The idea of postapartheid South Africa
2.5. Borders, anti-black violence and xenophobia
Borders have become highly visible in the postapartheid moment as the postcolonial moment. The increase in migration between postapartheid South Africa and the rest of Africa has made borders so hyper-visible that they are appearing even within the country’s urban spaces (See chapters 7 and 8). Balibar notes that this has complicated the question of a border as “we cannot attribute to the border an essence which would be valid in all places and at all times” (2002: 75). In the case of South Africa, a brief history of Beitbridge border post is necessary. As the biggest and busiest land border post, Beitbridge Border Post is the template of all bordering in South Africa. It has a history that dates back to that of the ‘real’ colonisation of Southern Africa. Walia (2013) has argued on these links between borders and imperialism. It is a huge infrastructure sprawling either sides of the banks of Limpopo River and linked by a bridge built in 1929. The bridge was named after
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Alfred Beit, founder of the De Beers Diamond Mining Company and Director of a number of companies such as British South Africa Company (BSAC) and Rhodesia Railways (Maredi, 2014).
The BSAC is the company formed in South Africa with the express goal of colonising Zimbabwe.
According to Olson and Shadle, the border was established by the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and later replaced by the London Convention of 1884 (1991: 367). The London Convention drew and set the boundaries of the South African Republic, at that time the Transvaal Republic (Moyo, 2016: 428). The history of the Beitbridge border, and how it has grown to be among the biggest in Africa, is tied to a long history of labour migration between South Africa and the rest of the continent as earlier discussed in this chapter.
The border is central to, and an organizing logic in, postapartheid’s colonial presence. Sidaways notes that the “empire is especially legible at frontiers and borders” (2019: 271). In that these borders extend into the interior of the country, the “empire is visible in imperial capitals too”
(Sidaways, 2019: 270). The coloniality of the borders is in their role in manufacturing difference in people signalling “who ought to matter versus who ought not; who is from a “great” place versus who is from a “shithole;” and who is human versus who is “animal” (Gahaman and Hjalmarson, 2019: 108). Borders not only ‘sort’ people into desirables (included) and undesirables (excluded), but also manufactures what Mignolo (2007) calls “colonial difference”. This border imperialism draws our attention to “the networks and modes of governance that determine how bodies will be included within the nation-state, and how territory will be controlled within and in conjunction with the dictates of global empire and transnational capitalism” (Walia, 2013: 5). The coloniality of the border is not only in its ties with the historical event of European colonization of Africa but also the colonial work that these borders continue to perform. In that borders make the world, especially the (post)colonial world legible, albeit under the logics of racialised modernity, they (borders) play a representation role.
In South Africa’s postapartheid moment, the migrant labour system, which continues as capital is still concentrated in South Africa, is now seen as the root of xenophobic outbreaks in the country.
With unemployment at 40 percent, especially among young black people, the swelling numbers of unemployed is seen as restless and turning on black migrants. Some scholars have pointed out that xenophobia is some kind of anti-black racism encouraging black-on-black violence. However,
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scholars are always reluctant to make a link between xenophobia, the economy and race.
MacDonald and James note that in the debate on the role of capitalist development in “the officially mandated racism of South Africa […] liberals either ignored, minimized, or denied an association, Marxists argued that capitalism and its dominant classes systematically promoted and actively underwrote apartheid in particular, and white domination in general” (1993: 387). We now turn to make the link between the border, migrant labour and xenophobia.
For Tafira, a spectre haunts postapartheid South Africa’s black communities and it is the spectre of xenophobia, which he describes as “intra-black-racism or black-on-black racism” (2018: vii).
He points out that, “xenophobia is not a postapartheid aberration [but] has its roots deep in the colonial contact,” which produces a “black subject and black subjectivities” that are “colonised”
and not “only self-hating, but hates another that looks like them” (Tafira, 2018: vii). In the postapartheid moment, xenophobia is seen as a continuation of the anti-black violence of the apartheid hostels, the mining compounds and the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal on the eve of South Africa’s independence in 1994. All this violence is underwritten by an anti-black racism linked to modernity, colonialism and the globalisation of capital. For Magubane, white settlers are a creation of the world capitalist economic system from the seventeenth century who “would safeguard colonial conquest and secure these countries as future outlets for excess population and for investment of capital from the metropolitan country” (1979: 3). The links between xenophobia, settler colonialism and global capital are that global capital in Africa manufactured colonial difference leading to people fighting over resources based on these differences. Bledsoe and Wright posit that globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness are articulated in that “prevailing forms of global capital accumulation—which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world — coincide with acts of anti-blackness” (2018: 1; See Wynter, 1976; McKrittick, 2011). Arguing that settler colonialism encourages self-hate among black people, Tafira, notes that underwritten by violence “settler colonialism is established within the confines of white supremacy in which race and rabid racism are underlying factors […] the justification is eminently religious, epistemological and scientific” (2018: 4). This coloniality of being is “the normalisation of the extraordinary events that take place in war [where] ‘killability’ and ‘rapeability’ are inscribed into the images of the colonial bodies. (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 255). From colonial, through
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apartheid, to the postapartheid moment spaces that black subjects occupy are characterised by explicit and implicit violence as seen in xenophobia and crime.