Xenophobia as Racism: The Colonial Underside of Nationalism in South Africa

Abstract

The present article fleshes out the observation that in actuality what is circulated in journalistic and scholarly literature as xenophobia in South Africa is systemic and structural racism that is rooted in colonial and apartheid history. As such the term xenophobia, as it denotes the fear and also hatred of foreign others by native nationals of South Africa, tends to conceal rather than reveal that systemic and structural constructs of racism at a world and local scale produce and locate black Africans of other countries in South Africa as alien and foreign others that are in the receiving end of nationalist and ultimately racist passions of hatred and violence. In a country that has not fully recovered from the homeland racist nationalism that placed black natives of South Africa according to geographic and ethnic lines, the black Africans from other countries take the place of racialized and excluded outsiders who become candidates for hatred, discrimination, and violation. In this way what is termed xenophobia is actually racism and the coloniality of being and belonging that accompanies it. This article, therefore, provides a decolonial understanding and interpretation of xenophobia as racism in South Africa.