South Africa: from apartheid to xenophobia

Abstract

How to explain the violent xenophobic attacks in South Africa in recent years? Two militant South African activists, Leonard Gentle and Noor Nieftagodien, interviewed here, analyse the race/class bases for the anti-foreigner violence in terms of the echoes/reverberations of apartheid and the rise of neoliberalism. They argue that remnants of apartheid have endured through the reproduction of racial and tribal categories, which has contributed to the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalist politics and the fragmentation of black unity. South Africa’s specific history of capitalist development, the African National Congress’s embraces of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and rainbowism, on the other, have produced the underlying conditions of precarity and desperation that resulted in the normalisation of xenophobia. The unions, too, have failed to recognise the new shape of the ‘working class’. Gentle and Nieftagodien outline the need to contend with the broader social conditions, the global economic crisis, neoliberalism and the deep inequalities it engenders in order to counteract the rising tide of xenophobia and build working-class unity.