an SA identity was as fragile as it was noble. The fractures of race were deeper and angrier than anything he could inspire.
Then there is the fact of SA’s northern border; it is extensive, and the traffic crossing it has always been persistent and dense. So much so that it renders the question of who is and is not South African obviously arbitrary. Millions of Sesotho, Setswana and Xitsonga speakers are either South African or not because of chance decisions their forebears took. And that is not to mention the millions of Zimbabweans who trace their origins to what is now KwaZulu-Natal and who speak a language that in SA is called Zulu.
This traffic did not cease in 1910 when the Union of SA was founded. Nor did it cease in 1994 when democracy came. Human movement in Southern Africa is more powerful and enduring than any border. It complicates all attempts to fix national identity. Amid this flux only one idea has proven powerful enough to anchor SA identity, at least among those who are poor and black: the idea that one experienced apartheid, or that one’s parents did, and that one is therefore owed redress.
Rooting national identity in recent history is hardly unique to SA. German identity, to take one of many examples, is bound to the Holocaust. That is one reason it has been so hard for Germans to accept Turkish immigrants and their children as fellow citizens; they arrived after the time that defines German identity; they were not there at the mythical point of origin.
In SA, foreigners are hated not just because they are thought to take jobs and business and other resources, but because these things are said to belong to those who suffered apartheid. This idea is defining, fundamental. It is, perhaps, the only idea that makes South Africans from those who are poor and black.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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