constructing otherness, strategies of sameness

CONSTRUCTING OTHERNESS, STRATEGIES OF SAMENESSXenophobia, the Ambiguity of Strangeness and Strategies of Invisibility of African Immigrants in Alexandra, South Africa

MA Thesis Ilja Hehenkamp

Constructing Otherness,

Strategies of Sameness

Xenophobia, The Ambiguity of Strangeness andStrategies of Invisibility of African Immigrantsin Alexandra, South Africa

BY ILJA HEHENKAMP

MA Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sci-

ences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master

of Science, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of non-

Western Societies, University of Amsterdam

May 21, 2010

Studentnumber: 0271241

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. N. Besnier

Source cover-photo: http://www.timeslive.co.za/multimedia/

dynamic/00504/Alex_504152b.jpg

Abstract

Global flows of interconnectedness are widely countered within nation-states withexclusionary notions of autochthony and belonging. People who are perceived bystate-authorities and their national subjects to be illegitimate competitors for state-provided goods, a threat to national identity and/or to contaminate cultural valuesare increasingly constructed by them as non-belonging outsiders. Once these con-structions of otherness are shaped by a dehumanizing, xenophobic state-discourseand accompanied by anxieties about who can legitimately claim scarce resourcescitizens sometimes resort to violent means to exclude these strangers they often per-ceive to be scapegoats for their social ills. Strangers, however, are frequently notable to be recognized as such and thus represent a highly ambiguous and liminalcategory within national imaginations. Therefore, citizens often employ stigma asa convenient device to reify their difference with strangers. Bodily attributes, suchas morphological features, appearances, behaviour and languages are rendered bythese stigmatizers as meaningful signifiers by which they identify individuals whothey perceive to be inherently different. Bodies and their attributes, however, pro-vide far from a secure map for categorical order and can be highly deceptive. Par-ticularly because of the ambiguous and performative nature of identity, individualscarrying a particular stigma –especially when they live in spaces in which their inter-subjective relations with others are radically transformed by violence and hostility–can adhere to these culturally dictated scripts of difference making in order to hidetheir identity. Far from being passive victims on the margins from the public realm,these excluded ‘others’ are able to employ creative agency to negotiate, manipulateor hide their ‘otherness’ or feign ‘sameness’ to avoid various forms of exclusion. Bydrawing on the case of the xenophobic riots in South Africa in May 2008, this the-sis will identify the variety of ways African immigrants in the Alexandra township,South Africa employ creative strategies in order to render their foreignness invisiblein their interactions with citizens they still experience to be highly hostile.

Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv

1 Introduction: Grades of Otherness 1Localizing the Global . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Researching Strategies of Invisibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Race, space and Alien invaders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11“You are eating everything that belongs to us” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13From hegemonic discourse to hegemonic practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Aims of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Structure of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2 Research-parameters and context 24Bourgeois Harry, Club Jazz and becoming streetwise in Alex . . . . . . . . . 25Africa imagined at home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27Greener pastures, bleaker futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31Expectations of a better life in the “fields of gold” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33The disillusion of illusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35Alexandra’s historical dynamics and discourse on identity . . . . . . . . . . 37An emerging rural-urban formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38Urbanisation and rapid populationgrowth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39Politicization and radicalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39United, but politically fragmented . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40Impoverishment, township wars and the demise of apartheid . . . . . . . . 41

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3 “They were KILLING, you see?” 43The riot and its structured chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44Reconstructing the “days of noise” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46Alexandra and its history of redefining the outsider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51Reading the Riots Against Earlier Community Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . 54South Africa and the quest for Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

4 “You can’t judge a book by its cover”. The Ambiguities of Otherness 61The stigma of otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63Xenophobia and Interrogating Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66Zuluness and the origins of violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67“Judging” the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70Pantsula selves, Fong Kong others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72Drawing Boundaries by Spatial and Occupational Indices . . . . . . . . . . . 74“A mistaken identity”. The Uncertainty of Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

5 Covering the Self, Performing the Other 79Subjectivity and Modes of Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82Fear and the Transformation of Public Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85The Self and its Audience as Parameters for Performances . . . . . . . . . . 87“You have to hide yourself”. Employing strategies to cover one’s Otherness 89“You have to pretend”. Performing Identities by Misrepresentation . . . . . 94Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

6 Conclusion 105

List of Figures

1 Alexandra location and division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v2 Map of Alexandra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

3 Images of the xenophobic violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1104 Stigmatizing reporting in newspapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1115 The Madela Zulu-hostel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1126 Images of Alexandra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1127 A variety of goods and services many (foreign) street-hawkers sell . . 1138 Miscellaneous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

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Acknowledgements

This thesis is first and foremost dedicated to the inhabitants of Alexandra of what-ever origin they are. Although the coming chapters may paint a picture of a hos-tile place towards strangers, my personal experiences have been predominantly onthe opposite side. The warmth and hospitality I have received from Alexandra’sinhabitants since the first days of my arrival can hardly be expressed in words.My five months of residence in the township have fostered countless of memorieswhich I dearly keep. How can I forget Alexandra’s vibrant liveliness, its constantrhythm of hooting taxi-drivers, the cute little children giving me a ‘thumbs up’ andshouted mlungu or equivalent nicknames for white men to me when I was galavant-ing Alexandra’s dusty streets? I daily recall the warmth of people inviting me intotheir homes, prepared to cook me some pap and chakalaka any time. I often recollectthe amusing memories of people calling friends or family-members I’ve never metto ask them to talk to the white man they’ve never met either; the experience of be-ing invited in a shack on an early Sunday morning, only to find the whole familyvery much drunk and one by one giving me a speech in an unintelligible Africanlanguage. I look back with pleasure on the many days on which I socialized withthe many friends I quickly made, who were always concerned of my well-being andeven secretly followed me after I –far from sober– insisted on walking home alone atnight. Of course it was not all uncomplicated happiness. There were those days inwhich I got depressed for simply being treated as ‘White’; for constantly being askedfor money, beers or jobs by complete strangers; for radically being racially catego-rized with all its simplistic connotations and mainly perceived as a rich white man.Often, I fled the township to the nearby hipster suburb Melville to enjoy some pri-

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vacy, sushi and beers, only to return in the evening. But these feelings would neverlast long and once I returned to Alexandra it would feel as to arrive home.

There are many people I need to thank for their incredible help and pleasantcompany which has enabled this thesis to become finally a reality. First of all, myinformants who have shared their often painful memories and experiences with me,but who I cannot mention by name due to the very fact that the upcoming chapterswill deal with their ‘strategies of invisibility’. I dearly hope there will be a day inwhich they feel there will be no need for them anymore to ‘hide their identities’. It ismy South African friend Harry who has enabled me in the first place to conduct myfieldwork in Alexandra and to whom I’m therefore indebted for in countless ways.His incredible dedication towards the community of Alexandra in the form of hiswork as an HIV and AIDS counsellor and the work he conducts for his own Alexan-dra Basketball Association in order to give young Alexandrians structure in life isgreatly admirable. He is the perfect representation of a young and dedicated gen-eration that makes the appealing slogan ‘It’s happening in Alex!’ certainly a reality.And how can I express my appreciations for the ways Kgakgi and Thoko Malokehave adopted me as a family-member? It is their luxurious and comfortable guest-house/nightclub Club Jazz, their warmth and hospitality, the delicious meals Thokocooked me on a daily basis and the many conversations we had in the evening, enjoy-ing beers from their own bar, about issues of daily life, history, politics and personalmatters that I will never forget. Hopefully there will be a day that Kgakgi, a formerlocal Jazz-celebrity, will take up his musicianship again. When his other musicianfriends were paying him a visit (like the hilarious trio Mike, Mike and Mike) I couldeasily picture them smilingly playing the trompet, guitar, piano and drums. I thankThapelo, Brian, Fifty, Gino, Judy, Kevin, Niels, Kitso, Giulia, Rhiana, Rianne, Wiesje,Jurgen and both Anna’s amongst others for the many hours we spend in clubs, tav-erns, pubs and shebeens in the company of many beers and the delicious ‘BananaRatz’. These people are just a fraction of many other unmentioned individuals I amgreatly indebted to.

Of course, the process of transforming my fieldwork data into a fairly structuredand theorized written form could never have materialized were it not for the pleas-ant company of Saskia, Orsi and Anna who made these months of solitude withinlibraries bearable. They were crucial motivators to put me back on track to finalize

this project. Thanks to all the coffee’s, cigarettes, laughters, frustrations and the oc-casional beers and palinka’s we shared I can even imagine I will eventually look backon these days as fun. The meticulous and insightful comments Yasmin, Lieve andAnna have made on my early drafts and the many revisions Rhiana, Raimer, Giulia,JD and Jonas made to my English grammar, of course, have resulted in countlessimprovements of my chapters. I also want to thank Thomas Blom Hansen who pro-vided me with the many useful literature-tips that have largely shaped my theory.Last but not least I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Niko Besnier for the thor-ough scrutinies he applied to– and intellectual comments he provided on what hephrased as which “doesn’t have to be perfect”. Although I am aware this thesis isindeed far from perfect, without professor Besnier’s motivating perfectionism andhighly inspiring theoretical insights it would be rather close to the opposite.

Chapter 1Introduction: Grades of Otherness

“Why are we so different", a passerby asks me laughingly. I’m strolling down thestreets of Alexandra and am not so sure how to reply to this question. So I justlaugh back and continue my daily journey on foot, enjoying the vibrant street-lifethat surrounds me. The man just testified to my white skin I presumed, in contrastwith the black ones that prevail in this poverty-stricken, overpopulated space ofshacks, hostels, flats and houses. My white skin was a visible marker of othernessthroughout my stay in the township, which I made my place of residence for fivemonths. It was a marker I could never conceal and which always made me a highlyvisible anomaly within Alexandra’s predominantly black public spaces. Despite myefforts to live my life as a township-resident, I always remained a white outsider anda constant source of enthusiasm, laughter, interest and amazement. I even becamea public asset to be paraded around by unknown pedestrians in front of their peersin order to enhance status. I became someone who was often perceived as beneficialto the community for the mere fact of being White and thus highly associated witheconomic prosperity and a Western lifestyle12.

In May 2008, markers of difference proved lethal for many immigrants fromneighbouring African countries within the informal settlements and inner-cities of

1From now on I will refer to a racial category in capitalization when it is not an adjective in order todifferentiate between the socially and politically constructed nature of racial identity and the natural,inborn perceptions of racial difference

2It must be said that being a European White made a difference too, since South African Whiteswere predominantly perceived as being racist who would never come to the township

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South Africa. While scattered xenophobic3 attacks against African immigrants havebeen increasingly witnessed since South Africa’s democratic transition, the scale andvigor of the May attacks have been unprecedented. Within the course of just twoweeks 62 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in a chain ofriots that rapidly spread throughout the country. As the victims’ otherness couldn’tbe clearly differentiated from local South Africans on the basis of skin-color as mine,South African perpetrators singled out targets of violence by using various prac-tices in order to ‘tell’ who was a foreigner. Language, skin complexion, vaccinationmarks, identity documents or simply neighbours’ pointing fingers served to iden-tify those to chase out. Rioters motivated their criminal actions by stating that thosemakwerekweres4 were to be blamed for South Africa’s societal ills. Popularly depictedwithin dominant discourse as economic parasites and illegal criminals ‘flooding’ bythe millions into the re-imagined Rainbow nation, African immigrants are increas-ingly scapegoated for the perceived lack of materialisation of change for the blackurban poor.

The Alexandra township was where the violence was most intense. Althoughxenophobic notions are by no means particular to South Africa, the South Africanversion is remarkably disturbing because of its violent manifestation. Together witha growing disillusionment, hostility against African foreigners has been on the in-crease within post-apartheid society5, culminating in these violent events of 2008.The euphoric era of the democratic transition appeared to have provided a huge in-centive for African immigrants to try their luck in the newly imagined “rainbow na-tion”. The abandonment of apartheid and the constitutional embracing of liberal val-ues, imagined South Africa as a country “brimming with possibilities” (Morris 1998).While South Africans gradually became disillusioned, the perception of African im-

3Xenophobia may be defined –according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition–as the “intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries”

4The popular phrase to depict Black African immigrants, meaning: those who speak an unintelli-gible language

5The first documented violent instances said to be based on xenophobic motivations date backto the very first year of the transition towards democracy: in 1994 and 1995 armed youth gangs inAlexandra demolished homes and properties of suspected undocumented immigrants, while in 1998two Senegalese and a Mozambican were thrown of a train by a group of South Africans returningfrom a rally, organised on the perception that foreigners are to blame for societal social and economi-cal ills (Valji 2003). Those are just a few examples out of many documented others.

INTRODUCTION: GRADES OF OTHERNESS 3

migrants said to be ‘pouring’ into the country resulted in them increasingly beingscapegoated for the failed materialisation of change. Analysts have mainly rootedtheir explanations in one of two contexts: that of nation-building and a new formu-lation of citizenship or that of the nation that ‘suddenly’ has been incorporated intoglobalized flows of interconnectedness.

Localizing the Global

Since the demise of communism and the collapse of the wall, globalization hasgained enormous resonance in popular, political and scientific discourses as a pro-cess that increasingly puts (identity) boundaries into question. Globalization is saidto be the driving force that transcends all borders and interconnects the world atlarge by ever-flowing and intersecting streams of migration, technology, ideology,goods, capital and labour (Appadurai 1990). Often the impression is given that theagents on the ground can only obey globalization’s enormous power and cannot butcomply with its everlasting drive towards the future of modernity. In reality, global-ization as an autonomous and sweeping force disguises the agency that it is rootedin. And as those agents catapult those streams around the globe and create a com-plicated and ever-changing web of intersections, dissolving (identity) boundaries isnot necessarily what they have in mind. A great deal of their agency is also involvedin generating cultural diversity, cultural closure, boundary and meaning making,selfing and othering. Brands that flow into their spaces are remade in culturally spe-cific forms of meaning making, ideologies are moulded into local belief systems andthe whole concept of interconnectedness leads to new possibilities of postmodernselfing, naturally excluding the others as non-belonging strangers

However, the notion of flows that circulate and are interconnected draws atten-tion away from the “missed encounters, clashes, misfires, and confusions that areas much part of global linkages as simple ‘flow”’ (Tsing 2000). As flows flow theysimultaneously carve and transform the ground. Put differently, the distinction be-tween global forces and local places obscures how these processes of force-makingand place-making are both local and global. An important example of these localways and processes, situated within globalized interconnections, is the increasingobsession with closure as opposed to flow. The world as an interconnected space

4 LOCALIZING THE GLOBAL

that transcends boundaries has often led to the belief that the nation state is becom-ing obsolete. Both state-authorities as their subjects frequently perceive dissolvingboundaries, powerful transnational corporations, new forms and means of postmod-ern identity-making and globalized ideologies to threaten the hegemony of nation-ness and national identities. This changing face of nationhood seems to have led toan explosion of identity-politics, an increase in rights claims as well as an obsessionwith affirming old and constructing new boundaries, all of which both strengthenas challenge perceptions on the rigidity of the nation-state, citizenship and nationalidentity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Nyamnjoh 2007a; Geschiere and Meyer 1998).

In this post-modern world that is said to be globalizing, large-scale national iden-tity containers, generated by modern state-level forces, are increasingly becomingunimaginable due to the people falling into these containers are finding it harder toimagine themselves as part of this cohesive national identity, many of whom resid-ing across “large social, spatial, and political divides” (Appadurai 1998; Geschiere2009). The radical uncertainty that arises out of these unimaginable “mega-ethnicgroupings” often creates anxieties about the relationship of citizens to state-providedgoods (Appadurai 1998). National subjects are therefore often obsessed with who‘we’ are and who we are not – that is, who and what is not part of the collectivity.The figure of the Stranger ultimately represents the anxiety and ambiguity aboutforms of belonging and notions of entitlement. Strangers not only sit uncomfortablybetween the insider/outsider division within the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki1995b), they are both strange and familiar, “no longer classified and not yet classi-fied” (Malkki 1995a) and often occupy spaces in the midst of nationals of the coun-try they have made their new home. Nation-states are thus often preoccupied withthe policing of identity boundaries between citizens and outsiders. By promotingnationalism as a ‘religion of friendship’, the nation-state tries to enforce ethnic, reli-gious, linguistic and/or cultural homogeneity in the form of ‘nativism’ and excludesthose strangers that do not fit into this ‘propaganda of shared attributes’ (Bauman1990). This fixation with who does or does not ‘belong’ is matched by the urge todistinguish between ‘locals’, ‘nationals’, ‘citizens’, ‘autochthons’ or ‘insiders’, on theone hand and ‘foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘strangers’, ‘autochthons’ or ‘outsiders’, onthe other (Nyamnjoh 2007b).

One kind of boundary making between nationals and strangers that seems to


have taken root since the dawn of the new globalizing era is the distinction betweenautochthons and allochthons: those who belong to the soil and those who do not.The notion of autochthony as “being rooted in the soil” gives it a sort of primor-dial quality which makes it the most authentic form of belonging (Geschiere 2009).And it is this ‘authentic’ notion of belonging that is able to draw the ultimate lineof difference: autochthony constitutes the fundamental boundary with its Other –a boundary which can be utilized by citizens as a powerful mobilizing force forclaiming rights to priority for state-resources as well as the right to exclude alienstrangers (Geschiere 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Despite the huge varietyof possible differences within nations, ‘autochthony’ serves as an umbrella to unifypeople based on birth or citizenship, while making it an ideologically useful conceptto exclude ‘the Other’ (Geschiere 2009). The result is that autochthony serves as anultimate divider of difference, whereby citizen-subjects, despite other identities theymay bear, are ultimately either an autochthon or an alien (Comaroff and Comaroff2001).

While all human beings through history have always had a natural propensity todistinguish difference, modern societies are particularly distinguished by the degreeto which such differences are reified (Hinton 2002, p. 12). By means of modernity’sdrive towards essentialized categorical order, identity boundaries within the stateand popular discourses are more often than not reified in essential “differences be-tween species-like ‘types’ or ‘peoples”’ (Malkki 1995a), and assume natural ‘traits’and ‘appearances’ to those ‘specimens’ of the ethnic, religious, racial and other cat-egorical orders one is said to belong to. While academic discourses stress the so-cially negotiated construction of identity, people who themselves are said to con-struct those identity boundaries often utter rather essentialized ways of who ‘is’ Usand who ‘is’ Them. In reality identity boundaries are not as fixed as many peopleassume them to be: labels such as “Sikh,” “American” and “Tanzanian,” that appearto be inborn, fixed categories over time remain oversimplifications of powerplays,historical and discursive processes, (political) agency and meaning making on theground. Such labels as primordial and other supposedly ‘natural’ categories of iden-tification obscure those processes that crystallizes them into something that ‘is’. Butto theorize them into something that is not real, but a discursive construction, is toblind oneself to their emotional power to guide agency, to do damage to the sub-


jective experience and social reality of agents themselves and, more importantly, toignore the deadly realities that can result in violent conflict.

Although it is especially within violent conflict that identity boundaries acquirea polarized and essentialized quality, violent conflicts simultaneously lay bare theambiguous nature of these discrete racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, national andotherwise categorized identity classifications (Apter 1997). Genocide is the ultimateviolent representation of modernity’s obsession with rational, social engineering; ofits fight for determination and against ambiguity, the everlasting battle against fuzzi-ness by artificially bringing about that ‘ambivalence-free homogeneity’ that the non-discrete and continuous nature of reality fails to produce (Bauman 1990). In orderto overcome the ambiguities inherent in identity classifications, genocidal engineershad to employ methods of spatial segregation and artificial markers of identification,such as identity cards and yellow Jewish stars in order to classify and stigmatizethe members of the group that they had decided to annihilate. Where these artifi-cial means of identification were absent, agents of genocide were resorting to morepragmatic forms of victim selection by means of the reading of cultural, physical,behavioural and linguistic attributes that were perceived to classify individuals intoa particular categorical order. Yet, reading bodies is far from a reliable method ofidentity classification and victim selection, being often characterized by uncertaintyand presumption.

In order to overcome the ambiguous nature of the Stranger, stigma providesa convenient device to classify a particular individual in the essentialized orderlyworld of binary us/them, insider/outsider, here/there orders. As identity classifi-cations are not ‘given entities’ with unambiguous rules of membership, stigma pro-vides a way to draw a limit within the fluid and socially negotiated nature of ethnic,national, racial or otherwise designated indices of identity: outward signs may beconcealed, but the bond between stigma-attributes –such as morphological features,clothing styles, linguistic dialects, etcetera– and inner ‘truth’ cannot be broken (Bau-man 1990; Barth et al. 1969). Nevertheless, stigmatized individuals are often able tohide their ‘true’ self that is negatively valued within society. As social life can be seenas a theatre play, where individuals are constantly giving a performance in front oftheir audience by employing particular sign activities in order to give way a certainimpression of the self, stigmatized persons are able to perform a certain identity in


order to avoid social discrimination, marginalization or even prosecution (Kanuha1999; Goffman 1959). Such strategies or tactics of individuals that are concerned withhiding one‘s identity or adopting a different one are known as ‘passing’ (Goffman1986; Einwohner 2008)

Although many examples of passing are documented, such as homeless womenconcealing their homelessness in public spaces, homosexuals performing as ‘straight’or African Americans passing as white (Einwohner 2008; Casey, Goudie, and Reeve2008), this thesis is primarily concerned with those strategies of invisibility of thefigure of the immigrant within a host-society in which s/he is more often than notmarginalized and excluded from access to resources. Moreover, when the propensityof nation-states to exclude the stranger that threatens the orderly world of nation-ness is accompanied with a xenophobic-tainted anxiety of socio-economic deprivednational subjects to whom belongs a legitimate claim to state-provided goods, thepropensity to exclude can gain a violent dimension. The modernist nation-state inparticular seems to have shifted from the ideal of an imagined community foundedon the fiction of shared characteristics of its citizenry towards a xenophobic sense ofheterogeneity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). Within the lived reality of large iden-tity containers that are becoming increasingly unimaginable, violent action can be-come a means of satisfying one‘s categorical self, while these vivisectionist forms ofbodily violence simultaneously offer temporary ways to render abstract ethnic labelsof others intelligible (Appadurai 1998).

The causal heterogeneity that is inherent in violent conflict makes explanationsof violence through a single theoretical lens problematic. The theorist should ratherseek to identify, analyze and explain the heterogeneous processes that underly wide-ranging occurrences of what is all too easily lumped together under the rubric of‘ethnic,’ ‘political,’ ‘racial,’ or ‘xenophobic,’ violence (Brubaker and Laitin 1998). Notonly do heterogeneous ‘processes and mechanisms’ of violence give more insights toviolent dynamics and the varied ways of legitimizing violence, it also “makes cen-tral what is often muted”: the varying subjective experiences of agents and subjectsof violent events and their aftermaths, and the ways perpetrators and victims legit-imize and make sense of these violent actions (Warren 1993). To ask questions aboutlocal violent dynamics foregrounds not only the agency of perpetrators, but also theagency and subjective experience of those victims whose daily lives are so distorted


by it. How do they deal with those uncertainties and dangers of (possibilities of) vi-olence? How do they find ways to represent the nature of terror and simultaneouslyemploy strategies to resist its pressures? (Green 1999).

Although the focus of this thesis is not so much the function and dynamics ofviolence per se, an understanding of the social, spatial, political and communal trans-forming power of violence is important to analyse the ways it shapes the experiencesand strategies of victims of violent agency. Especially in a space where those victimsand perpetrators are still living together, the lived reality of violence transforms ev-eryday life. Family bonds and friendships are destroyed, social alliances are markedby suspicion, spaces and faces all bear memories that one has to live with, and thefear of ‘it’ happening again shapes future plans and strategies. Indeed, the dangerof being singled out as an ‘other’ has profound implications for agency in social andpublic space. The specificity of the relations between daily face-to-face relations andthe larger contexts that shape them reveals more about the nature of violence than amacro-analysis solely involving abstract theoretical forces (Warren 1993). By payingclose attention to how violence operates locally and the ‘mundane aspects of every-day experience’ my aim is both to do justice to the victimhood of subjects of violenceas well to consider the possibilities for creative agency that may emerge from theseprocesses (Green 1999).

When violence is largely framed in xenophobic notions of belonging and il/legitimateclaims to resources, the mobilization of identity classifications by xenophobic rioterscannot be separated from existing political institutions that have legitimized and in-terpellated differences between who do and who do not belong (Chun 1996). Espe-cially the concept of citizenship predominantly shapes the parameters by which na-tional objects are able to draw boundaries between autochthones and allochthones.While xenophobia is far from particular to the African continent and can be observedin different forms around the globe, the concept of citizenship has shifted particu-larly in many African post-colonies from a unifying notion based on pan-Africanismduring the struggle for independence towards one that is largely found on indi-geneity and essentially exclusive. This post-colonial form of nationalist discoursefrequently equates nationalism with access to state-provided goods by an emergingmiddle class in tandem with the adoption of liberal democracy and the celebrationof global consumer capitalism (Neocosmos 2005; Nyamnjoh 2007b). As we will see,


within South Africa’s post-apartheid project of nation-building, the fact that the fig-ure of Makwerekwere has occupied centre stage within a national imagination can belargely attributed to a newly imagined self that is connected with notions of entitle-ment. Moreover, this stereotyped figure of the Makwerekwere is predicated on exactlythe same discredited indices of races that were employed by the former apartheidregime to legitimize the oppression of the non-white population (Matsinhe 2009). Asthe figure of the Makwerekwere is highly racialized within the dominant discourse,it was skin color that primarily identified those to chase out during the xenophobicviolence in South Africa in May 2008. But rioters employed many other techniquesfor exploring, marking and classifying those who might be African foreigners (Ap-padurai 1990). Seen from this angle, one can argue that black bodies were ultimatelyused as text whereby indexical markers or signifiers of identity became legible as ‘ev-idence’, or counter-‘evidence’, of imagined citizenship (Matsinhe 2009; Harris 2002).

Researching Strategies of Invisibility

Much has been said about the ‘root causes’ and the broader contexts in which theSouth African xenophobic violence should be contextualized. Less has been saidabout the local dynamics of violence, subjective perceptions of violence of perpetra-tors and victims and coping strategies of victims in those spaces of violence them-selves. During my work as a volunteer in the Johannesburg Rifle Range refugee-camp, the local government’s constant threats to dismantle “temporary shelters”for victims of the violence6 caused a lot of tension and anxiety amongst the camp-residents. Despite well-known cases of immigrants who were attacked again by localresidents when they tried to return to their former community, the Gauteng7 provin-cial government stated that it was “confident that favourable conditions now existfor the reintegration of displaced foreign nationals” (Victor Khupiso and Nombe-mbe 2008). The local governments gave displaced victims the choice to either coop-erate with reintegration strategies into South African society, or to go back to their

6This term was preferred by the government in its official rhetoric, since the denotation of “dis-placed foreign nationals” as “refugees” and their sites of shelter as “refugee camps” would obligethem to comply with the UNHRs policies in corresponding situations

7South African province

10 RESEARCHING STRATEGIES OF INVISIBILITY

own country. Statements like “I’d rather die in my own country than here in SouthAfrica” reflected the fear and despair of many immigrants trapped between a highlyhostile host-society and countries of origin that are themselves embroiled in inter-nal violent conflict and/or severe economical instability. Since the violence manyforeign nationals have returned to their countries of origin, but numerous others re-mained behind or returned to South Africa after the situation calmed down. Thosewho remained somehow needed to find their way back and indeed, reintegrate, intoSouth African society.

As the mere idea of returning to these formerly hostile places of residence be-came a source of extreme anxiety for many displaced immigrants in the Rifle Rangecamp, I became interested in possible strategies African immigrants could employin order to lessen the chance of violence or intimidation against them in their dailyinteraction with South Africans. Immigrants who could or would not return to theircountry of origin eventually needed to find ways to re-engage with South Africancitizens whom they had experienced to be extremely hostile. Two immigrants fromZimbabwe provided me once with a snapshot of possible strategies to avoid harass-ment in public places. Due to his linguistic accent, the first man told me, he couldeasily be singled out as a non-South African in public taxi’s and explained to me thathe side-stepped this potential vulnerability by taking the exact amount of money forhis fare in order not to have to speak in public. The other man described to me thathe tried to avoid being identified as a non-native speaker by using chewing gumin his daily interaction with South Africans so his distinctive accent would not benoticed.

These strategies not only exemplify the fears which African immigrants are liv-ing with, but also their creative capacities to deal with these fears. Moreover, theyreveal various ways in which strangeness is identified by South Africans. Markers ofdifference such as skin-complexion, linguistic dialect, hairstyles, clothing style andother cultural and bodily identity signifiers provide far from a secure way of iden-tifying someone’s ethnic or national identity. Especially in extremely heterogeneoussocieties such as South Africa –which has many historical, linguistic and cultural tieswith neighbouring countries– the process of identifying someone as a particular ‘na-tional’ or a particular ‘ethnic’ reveals various ambiguities. In violent conflicts –whereidentity may become a ‘deadly knife’ (Hintjens 2001)– targets of violence can utilize


this ambiguous nature of identification in order avoid being attacked by giving waya performance in which they present themselves as what they are not (Kanuha 1999).

But what does it mean when identities are socially constructed? This thesisparticularly focusses on this theme by analysing how the ambiguities of identity-signifiers and the performative nature of identity leave open space for social agentsto employ creative strategies to renegotiate difference-making. My aim is to showthat the Stranger is particularly within the South African context a highly ambiguous figure,which creates considerable leeway for creativity that African immigrants in the Alexandratownship are able to utilize by means of strategies of invisibility in order to render theirforeignness invisible.

Race, space and Alien invaders

Although scattered attacks against foreigners had been observed around Pretoria themonth before (Sowetan 2008), it was in Alexandra that the official ‘wave’ of violencebegan. On Monday-night the 12th of May, Alexandra transformed into a scene ofnightly attacks, violent mobs, and burning shacks, eventually leaving two dead and40 injured. Within days the violence spread to informal settlements and inner-citiesthroughout the country. Only on May 28th, two weeks later, the situation was finallysaid to be “calm”. Over 25.000 refugees fled the violence nationwide, 62 people werekilled and 670 people badly injured (Kapp 2008). The months hereafter, thousands ofdisplaced people were transfered to what the government called “temporary shel-ters”, clearly a sign that the government was not planning to provide these sheltersfor a long time. “We do not expect the situation to go on for more than two months,”local government spokesman Masebe said. “We are currently talking to communitiesto try and reintegrate them into their communities” (Monama 2008). This period wasmarked by heated debates, lobbying and frustration amongst civil society organi-sations who accused the South African government of failing to deliver adequatehumanitarian services, failing to address the issues underlying the xenophobic vio-lence, but most of all of washing its hands of its responsibility to protect those whowere displaced.

The post-apartheid imagined ‘rainbow country’ suddenly seemed to had lost itsbright colors, quickly re-imagined as a dark xenophobic nation, hostile to its African

12 RACE, SPACE AND ALIEN INVADERS

immigrant population and populated by citizens willing to kill in order to get ridof ‘criminal’, ‘illegal’ and ‘parasitic’ immigrants. Newspapers worldwide featuredimages of furious mobs spreading terror, with the image of Mozambican Ernesto Al-fabeto Nhamuave in flames becoming a target for global moral outrage. Immediatelythe media, non-governmental organisations and politicians were keen to search forthe ‘root causes’ of these events. A growing frustration about lack of service deliv-ery, the violent nature of South African society, a widening inequality, rising fuel andfood prices, corruption, inadequate education, extremely high unemployment andhigh poverty were all mentioned by many analysts to underscore the complicatednature of this violent rupture within South African society.

Although those distinguishable root causes are significant underlying factors ofthe violence, they do not explain that the African immigrant was blamed by thoseperpetrators who were seeking a convenient scapegoat for their disillusion in socio-economic change. The post-apartheid process of nation-building, primarily con-cerned with the construction of a non-racial South African identity, seemed to haveconstructed the Black African immigrant as the “irreducible Other” (Cejas 2007). Inorder to understand why African hairstyles, skin color and vaccination marks takeon a xenophobic significance, one must look at how foreign Africans are representedwithin South African society (Harris 2002). And once one analyses the ways the fig-ure of the immigrant has been depicted in popular discourse by many politicians andmedia-authorities, a troubling image appears: a “perverted parody of the past”, thefigure of the alien has ironically become a distinctive species in the popular imagina-tion, primarily marked by skin color and dominantly associated by (media) authori-ties with illegality, usurping resources and fostering crime, prostitution and diseases(Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). The foreigner, as an informant angrily expressed tome, is in the South African context not just “anybody that crosses one boundary of anation to another”:

So, if you are from other African countries, as far as the skin-color is not black,

you are as good as the person from America. You understand? And for you

[refers to me], you are not a foreigner. And there to me, that is where I find it a

bit disturbing. Because the word foreigner is anybody that crosses one boundary

of a nation to another. It doesn’t matter how close the countries are. You are a

foreigner (Ob, Ghana 2009).


In other words, the imagination of the foreigner, the immigrant or the alien inpost-apartheid South Africa has become synonymous with the black African Other.“According to their classifications”, Ob continued his outrage, “the only person whois called a foreigner, is somebody from other African countries” (ibid.). And in orderto understand why such classifications have gained xenophobic meaning, one mustanalyze the formation of the particular state-discourse that has arisen in tandem withthe formation of the post-apartheid state (Neocosmos 2005).

“You are eating everything that belongs to us”

The fact that South Africans who feel economically deprived should scapegoat for-eigners, while many significant others such as Whites, the new Black middle-classor politicians could be blamed, tells us something about possible political identi-fications that were forged by state-discourse during and after the transition fromapartheid to democracy (ibid., p. 4). South African post-apartheid democracy is largelyconstructed on a discourse of human-rights, non-racialism and individual equality.This institutionalized discourse of human-rights within the newly imagined nationis not incompatible with, but is the very source of post-apartheid xenophobia:

The argument here is fundamentally that xenophobia in South Africa is a direct

effect of a particular kind of politics, a particular kind of state politics in fact, one

which is associated with a specific discourse of citizenship which was forged in

opposition to the manner in which the apartheid state interpellated its subjects.

This statist notion of citizenship has been buttressed by a ‘Human Rights Dis-

course’ for which the politics of agency are substituted by appeals to the state

for redress (ibid.).

This discourse of human-rights has led to a large emphasis on individual free-dom –based on hegemonic neo-liberal notions– and a “culture of entitlement” or a“culture of rights”, which has pacified the majority of the population away fromtangible political participation. The post-apartheid process of forging a unifying na-tional identity –largely based on indigeneity and necessarily exclusive– is not sim-ply concerned with the re-imagining of a non-racial South African identity, but moreimportantly with a demarcation from others, based on rights and duties and socio-economic benefits for its citizens. It is therefore not only ‘imagined’, but “materially

14 “YOU ARE EATING EVERYTHING THAT BELONGS TO US”

experienced”, notably by non-civilians “who are excluded from community rightsand access to resources” (Neocosmos 2005, p. 90). As a consequence, chauvinismand xenophobia grip the masses, influenced by the “politics of the powerful”, asthey feel entitled to claim resources used by foreigners as their own (ibid.).

In the light of those civilian notions of entitlement, especially the Black African issaid to be obstructing socio-economic change by usurping jobs and resources, foster-ing crime, prostitution and disease (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Former Ministerof Home Affairs Buthelezi immediately proclaimed during his first speech in par-liament that “if we as South Africans are going to compete for scarce resources withmillions of aliens who are pouring into South Africa, then we can bid goodbye to ourReconstruction and Development Programme” (Buthelezi in Landau, Ramjathan-Keogh, and Singh (2004))8. Despite the government’s rhetoric of an African Renais-sance –in the form of the famous ‘I am an African’ speech president Mbeki deliveredin 1998– a universalising ideology of Pan-Africanism seems to have failed to takehold of the population. Within state-discourse, Africa is over and over again rep-resented as the Other, a place ‘over there’ and the place of the Other. Both SouthAfrica’s economic dominance and its role as a bridge for Western political liberal-ism on the continent intensifies this discourse of Africa being riddled with death,war, disease, starvation, corruption and helpless victims and a reproduced Westernstereotypical image of the content as economically backwards and a political failure(Neocosmos 2005, p. 112). This quasi-colonial remnant of the past makes the slo-gan of an ‘African Renaissance’ simply a vehicle for South African hegemony (ibid.,p. 125). Ob, insightfully reflected on the matter from his own experience:

Most of them don’t understand aaaall these things, when they talk about I am

an African9. They don’t look at themselves as African, that’s why they call US

Africa.

Me: What do they call themselves?

I don’t know! That one I’ve asked them several times. They say [feigns a thick,

heavy South African accent] ‘ey, my friend, this place is not Africa man, this

place is not Africa man’. You know? So and then I ask them, so this place is not

8RDP (Reconstruction Development Programme) is an ambitious socio-economic policy frame-work implemented by the ANC after the 1994 democratic elections. One of their six principles is tobuild millions of cheap houses, eligible for government subsidies

9The African Renaissance speech Mbeki delivered was called “I am an African”


Africa so, where is here? Because we hear most of the parliamentarians saying

‘when you go to Africa’ [laughs] And I wonder where is Africa and where is

South Africa (Ob, Ghana 2009).

Clearly, ordinary South Africans and politicians alike perceive South Africa notas belonging to Africa and associate the continent with ‘them’, the Black foreignOther. In the same vein Ob recalled an anecdote where he was eating chicken onthe street. Two girls passing by said to him the following: “Ah, wena, you see.All in South Africa you can eat chicken. You never had any chicken to eat in yourcountry. You came here, you are eating everything that belongs to us” (ibid.). Notonly did these girls reproduce the stereotype of Africa not having what South Africais perceived to have, their statement seemed to symbolize Black African foreignersas eating “everything that belongs to us”. And this notion of Africa being the Otherthat invades the country and ‘eats’ South African resources is constantly reiteratedin public discourse, by politicians and newspapers alike.

Once again, former Minister of Home Affairs Buthelezi stated that South Africais “perceived as an island in a sea of poverty, making [it] a magnet for migration”(Crush 1999) and clearly implied that the burden of immigrants said to be pouringinto the country are from Africa. That this “deluge of migrants” who are “mainlyillegals” causes xenophobia and resentment, Buthelezi continued, “should not besurprising”. And because ‘illegal aliens’ are predominantly perceived in the state-discourse to be blamed for obstructing the reversal of economic deprivation of ‘in-digenous’ South Africans, the Department of Home Affairs instructed all govern-ment departments that undocumented immigrants should be denied access to basicservices like health-care, education and utilities (Peberdy 2001). To make mattersworse, the then Minister of Defence remarked in 1997 that “we have one millionillegal immigrants in our country who commit crimes and who are mistaken bysome people for South African citizens”, and identified that as “the real problem” ofSouth Africa’s high crime-rates (Landau, Ramjathan-Keogh, and Singh 2004). Theseexamples are not merely incidents of irresponsible utterances by those in power, butare aspects of a structural feature of state-discourse and practice (Neocosmos 2005,p. 125)

The construction of the Black African immigrant, mainly depicted as ‘illegal’ andconstructed as “the real problem” is not only shaped by a hegemonic xenophobic

16 FROM HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE TO HEGEMONIC PRACTICE

discourse of politicians, but by media-authorities too. The many newspapers thatdefine South Africa’s media landscape reproduce the same stigmatizing stereotypesabout immigrants in big fat capitalized headlines. A survey drawing on newspaperreporting on immigrant coverage between 1994 and 1998 concluded that the burdenof press-coverage had been largely anti-immigration, unanalytical and reproducedracial stereotypes about African immigrants as illegal aliens predominantly associ-ated with criminal activity (Danso and McDonald 2001). Although the debate onmedia representation is polarised around its role as shaper versus reflector of publicopinion, the report concluded that “the print media does appear to be a significantpart of the equation” (MMP 2008). Ob, commented on the alien vocabulary withinnewspaper coverage with his insightful, intellectual wit:

They were calling us ALIENS. YEAH IN THE NEWSPAPERS! And I’m so sur-

prised. That, an editor, you edit the news that have the headline ‘an alien from

Africa has been killed’. I’M SO SURPRISED. And I said to them, one day I said to

one of SABC boys ‘look to me, the word alien does not exist in my vocabularies.

It only exist in American movies. If you want to know what an alien is, go get

any other comic movies from America’. That is where you see aliens. Because

for me, aliens do not exist. And I said, oh no, I just realised aliens exist. And to

the BEST of my knowledge, what I understand about aliens is that: in Ameri-

can movies aliens are from another planet. And they LOOK different, they ACT

different, they DO things DIFFERENT. And then you people in South Africa say

you are SUPERIOR over us. And the way we TALK is DIFFERENT, the way we

DRESS is different, the way we do our things is different. Yet, we are successul.

So the question I wanna put to you people is ‘WHY DON’T YOU GO TO THESE

ALIENS AND LEARN THE GOOD THINGS THEY DO, that make them SUC-

CESSFUL and use that to BUILD your nation and STOP accusing them of this

on this on that (Ob, Ghana 2009).

Nonetheless it goes beyond xenophobic speech, writings and discourse. Utter-ances of politicians and media-authorities are reflected, both verbally as in practice,in daily life.

From hegemonic discourse to hegemonic practice


While the violent events can be seen as the most dramatic form in which a hegemonicxenophobic discourse has been translated into action, documentation on South Africanxenophobia is replete with examples of daily xenophobic practice in all spheres ofsociety. Asylum seekers are constantly arrested and detained, being identified basedon superficial physical features such as skin color, vaccination marks, accent, linguis-tic competence and clothing (Peberdy 2001) or simply for fitting a highly racialized‘profile’ of undocumented immigrants (Landau 2006). Even when African foreign-ers are able to identify themselves and produce valid documents, examples of policeofficers tearing them apart arguing it was a “fake ID” or that the person in questionis “too black” to qualify for a South African ID are plenty (Crush 1999). Undocu-mented immigrants have even come to be perceived as “walking ATM’s” by somepolice officers, regarding them as easy targets to extort money. Most informants toldme similar stories:

Because some of them can’t BANK their money. You have no ID, you don’t

go to bank. You only can keep it in the pocket. Walking ATM’s, THIS is what

they call us! The policeman stops you, your ID is even good, your papers are

good, he says [imitates thick and heavy South African accent] ‘my friend, bring

money. If you don’t bring money, I’m gonna lock you’ [...] A POLICEMAN

sees you, to CHECK your paper! To just check your paper, your your ID. You

know, these things, IT PISSES ME OFF! I’m TELLING YOU! IT PISSES ME OFF!

I SAW I SAW I SAW, god almighty, I saw this guys man, these guys coming

from Botswana. These guys were arrested, coming from work. These guys were

having papers! And then you POINT A GUN ON THEM! THEY SHOULD LIE

ON THE GROUND for you to check their papers. WHY!? You TAKE their paper,

you CHECK IT and still ask them for money. Why? Just because he’s a black

man. You know? (Ob, Ghana 2009)

And while this authoritarian culture permeates all apparatuses of the state and islargely directed towards non-citizens of African origin (Neocosmos 2005, p. 111), ex-amples of African foreigners being denied access to public services like hospitals orschools are abundant too. Teachers who tell their foreign students to go back to theircountries or nurses who openly speak about “foreigners taking government moneyand having too many babies” (Landau 2006) are two well-known examples. An-other famous illustration is that of an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic

18 AIMS OF THE THESIS

of Congo who was refused treatment by the hospital as she was about to give birth,after which she was forced to deliver her baby in front of the hospital (Neocosmos2005). Xenophobia is clearly practiced within all ranks of South African society:

It is found everywhere: in government establishments, religious organisations,

and even in institutions of higher learning where one expects a higher level of

broadmindedness. In such places, xenophobia may not be manifested in the

form of physical violence, but in more subtle forms of making the non-national

feel so unwelcome and despised in an environment that is made psychologically

hostile (Mogekwu 2005).

Xenophobia was particularly practiced within the micro-politics of township lifeat the most intense and in the most violent manner (Landau and Misago 2009).Alexandra was said to be the epicentre from which the violence spread and in whichit endured the full period of unrest (Park 2009). The mobilisation of violent mobscertainly was a dangerous mix of ethnic components, nationalism, criminal oppor-tunism and the rights to space. Previous forbidden cities have been attractive forimmigrants –both from abroad and from South Africa’s rural area’s– since the end ofapartheid. Most inner-city residents must now renegotiate their relationship to theirplace of residence and fragmentary identities have become spatially rooted in waysthat rights to space have become resources for ethno-racial mobilisation (Landauand Misago 2009). Hegemonic xenophobic discourses have provided parameters foridentification and a discursive repertoire for the exclusion of the Other locally. Thethird chapter of this thesis deals with how those hegemonic divisions are conflatedwith the fragmented identities that have defined Alexandra’s historical landscapeand that the violence strikingly resembled previous material conflicts within thetownship: although they were mobilised on similar insiders/outsiders cleavages,the content of who constituted as an insider and who did not, has shifted accordingto Alexandra’s socio-economic and political developments within a national context.

Aims of the Thesis

Although extremely important, especially concerning policy recommendations, it isnot the ‘truth’ or the root causes of the xenophobic violence in South Africa in May


2008 with which this thesis is concerned. It is instead about the ways informantsconstruct their truth(s), how their subjectivities are related to local experience of in-tersubjective life and what strategies they employ to deal with their truth. After all,there exists no ‘God’s-eye view’ of history. “The ‘worlds made’ through narrationsof the past are always historically situated and culturally constructed, and it is thesethat people act upon and riddle with meaning” (Malkki 1995a).

As much as this project is not concerned with a reified and essentialized truth, Istress the dialectic construction of identity. Although many social agents in Alexan-dra –be they South African or foreign– narrated essentialized versions of identity,assuming them to have natural, inborn qualities and clear-cut boundaries, my aimis not to reproduce them in the same vein. (Racial) identity has been –and in manyregards, still is– an essentialized category, which strongly determined one‘s social,political, economical and spatial position within South African society. Using thecategory of the Black, the White, the South African, the Zimbabwean, the Zulu orthe Immigrant in the same reified essence means reproducing an ideology of essen-tialism which so often has been harnessed to oppressive and even deadly politicalactions (ibid.). Nevertheless, bounded and polarized identity utterances and percep-tions, become –especially when violence comes into play– a socio-political reality ontheir own, where one‘s social identity can make a crucial difference in one‘s move-ment in social and public space.

This project seeks to interrogate the representation of refugees and/or immi-grants as helpless victims whose agency is diminished by grand abstract forces ofglobalization, nationalism, modernity and ethnicity. My aim here is to show, firstof all, that immigrants in Alexandra are not mere passive objects on the margins ofthe public realm, but are instead active and creative agents within the confines oftheir own social space. Secondly, I hope to demonstrate that there exists no suchcategory as ‘the African immigrant’. Rather, there are different grades of immigrantstatus constituted of various categories such as nationality, racial identity, (il)legality,citizenship and socio-political motivations to migrate. For reasons I will explain inthe next chapter, my pool of informants was far from a representative sample of theheterogeneity that defines Alexandra. Nevertheless, as much as the narratives of myinformants displayed many similarities given their shared experiences, by givingvoice to deviant utterances and particularities of different subjectivities, this ethnog-

20 AIMS OF THE THESIS

raphy is concerned with the ways in which a myriad of identities are (de)constructedby various actors and with the socio-political realities these identities have acquiredin intersubjective life.

My informants were highly critical and often made derogatory remarks aboutSouth African society and South Africans in particular. While reverse stereotyping‘the South African’ as ‘bloodthirsty’, ‘ignorant’, ‘lazy’ and so on, they morally con-structed themselves and their native society as the romanticized opposite. The storythat I will tell in the following chapters is informed by these polarized ideologies.This implies a danger of simply reproducing and confirming the negative percep-tions immigrants have of South Africa and its citizens being downright morallyinferior or their society as having “a criminal record” (Tendai, Zimbabwe 2009).While this ethnography of violence and its socio-political aftermath mainly focuseson South African perpetrators of violence, many ordinary South Africans stronglycondemned what happened. Although it was South Africans who perpetrated theviolence, many other South Africans gave shelter, fed, and helped the victims innumerous ways.

Africa is too often imagined as a space of darkness, disorder, poverty, violenceand disease within Western society. While this dominant Western discourse mainlyperceives ‘the West’ as civilized, orderly, advanced, democratic, peaceful and so on,it stigmatizes Africa as the opposite, “as an object apart from the world, or as a failedor incomplete example of something else” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008). As much asxenophobic and violent aspects of South African society are troubling, we should tryto avoid the pessimism or ‘Zimbabweanism’ –the widespread view that South Africaseems to follow a similar trajectory as Zimbabwe, from a ‘successful’ post-colony to a‘failed state’– that seems to preoccupy many analysts, immigrants and South Africancitizens themselves. In many regards a highly fragmented society, South Africa isstill a nation ‘in progress’ (this being said, without assuming the term ‘progress’ anormative quality). “You can’t expect everything to go ‘right’ in South Africa just15 years after the democratic transition, while it has been oppressed for hundreds ofyears before”, my South African friend Harry once said to me. Post-apartheid SouthAfrica is a ‘better’ society than its predecessor. Formal equality amongst variousracial, social and political cleavages have been institutionalized and opportunitieshave markedly improved for the formerly oppressed population.


While xenophobia is strongly embedded in South African society, it isn’t aliento ‘our’ societies. Obsessions with who belongs where and who constitutes as au-tochthonous constructing those who are not as allochthonous ‘strangers’– those whodo not belong– are a worldwide trend (Geschiere 2009). One needs only look at thepopulism and neo-nationalism that increasingly marks European party-politics. Thisstory should not be read as a confirmation of post-apartheid South Africa graduallybut irreversibly sliding into a disorderly post-colonial nation. Rather, it should beunderstood in the context of a society in transition, a transition from decades of racialoppression and a transition whereby the South African citizen is still in the processof being imagined. Societies in transition, whereby enormous socio-economic in-equalities need to be reversed, often generate a violent tension between marginalisedpeople that have to struggle for their survival.

Structure of the Thesis

This chapter has been primarily concerned with a theoretical macro analysis of globalconjunctures of belonging, the ambiguous figure of the Stranger, the uncertainty ofdifference and the convenient weapon of stigma in order to overcome this ambiguityand uncertainty of self and other, sometimes by violent means. I gave this abstractanalytical exploration some more substance by zooming in on the South African na-tional level. While analyzing the ways how the racialized figure of the Makwerekwerehas been constructed in stereotypical on a South African level, it is the micro level oftownship-life with which the next four chapters are concerned.

In chapter two, the usual ingredients of conducting fieldwork will be outlined.Before I proceed to the methods of qualitative research, its related encountered prob-lems and questions of representativeness, I will give a short introduction to my re-search setting, its inhabitants, my close friend Harry who has been of tremendoushelp with all aspects of my research and the family Maloke, who made my stay aspleasant and as comfortable as it was. Since both Westerners and South Africansoften imagine Alexandra –and township spaces in general– as spaces solely to bedefined in terms of misery, deprivation and dangerousness, I will briefly touch uponhow these perceptions shaped the responses on my decision to conduct my researchin Alexandra. While for many (foreign) inhabitants of the township violence and

22 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS

deprivation is indeed a daily reality, Alexandra is simultaneously a place of warmth,hospitality and a vibrant and buzzing nightlife epitomized by it’s popular trademark“It’s happening in Alexandra!”. Before I conclude with a short historical narrativeof Alexandra, my research population will be introduced briefly dealing with theirmotivations to move to South African and their experiences within their host-society.

Chapter three will reproduce the complicated dynamics of the xenophobic vi-olence from my informants point of view. By analyzing their perceptions of theorigin of the violence, the identification of its perpetrators and their motivations toconduct violence I hope to generate some insights into the complicated nature ofwhat is often shunned by the predominant coinage of the violence as ‘xenophobic’.I will not only argue that the violence should be understood within the context ofAlexandra’s material conflicts and the identity-formations that have always definedits socio-political landscape, but additionally that conflicting (historical) notions onbelonging have complicated the already ambiguous nature of the Stranger in waysthat also South Africans were told to go home.

It is in chapter four that I start to analyze the various stigma attributes which areregarded by my (predominantly) foreign informants to define foreignness that en-able immigrants to reflect and act upon the ways they are perceived and identifiedwithin South African society. I will show that for many immigrants their other-ness was often perceived to be identified by ways of language, style, morphologicalfeatures, behaviour and occupation, while it was Zuluness that was predominantlyperceived to be employed as a crucial marker of difference between selves and oth-ers. Eventually I will argue that the ambiguous nature of identity markers not onlycreates space for creativity, but that their uncertainty to signify identity were sym-bolized by ‘mistaken identities’ of South Africans. Not only because they were trag-ically perceived as foreign, but more importantly that, due to South African’s ethno-racial and linguistic heterogeneity and conflicting notions of belonging, many SouthAfrican ‘ethnics’ are consciously constructed as not belonging by fellow nationals inways that closely resemble the liminal position of the Stranger.

Finally, chapter five brings creative agency to the foreground. I aim to present analternative view to the one of victims of violence as solely passive agents on the mar-gins of society by analyzing the ways African immigrants manage their undisclosedstigma-attributes in ways that can be defined as strategies of invisibility and some-


times give way performances of South African identities. Ultimately these possi-ble strategies of invisibility will show that identity labels are far from unambiguous,natural and discrete categories of classification, but that their ambiguous boundariesand associated identity markers can be socially negotiated by ways of performancesand stigma-management. Many immigrants are able to actively renegotiate theirstigmatized identity within their daily interactions with South Africans in Alexan-dra’s public spaces by reflecting upon the ways foreignness is constructed withindominant and demotic discourse and practice within South African society.

Chapter 2Research-parameters and context

My decision to conduct fieldwork in a space mainly imagined as Black, dangerousand violent gave way to various insights on the ways Africa in general is perceivedin dominant Western discourse. Friends, relatives and strangers alike often repro-duced stereotypical perceptions on Africa in response to my research plans. But, ofcourse, the same applies for ways South Africans –in this case Black Alexandriansin particular– imagine the (European) White man and how this shaped my intersub-jective relations of daily life in this South African township. Although many Africanimmigrants living in Alexandra frequently experience hostile perceptions towardsthem in their daily interaction with South Africans, my experience while living inAlexandra was predominantly on the positive side. In order to counteract the dom-inant imaginations of Alexandra as solely being a dangerous space and to describethe ways Alexandrians’ perceptions towards me informed the course of my field-work I will give a short description about living my life as a white man in a blackcommunity. The main focus of this chapter, however, is describing and contextu-alizing the setting and my informants. Before I proceed to the usual ethnographicingredients like methods of qualitative research, fieldwork difficulties and questionsof representativeness, I will introduce Harry –my good friend and liaison– and myhost-family, Kgakgi and Thoko Maloke. Finally I’ll proceed to the subjects this re-search mainly focusses on: African immigrants living and/or working in Alexandra.I will discuss their motivations for leaving their country of origin to come to SouthAfrica, followed by their experiences in the community of Alexandra. Finally, I willintroduce a short historical narrative of Alexandra.

24

CHAPTER 2. RESEARCH-PARAMETERS AND CONTEXT 25

Bourgeois Harry, Club Jazz and becoming streetwise in

Alex

Much of my research would not have been possible were it not for Harry. He wasmy key informant and most of all, a man who became a very close friend. I metHarry, a dreadlocked self-declared Rastafarian, during my work as a volunteer inthe Rifle Range Refugee camp. We both were involved with social relief work fordisplaced children and were mostly busy playing soccer, distributing toys, and try-ing to educate them with the limited resources we had. We were basically trying toprovide them with some distraction from the horrors they had endured, the currentstress they had to deal with and tried to give them some structure in the chaoticdaily events that defined the temporarily spaces of refuge. Soon, Harry invited meto visit his home in Alexandra. This visit immediately made me decide to conductmy fieldwork research in this vibrant and dynamic space of both warmth and de-privation. Harry appeared to be a well-known and extremely popular figure. Manypedestrians shouted his nickname ‘Rasta’ enthusiastically at him as we walked themany gridlocked avenues and main roads of Alex. ‘Fire!’ Harry would constantlyresponded, while throwing his fist ‘Mandela-like’ in the air, a gesture reciprocatedwith ‘Mo’ Fire!’. Harry spent a lot of time on shaking complicated handshakes andchatting informally with the many that wanted to. “Everyday it takes me two hoursto get home”, Harry told me smilingly and this surely was not an exaggeration. Itappeared I had met the perfect man to start off successful research and I went backto the Netherlands with a feeling that all would be well.

Upon my return to do my fieldwork in December, I met Harry again at theAlexandra Health clinic. He told me he had found a nice place for me to stay. Iwasn‘t sure what to expect of ‘nice’ in an overcrowded township, inhabited by manyshack-dwellers and known for its dominant impoverished living-conditions. But assoon as we entered the gate of ‘Club Jazz’, the place of residence that he had foundfor me, I realized that ‘nice’ was a highly understated predicative. Situated in theheart of the ‘old’ Alexandra, on the corner of 7th avenue and main road Selbornestreet1, Club Jazz appeared to be a full-blown guest-house that would be considered

1In order to explain Alexandrians your geographical living location in the township, you wouldname the street-name in combination with the nearest-by road that corners it. My geographical place

26 BOURGEOIS HARRY, CLUB JAZZ AND BECOMING STREETWISE IN ALEX

a mid-range place to spend your night in any proper tourist guide. Even residents ofAlexandra, not formerly aware of the place, expressed their surprise of such a niceplace being located in Alexandra.

Club Jazz is situated in the midst of the old part of Alexandra. Right on 7thstreet, not far from the house in which Nelson Mandela briefly lived. The experi-ence of walking through its gates, right from the dusty, lively streets with its manyshacks and hooting taxi-cars, is a somewhat surreal one. A big yard, surroundedwith a veranda, a hatched roofed terrace, two apartments and the family-house areall segregated by its walls from the surrounding township-life. Once inside, the si-lence, cleanliness and white plastered buildings make you almost forget you’re rightinside a township. Only the pumping house-music and hooting taxi’s that alwaysdefine Alexandra’s daily rhythm in muted form remind you of where you are. Inthe course of my stay my relationship with the family Maloke grew towards one inwhich I was treated as a family member. Kgakgi referred to me as a ‘brother’, buttreated me like a son, while Thoko smilingly told everyone she was my mother andtook care of me as such. And I was taken care of indeed. Thoko cooked me deliciouspap and chakalaka, dumplings2 and chicken-wings on a daily basis, while Kgakgi,always busy ‘doing business’, chatted with business partners, listened to jazz or justsimply enjoyed a drink and his daily cigarette of daga.

In the course of my research Harry introduced me to many people, customs, localfood and places. He introduced me to the township-style of greeting and prettysoon I was walking around on my own, using basic tsotsitaal3 slangwords like heitahola, sharp sharp, sho and eish4 and the proper hand-signals that accompanied them,to whomever. Harry showed me the many shortcuts to go wherever you neededto be going, so I moved around the township in little alleys and between shacksand yards like a ‘proper’ local. He took me out to the many shebeens5 and clubs

would be from now on ‘7th Selborne’, meaning I lived on 7th avenue, nearby its corner with Selbornestreet

2Pap is a porridge made from mielie-meal that is often combined with chakalaka a spicy vegetabledish and dumplings, cooked bread-like sliced pieces of dough

3Tsotsitaal is a township language that is constructed out of the grammar of various languages4Respectively expressing: a greeting, a confirmation that all is well, an affirmation and an expres-

sion of disbelief5Originally illicit bars where beverages were sold without a licence. Nowadays many shebeens

are legalized


that Alexandra hosts and I found myself delving into the energetic beer- and bass-infested party-scene that would define Alex-nights from Friday till Monday. Eachnight had its own hotspots. Fridays would be a day to jive6 at Mkaya on 1st street,on Saturdays you could choose between Chicks and Banjello’s in Tsutsumani. OnSundays Joe‘s Butcher provided meat, beers and pumping house-rhythms, fillingthe streets of ‘12th Roosevelt’7 with a huge and energetic dancing crowd, followedby an after-party at Mielies, while Mondays Chicks again was the place to be. In eachclub pumping, bass vibrating local house and kwaito8 rhythms defined the nights, onwhich people would make their amazing and unique robotesque Pantsula9 moves,whistling and shouting to the beats while dumpies10 or ‘proper’ 750ml beer-bottleswould be consumed. Often, local hot-shots were joyriding with their fancy sports-cars and expensive motorbikes and roared the engines to the beats, while bystanderscheered and whistled at the scene. Each weekend the cycle would repeat itself–same, but different and always enjoyable. “It is happening in Alex” was a popularphrase for local Alexandrians to celebrate the vibrancy of their township. It surelywas. But this positive celebration of township life stands in stark contrast with thenegative imaginaries township spaces receive in Western and South African society.

Africa imagined at home

“Do you want to die!?” A close relative of mine expressed her horror in some-what grotesque terms of my plans to conduct my research in Alexandra. Althoughher statement reflected mainly her sincere concern for my safety, it also testified tothe image of “Africa” in general, “South Africa” in particular and the black poor,urban spaces within the latter as spaces of violence, danger, disorder and insecu-rity. Of course, South Africa’s crime statistics place it at the top of the worldwidecrime league. This is a nation where murder, rape, hijacking and burglary havecreated a huge market for 24-hour armed security companies and panic-buttons,

6Township slang for dancing7Meaning the corner of 12th avenue with Roosevelt street8A music genre that is combination of housemusic, ‘African’ sounds, hiphop and rap that origi-

nated in township spaces9A township style comprising musical preference, clothing style and particular dance-moves

1033 cl bottles of beer or cider

28 AFRICA IMAGINED AT HOME

where fences, barking dogs, bars and barb-wired walls dominate suburban streets,where the tourism industry seems to be obsessed with safety and not to forget, wherecountless victims of those crimes are living with their trauma‘s, memories and losses.Again, all this should obviously be placed in a context of apartheid, which has cre-ated one of the most unequal societies in the world and where education, prosperityand health are still unevenly distributed on racial divides. I recall one day when Iwas walking around with a Dutch girl in Alexandra, hoping to give her a sense ofdaily township life. What struck her most was that “people look[ed] so happy”, tes-tifying to an image she had in mind of township places as ones of suffering. Clearlyshe expected those people to be unhappy, strongly informed by stereotypical imagesthat Western society likes to reproduce.

These Western perceptions of Africa that morally and ultimately draw the line be-tween “us” and “them”, “modern” and “traditional”, “civilised” and “uncivilised”,“developed” and “backwards” seem to forget that due to colonialism and globaliza-tion ‘the West’ forms a significant part of South Africa. Sandton, a highly Western-style suburb of shopping malls and office buildings, can be seen from the slopes ofAlexandra. Johannesburg in particular –as many other South African urban spaces–is a “truly global city” with a “multiplicity of registers in which it is African; Eu-ropean, or even American” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008). The city is even said to bethe “premier African metropolis” par excellence, symbolizing the “African modern”,strongly connected to various forms of circulation of people, capital, finance and im-ages (ibid.). But Alexandra itself too is not only a space of poverty, but also a spacewhere new cultures of commodification are emerging: cultures that “underlie newaesthetic forms, of which cell phones, cars, and various registers of fashion are butexamples” (ibid.). Though not evenly developed spatially, the African modern per-meates South African daily life in many ways.

Township spaces are often imagined as homogeneous places of shacks and dete-riorated living-conditions. The spatial reality in Alexandra is far from as simplisticas those images would lead one to believe. ‘Old Alexandra’, the center of the town-ship, mainly consists of yards of (double story) shacks, spaza-shops11, brick-housesand flats. Yards –small plots of land, occupied by several families– often shared toiletfacilities, but electricity and running water is widely available. Old Alexandra not

11An informal shop, usually run from home within township spaces


only forms the centre in terms of spatial location, but is clearly the economic and so-cial heart of the township that fills its streets with vibrant life. Shouting and talkingpeople, hooting taxi-cars, roaming children and street-sellers screaming their slogansto attract their customers are filling its streets during the day. While at night life isas busy, but mostly with youngsters who drink beer, gamble or dance to pumpinghouse- and kwaito-rhythms, while the many rats that form a significant undergroundpart of Alexandra‘s urban-formation constantly run away from the footsteps that ap-proach them. And even this old part is comprised of different areas, some infamousfor being dangerous, others known to be relatively safe. In the West, at 1st avenue,is Pan-Africa, the shopping area with a small shoppingmall12, surrounded by manystreet-hawkers selling their goods. The area of first until fourth avenue, is known asBeirut, and for many perceived to be a ‘Zulu-area’ or ‘KZN’13. In the midst of Beirut,on the corner of fourth and London Road, the Madela hostel looms up, a huge grimstructure, which is mostly (over)populated by male migrant workers from KwazuluNatal and therefore locally perceived to be a Zulu-enclave.

During its 100 years of existence, Alexandra has grown rapidly. Right acrossthe Jukskei river lies East-Bank, a suburban neighbourhood with fairly large lux-ury houses and surrounded by gardens and fenced off with walls. Obviously, thisarea is inhabited by the relatively well-off. Next to that is the Tsutsumani location,a former sports-community that was build for the African games and which is nowtransformed into a residential area. To the North of old Alexandra, bordering theneighbouring suburb Marlboro, is a deserted industrial area, its empty buildingsrapidly populated by residents desperate for a proper roof over their head. South ofMarlboro lies an area called ‘Transit Camp’, a temporary space with simple ‘match-box’ houses, which are populated by people waiting for a permanent space of res-idence. On the Northern banks of the Jukskei river is a highly impoverished areacalled Setswetla, popularly known as “the graveyard”. This area lacks running wa-ter and electricity and the spatial environment mainly consists of shacks made of anypiece of material usable that construct a chaotic maze of winding, dirty paths. Dueto the fact that Setswetla is situated in the flood-line, its shacks are regularly flooded

12At my time of residence a large shoppingmall was in the process of being constructed, as well asa triple-storied taxi-rank

13KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu province of South Africa

30 AFRICA IMAGINED AT HOME

during rainy days. More to the North of Setswetla is a little fenced-off enclave called‘Silvertown’ that earns its name from the blinking curved aluminium plates of whichits houses are built of. It is inhabited by a small community of people displaced dueto a dismantled building that had to make way for the new shopping mall. Nextto Silvertown is Extension 7, a newly build RDP-area that many Alexandrians re-gard as a desired place of residence for its relative new houses and therefore thesource of a lot of tensions. All these areas have their own socio-economic dynam-ics, grades of available facilities, spatial structures and demographic particularities,while obviously embedded and connected within the larger social and spatial town-ship structure.

Although Alex is highly imagined within South African society to be unsafe forand by Whites, I have never felt so. My only negative experience was a young andobviously drunken guy shouting at me while walking on the streets: “You are fuck-ing with our temptation! You are FUCKING with our temptation! This is Alexandrayou!”. Luckily his temptation wasn‘t put into any action. But while my experiencehas notably been on the safer side, for many Alexandrians this has not been thecase. They often live in a world where violence and/or the threat of violence is al-ways present (Ashforth 1998). Due to the township’s high crime-rates and senses ofinsecurity of its inhabitants, Alexandra has become in many ways a very socially-controlled community. This is illustrated by reassertions of local control in the formof vigilantism to more brutal forms of corporal punishment –popularly known as‘people’s justice’ or ‘mob justice’– whereby the community takes matters into theirown hands by beating up or even killing perceived criminals. These forms of com-munal justice have –especially in township-spaces– exposed the limits of the SouthAfrica’s capacity to secure justice for all and the limited reach of the new valuesof human rights and non-violence (Buur and Jensen 2004). For many Alexandrians,mob-justice and vigilantism is considered as a morally rightful and necessary aspectof township life, riddled as it is with crime and danger. The xenophobic violence ofMay 2008 can be seen as a dramatic form of the community taking the law into theirown hands: “by using violent means to take control of the township, the native peo-ple of Alexandra both asserted their township’s autonomy and demonstrated thattheir willing partnership with the government had ended with their patience” (Park2009). But instead of the government, African immigrants were on the receiving end


of the violence.

Greener pastures, bleaker futures

While there are no official statistics, roughly 15% (approximately 60 000) of Alexan-dra’s residents are estimated to be of foreign origin (Alexandra Renewal Project2008). Although it is very plausible this number has dropped due to the violence,it has been noted that roughly 75% of the approximately 1000 displaced people havereturned to Alexandra (ibid.). Countries of origin vary from Nigeria, Malawi, theDRC, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Mozambique amongst others. Citizens ofthe latter two countries form the majority of Alexandra’s migrant population. Themajority of these in turn were of male Zimbabwean nationality due to their demo-graphic overrepresentation and the inability of many Mozambicans to speak the En-glish language. The migration stories they tell are thus often informed by the eco-nomic situation of their country of origin and can by no means be generalized to allmigrants living in Alexandra. That being said, the experiences of many immigrantsof various origins in South Africa remains strikingly similar as many studies haveshown (Sharp 2008; Neocosmos 2005; Nyamnjoh 2007b; Landau, Ramjathan-Keogh,and Singh 2004, amongst others).

Finding immigrants in order to conduct interviews for my research appeared tobe not an easy task. A major difficulty was inherently implicated in my researchquestion. As people tried to deconstruct their foreignness and forged an identitythat would relatively free them from the fear of being a target of violence, how couldI find them? How should I approach them? And, more importantly, how wouldthey react? My chosen strategy could determine whether potential informants werewilling to provide me with sensitive information, since disclosing one’s foreignnesswould put them in a more vulnerable position. One anecdote exemplifying thisdilemma, was when I blatantly – and irresponsibly – approached a street-vendorand asked him if he knew foreign immigrants I could speak with. “I know someZimbabweans selling further down the road”, he replied, “just walk with me”. Oncewe were out of reach of his customers he told me he was a Zimbabwean himself, butdidn‘t want his customers to know that and was happy to talk to me. This was myfirst encounter with an example of the strategies I was looking for, but also made

32 GREENER PASTURES, BLEAKER FUTURES

me realize I would have to be much more careful with my strategies of approachingpossible informants, both for the sake of finding informants for my research, butmore importantly, for not putting them in danger in front of their South Africanneighbours.

Gradually I realized that many street-hawkers around the shopping area of Pan-Africa were of foreign origin. Due to their difficulties of finding entry within the for-mal employment market and the fact that most of them have to rely on themselvesin the absence of their families, many immigrants sell goods on the streets. Conse-quently, my fieldwork was mainly conducted around Pan-Africa, a place brimmingwith street-stalls, shouting market-salesmen, shopping consumers and mini-taxi’s.Gaining their trust proved a difficult task. Often I found out that people suspectedme to be a policeman or a representative from the government at first, which theylaughingly confided to me once I had gained their confidence. But as I spent my timein Pan-Africa on a daily basis, sitting and chatting and trying to casually speak tostreet-sellers about the subject I was doing research on, I became a familiar face. In-formants whom I managed to interview reassured their sceptical friends that I couldbe trusted. But as South African customers were always within ear-reach, most in-terviews were conducted in a private environment or from a safe distance wherebyour conversations could not be heard.

My informants were, except for one woman, all young males ranging from theirtwenties to mid-thirties for several possible reasons. First of all, within Alexandra, apredominant perception exist that men have the authority. Not only did this resultin men taking this authority to speak to me as such, but women often simply shiedaway and replied with “aah, I don‘t know” once I tried to ask them questions. Thisis a problem that others have observed as well in places where men are assumedto have authority and women appear “less accustomed, and to feel less of an en-titlement, to assume authorship or narrative expression” (Malkki 1995a). Anotherproblem of conducting interviews with women was my being a male. Platonic re-lationships between men and women in Alexandra are perceived to be impossible,exemplified by local expressions like “women are here to fuck” or other sexual re-lated statements that typify the dominant perception amongst men on male-femalerelationships. A very educated and outspoken Zimbabwean women once told meshe couldn‘t speak to me, since it would lead to presumptions amongst her friends


of her fooling around. Because I was a highly visible outsider within the community,discrete appointments were almost impossible.

Expectations of a better life in the “fields of gold”

Many informants explained their motivation to leave their country of origin in termsof looking for “greener pastures”:

And I came in the same year I finished, I came this side. To look for greenerpastures. Because, back home it’s difficult, back home. You can’t work at home,

there’s no work, food, clothing. So I decided to come this side (Sibusizo, Zim-

babwe 2009a).

Without exception, all my non-South African informants motivated their decisionto come “this side” in similar terms. While this may be because the majority of themwere from bankrupt Zimbabwe, where there “are no jobs”, “no food”, “no money”,“people are suffering” and pastures are far from green, South Africa is imagined asthe ‘United States’ of Africa where business opportunities are plenty. These imag-inations could simply be aroused by seeing adverts in a pamphlet: “Ah, I expect,like, work, everything, like, since I see some other pamphlet, you know, some mag-azines. Check the groceries, clothes, you know?” (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009), or justby rumours of mythical proportions:

You see, when I grow up, there was a rumour which say, it’s called gold-fields,

which means here in this area. Some of the people wishes to come to cross over

to visit the gold-fields, to look for greener pastures (Robert, Zimbabwe 2009).

Due to the high density of people living in Alexandra, many perceive it as aprofitable business area, as Sibusizo –a Zimbabwean youngster who lived in therelatively small neighbouring township Thembisa, but conducted his business on adaily basis in Alexandra– explained to me: “In Alexandra there is exposure, there aremany customers this side” (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009a). Many youngsters like himcome to South Africa to support their family back home and often work seven daysa week for many hours to do so. Johannesburg is often the first place of arrival, be-ing the economic centre epitomized by its well-known nickname “the city of gold”.

34 EXPECTATIONS OF A BETTER LIFE IN THE “FIELDS OF GOLD”

While some stay in South Africa permanently –and often undocumented– and rarelygo back to their home-country, many others enter the country to work for as long astheir entry-visa permits (three months) and return back to their family with moneyand shopping-goods, and then re-enter South Africa a few weeks later.

By going “in and out in and out in and out” (Innocent, Zimbabwe 2009) betweenSouth Africa and their country of origin, often Zimbabwe, immigrants tried to liveup to the responsibilities and expectations of their families. The little money thatremains from what they earn (often around 100 to 300 Rands per day, 9 to 28 euroa day) they often used to stock their street-stalls, send remittances across the borderand buy groceries and luxury goods to bring home:

Mozes: Yeah. I send money every month. Every month I must try and give them

something, yeah. They even charge us for sending money that side

Me: So you are saving groceries as well, ne?

Mozes: Yeah, I’m saving groceries. Here, I’ve got some soja-beans and some

mielie-rice. [...] Yeah, every week I buy something, every week I buy some-

thing. When I go to Zimbabwe it will be a big bag. They even deliver it (Mozes,

Zimbabwe 2009).

As I was in South Africa on a tourist visa I –as many migrants– had to go “inand out” of the country to be able to extend it. When I was about to depart fromJoburg Park Station, I was amidst a busload of Zimbabweans who were destined totheir Zimbabwean families and dressed up in stylish clothing and cool-looking sun-glasses. They would for sure give the impression to their familiars of having madeit in their new homeland, I imagined. The loads of goods they were taking were im-pressive: trollies, packed with fridges, other electrical goods, bags and boxes stuffedmeters high and pulled by a readily available employee. The bus couldn’t carry theentire load in its luggage room, so we all ended up being packed in between theremaining boxes and bags in the bus itself. It gave me a tiny insight into the com-plex dynamics of migration and the experience of bribing myself across the border.In order to avoid the bus being stripped searched everybody folded 20 Rands inhis or her identity-document, which was all being handed over to the border po-lice. Nonetheless, we still had to wait for three hours due to the high amount oftraffic that tried to cross at that particular time. As we arrived at night, the chaos– fully loaded buses with migrants and their goods, border-policemen conducting


their informal business, and the other politics of border-crossing – was a fascinatingopportunity to observe. The electrified fences that marked the national boundarycould be seen from the border-post, in the midst of darkness. At one point I heard awoman screaming and saw some silhouettes just a couple of 100 meters away fromus. It gave me an eerie feeling and I asked my Zimbabwean neighbour what hap-pened. “She was trying to cross the border, but was probably mugged by a tsotsi14”,he shrugged as if nothing happened. Bribing, illegal trafficking, jumping borders,tsotsi’s trying to take advantage of one‘s vulnerable position suddenly seemed a per-fectly normal aspect of our journey.

Aside from the business opportunities, many immigrants decide to live theirlife in Alexandra because friends or family from ‘back home’ are living there al-ready (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b; Patrick, Zimbabwe 2009; Prince, Zimbabwe 2009;Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009). It is also simply because many people of the same nationalorigin are providing them with a social network, business and/or housing opportu-nities and a sense of familiarity:

at least this side I work with my brothers, the ones from home. These guys, they

are from Zimbabwe. And I enjoy that, you know, being in the company of other

guys from home. You know, it’s much easier that way, it’s much easier that way

(Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009a).

Imagine living as a youngster in a place where the environment is hostile to you,far away from your friends and family, having to rely solely on yourself to providefor your daily needs and at the same time feeling the immense pressure of succeed-ing to take care of your family back home. Being accompanied by familiar faces ofsimilar cultural and socio-economic backgrounds makes life indeed a little bit easier.When you have to deal with memories of terror and the daily experience of spacesand faces that remind you of violence for many immigrants this forms a crucial partof bearing those difficulties.

The disillusion of illusion

14South African township-gangster

36 THE DISILLUSION OF ILLUSION

However, life in South Africa has rarely lived up to the high expectations my in-formants had of the country. First of all, many expressed the hardship they had toendure by starting a whole new life in the midst of a culturally and socially alienenvironment and often having nothing but some clothing. Mozes considered thefeeling of being “lost”, while he had to live up to the expectations back home to bevery “hard”:

Me: So is South Africa the way you expected it to be?

Mozes: No, because it’s hard. Because first time coming over this side, it was

like, fuck. You know, starting life from scratch. Not knowing no-one, no friends,

new people, new language. So, you will be like, lost, first few months come here,

lost lost lost, like end up missing back home again. But now, check, I don’t like

going back home, without carrying something you know? They expect if you go

to another country, if I’m coming back, you have to show I’ve been there, I was

working, I’ve got myself one, two, three. Yah (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009)

While many are able to set up a relatively profitable business after a while –andget one, two, three as Mozes calls it–, even expectations of a ‘good life’ remain anillusion for many immigrants. Nevertheless Josef regarded life here still as betterthan in Zimbabwe and until the country recovers from its economic destruction, ahard life is still preferred by him above one in which ‘things aren’t valuable’:

Josef: You know, when I came to South Africa I expected a lot. But. EVEN NOW,

I haven’t even achieved ONE of the things that I expected from South Africa. I

was expecting good life. Because, by that time neh? Things were slowly slowly

changing, there by our country. You see? So we thought, maybe South Africa

is what? It’s a better place for us. BUT. As for now, maybe by that time it was

better, but as for now it’s not. You can even see there are too many people, no

jobs. You see? It’s difficult. It’s difficult.

Me: But is life better here than in Zimbabwe?

Josef: Yeah, life is better, just because, things are valuable. Shops, food and

stuff, you see? There’s much more hunger there in Zimbabwe. But if things are

valuable in Zimbabwe, I think the lifestyle there is better then here. You see?

(Josef, Zimbabwe 2009)

Ob, who sold pirated Nigerian movies at Pan-Africa, was a very outspoken, en-ergetic and articulate man. I would often hang out with him and philosophized


with him about township life as a foreigner, politics and daily business while ob-serving him charming his customers into buying his Nigerian movies, movies inwhich witchcraft or love figured predominantly. His outspokenness and intellectualwit provided me with a lot of in-depth information, which he managed to place in awider context of politics and experience. His experience in South Africa made himvery angry and he passionately stressed the words he was upset about. He seemedto be particular disappointed with the discourse of human rights, equality and op-portunities that South Africa promises the “people who live in it”:

That anthem can MAKE you wanna come. But you get there and you find things

are VERY different. The discrimination is just too much. You know, what they

call ethnicity ne? These people they play it in a very different role. Unlike in

other African countries, so you can see clearly that, that this is, when you go to

Rwanda, you see that this is a Tutsi, you know. But here, they play it in a way

that you you think that, ehm, everybody is trying to promote something. But it’s

a lie! It’s the SAME thing they are doing here. They can easily make you to feel

that you are not ONE of their own. Do you understand me? (Ob, Ghana 2009)

Ethnicity is ‘played’, according to Ob, as if everybody is equal no matter whatbackground, while in reality he experienced this institutionalized promise as farfrom true. While the constitution promotes universal values and a nation for all,Ob clearly feels discriminated. Indeed, during the violence ethnicity was played outin various –especially violently excluding– ways. Before I proceed to those memo-ries of terror of May 2008, let me first outline a small history of Alexandra and theways identity has been played out in the township since its early years of existence.

Alexandra’s historical dynamics and discourse on iden-

tity

Alexandra’s history is one in which struggle, political uprisings, insider/outsidercleavages, and the enduring danger of demolition and forced removals have im-bued the community with a strong political consciousness. While Alexandra rapidlypoliticized in the 1940s a kaleidoscope of political and cultural activities has createdpolitical and cultural pluralism, which has been a “persisting and distinctive feature

38 AN EMERGING RURAL-URBAN FORMATION

of the township’s history” (Bonner and Nieftagodien 2008, p. 125). Many politicalactivists began their activism during Alexandra’s many times of turmoil. NelsonMandela, living briefly in Alexandra, recalled that during the bus-boycott of 1943, he“departed from [his] role as an observer and [became] a participant” (ibid., p. 72). Or,to quote Jika Twala, “As long as you were born in Alexandra, you were a politician”(ibid., p. 125). As much as Soweto is historically imagined within South African so-ciety as the centrifugal political centre in which the Soweto student uprising of 1976catalyzed the national apartheid struggle, Alexandra is known for the important roleit played in Black political mobilisation since the early apartheid years. Although itshistory is strongly embedded within a national historical narrative, there are manyparticular localities that have defined Alexandra’s distinctive character, a characterin which both struggle, deprivation and poverty as resistance, the crystallization ofan urbanized identity, a strong sense of independence and a rich social and culturallife have played important parts.

An emerging rural-urban formation

If it was up to Herbert Papenfus, who bought the piece of land in 1905, Alexandrawould have been a farming area for White Afrikaners. However, because of lackof White interest, he was forced to change it to a freehold township for Africansand Coloureds in 1912. Not coincidentally, this occurred just a year before the Na-tive Land Bill was passed, which prohibited non-Whites from buying plots of land;the result was a desperate scramble for land by Africans and Coloureds. It broughtmany rural immigrants to the township, and as land-owners they were filled with agreat sense of independence and took pride in their rural background (ibid., pp. 18-21): “property meant independence, self-worth and respectability, and it clearly de-marcated residents of Alexandra from the rest of Black society” (ibid.). Many life-trajectories of Alexandrians were defined in terms of ‘sharecropper turned urbanbusinessman and entrepreneur’ (ibid., p. 5). These emerging land-owner identitieslargely suppressed ethnic rivalries of past decades, which was even described asdetribalization, but could in reality be more accurately described as surpassing a“loose, diffuse, non-traditional ethnic consciousness” that always loomed under thepolitical and social surface (ibid., pp. 53-4).


Urbanisation and rapid populationgrowth

During the rapid urbanisation of the 1940s, apartheid became highly dependent oncheap Black labour, which led to a massive influx of migrants from the rural ar-eas looking for opportunities in the urbanized industrial areas. While an enigmawithin White suburbia, Alexandra nonetheless became incorporated within the offi-cial boundaries of the city. Simultaneously, this led to growing demands for demo-lition, which paradoxically coincided with the increasing demand for cheap labour.The population of Alexandra therefore grew rapidly, feared by the state as spirallingout of control. The state attempted to manage this dilemma by transforming thearea into a massive migrant labour compound, flattening people’s homes and erect-ing “grim edifices of migrant hostels” on its ruins. In 1952 the Mentz Committee wasappointed by the Minister of Native Affairs and charged with giving “substance tothe 1950 Group Areas Act”, implemented for racial and business segregation. Thecommittee recommended “that [Alexandra’s] population should be reduced [from90.000 to 30.000] so that it ultimately was comprised of residents working in thenorthern suburbs” (ibid., pp. 172-3). These desperate state attempts to control theinflux of Black workers led to the first signs of Black urban resistance, in which theyouth played a decisive role. Tertiary institutions and secondary schools turnedgradually into political arenas for Black mobilisation (ibid., pp. 10-11).

Politicization and radicalization

The late 1940s and 1950s marked a period of many political protests, which gradu-ally turned many inhabitants into radicalized and militant political activists and outof which a generation of young and educated intellectuals arose. Inward-lookingpolitical consciousness quickly gained a more mass-based, unified outward charac-ter as the people of Alexandra began reaching out to wider political organisations onbroader political issues (ibid., pp. 53-5, 59). Both in 1944 and 1957 mass political mo-bilisation led to bus boycotts within Alexandra, in protest against the rising pricesof public transport. Both boycotts “fundamentally shifted the direction and [...] thetempo of political struggle countrywide”, out of which apartheid architect and pres-ident H. F. Verwoerd noted that “the really successful boycotts occurred in uncon-

40 UNITED, BUT POLITICALLY FRAGMENTED

trolled townships”. Because of its radicalized nature and rapid population growth,Alexandra in particular was targeted with repressive influx controls and continuousthreats of demolition and forced removals of the Black population to racially segre-gated Bantu areas in order to bring the township “under very strict control” (Bonnerand Nieftagodien 2008, pp. 8-10, 148). But, concurrently, its issues were widely de-bated in the national press and for the first time seemed to impress themselves onthe minds of a section of the White public. Alexandra started to symbolize the ex-ploitation and oppression of urban Africans more generally. More importantly, thesuccess of the bus-boycotts, made painfully clear that the only language the oppres-sor seemed to understand was mass organised action (ibid., pp. 72,80).

The mid 1960s to the early 1970s marked an era of heavy state-repression and rel-ative political quiescence. But the lulling political consciousness was strongly awak-ened in the 70s, of which the student uprising in 1976 was the first major township re-volt, propelling the nationwide struggle against apartheid to unprecedented heights.As a Black Consciousness (BC) inspired protest against the inferior Bantu-educationand the introduction of Afrikaans in Black schools as the main language, it marked adecisive turning point in national resistance politics. Both periods of resistance werecharacterised by its diverse political character, grass-roots mobilisation, a strong rep-resentation of socialist politics and the heavy influence of a “layer of organic intel-lectuals and working-class activists” (ibid., pp. 10-11). But it was mainly young stu-dents that inspired the movement, forming local organizations co-ordinating “theiractivities beyond individual townships” and consciously reaching out to parents tosupport their demands (ibid., p. 11).

United, but politically fragmented

Labour disputes were of important significance in the mobilisation of independenttrade unions and the reawakening of the urban workers class. Both student andworkers movements would coalesce around solidarity actions, providing the cata-lyst for a much broader resistance movement. Marxist ideologies and literature in-fluenced the township-based intellectuals and emphasised the importance of workersolidarity and activism. A diverse movement of different and often competing po-litical youth groups and trade unions would emerge from these heterogeneity of


grass-roots organisations and would radically define Alexandra’s diverse politicalclimate, a climate which exists to this day. None of the popular organisations, like theCongress of South African Students (COSAS), the United Democratic Front (UDF)and the Alexandra Youth Congress (AYCO), could impose their political dominancein the township. The so called People’s Power organs, civic yard and street commit-tees, further propelled the struggle, which eventually brought apartheid to its knees.Yards and streets were both local spaces of participatory democracy and spaces ofcontestation between property owners and tenants, based on a long tradition of self-help and Alexandra’s strong sense of community (ibid., pp. 12-14).

Impoverishment, township wars and the demise of apartheid

The continuous struggle against removal defined a strong sense of belonging andownership in Alexandra, in which remaining residents defined themselves as ‘au-thentic’ bona fides. Eventually the government announced the reprieve of Alexan-dra’s removal in 1979, leading to enormous hopes that Alexandra would finally en-joy the fruits of redevelopment. However, in 1980 the Alexandra Master Plan fordevelopment, desperately failed to materialise due to the crisis of apartheid in the1980s and the government’s privatised policy of housing delivery in order to fostera black middle class. Only a small minority could afford the relatively expensivehouses that would be built as a result of this. Secondly, the massive urbanisation ofthe 80s again led to tens of thousands impoverished migrants moving to the town-ship areas. Lack of proper housing led to a huge increase of peripheral informalsettlements within Alexandra, and the township gradually transformed into a hugesquatter camp. Alexandra became widely regarded as the most overcrowded placein the country, as former working-class areas were converted into “reservoirs of theunemployed” (ibid., pp. 14-15).

These events did not only further impoverish the township spaces dramatically.They simultaneously triggered further resistance and an upsurge in labour disputesas well as the growth of perceived insiders/outsiders cleavages. Intertwined withpolitical and material struggle and ethnic affiliation, these eventually culminatedin the township wars of the 1990s, in which thousands of people were killed in abloody conflict between Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) aligned hostel dwellers and

42 IMPOVERISHMENT, TOWNSHIP WARS AND THE DEMISE OF APARTHEID

ANC-supporting township residents. These events marked a bloody end to an erain which decades of struggle against oppression and deprivation had caused thewhite oppressive regime to finally dismantle its oppressive apartheid system. Thedemocratic change of 1994 resulted in major hopes for change for the Black major-ity. However, delays in service delivery caused more overcrowding and the formerunity of the struggle against apartheid began to crumble, resulting in a deepeningof existing social cleavages and a struggle over limited resources. It is in the contextof these historical localities and legacies, embedded in broader national and globaldevelopments, that the xenophobic violence that ‘swept’ through the township inMay 2008 should be placed into and in which I will come back to the next chapter.

Chapter 3“They were KILLING, you see?”

“They were KILLING, you see?”, Ndundu said to me bluntly with his typical deepgrunted voice and twinkling eyes. I was sitting together with him and his familynext to their shack in the impoverished area of Setswetla, drinking beer and talkingabout those days of violence. As Ndundu had serious problems lowering his voicewhile cracking jokes about the perceived laziness and stupidity of South Africans,his family was very concerned about the possibilities of neighbours hearing them.“We have to go inside”, his wife whispered, after which Ndundu lowered his voiceand responded: “but do you think they will understand?” and made us all burst outin laughter. Their perceptions of South Africans as unable to speak proper English,being lazy, stupid, ignorant and jealous were a constant source of entertainment forNdundu and his family. Eventually we moved inside, since Ndundu was unable tolower his voice for more than a minute while he kept constantly ridiculing SouthAfricans with his infectious humor, which made the others obviously uncomfort-able. Although many respondents told me stories of fear and horror and were aswary as Ndundu’s family of their neighbours, most of them either expressed theirgenuine anger and contempt for South Africans or expressed their perceptions insimilar ways to Ndundu. By placing themselves morally above their South Africanneighbours and using humour or anger as ways to express this contempt seemed tobe a way to deal with their experience of suffering.

As we have seen in the first chapter, a hegemonic xenophobic state-discourseand practice has provided for a stereotypical and racialized image of the foreignerin South African public discourse. To what extent reflected the days “they were

43

44 THE RIOT AND ITS STRUCTURED CHAOS

KILLING” the same stereotypical perceptions towards those that were killed, in-jured and/or chased away as those stereotypes of the makwerekwere within SouthAfrica’s hegemonic xenophobic state-discourse? What kind of stakes claimed thoseperpetrators of violence and what was the basis of their motivation? How did theviolence originate and what dynamics came into play? What were the localized con-texts in which the violence has to be placed? As xenophobic perceptions are shapedby a hegemonic political discourse that has provided a set of ideological parametersby which socio-economic grievances of South Africans can be articulated (Neocos-mos 2008), to what extent do these discourses about insiders and outsiders reflectlocalized dynamics of the violence that was said to be xenophobic? And, relatedly,how did those cleavages express former cleavages that have informed Alexandra’ssocio-historical landscape? Clearly, ethnic or national identities are often politicallyconstructed as South African history has so painfully made clear and as we will see,the political construction of insiders and outsiders has always been a notable aspectof Alexandra’s particular history. Moreover, given that foreigners are predominantlyconsidered by various elements within South African society to be a threat to SouthAfrican resources and public services, how have these perceptions informed the ori-gin of the violence? This chapter is concerned with a reconstruction of perceptionson the dynamics of the riots, which is firmly placed in Alexandra’s local and histor-ical context. As the story unfolds we will see that while South Africa’s hegemonicxenophobic discourse is clearly reflected in the dynamics of the violence, it cannot befully understood without placing it in the local socio-economic and historical land-scape of Alexandra.

The riot and its structured chaos

Codifying violence in analytical terms –be they nationalistic, ethnic, xenophobic, po-litical or racial and the like– is always a political choice. Violence, in other words,is not a social fact or a cultural experience until it is given significance by analyz-ing subjects (Warren 1993). To complicate matters even further, violence itself is al-ready an ambiguous concept that shades over from the direct use of force to causebodily harm (Brubaker and Laitin 1998) to the “deeply-ingrained, disguised, andhabitual forms of ‘structural violence’ that systematically negate the will and deny

CHAPTER 3. “THEY WERE KILLING, YOU SEE?” 45

agency to vast numbers of people in modern societies simply because they are poor,‘coloured’, infirm, elderly, vagrant, or migrant” (Jackson 2002). By analysing conflictusing grand analytical concepts like globalization and modernity anthropologistsoften study these complex phenomena from a distance, thereby silencing the harshrealities of those victims themselves and create a profound silence about suffering(Green 1999).

The story of immigrants in Alexandra needs to be told not only to do justiceto their victimization. Reproducing a micro-analysis from their point of view willalso help to capture a glimpse of the complex dynamics of the xenophobic violence.The vocabulairy and images that were employed within newspapers coverage ofthe violence often gave the impression of a homogeneous crowd acting with a col-lective subjective mind. Subject positions are not fixed in advance, but constructedand construed by violent performance and this mutation of agency renders formalideological rationale and prior contextual motivation unstable and even secondary(Feldman 1991). This has dramatic consequences for analysts trying to accurately an-swer questions about the nature of violent conflict, to the point where one ultimatelyrealizes that what happened “is built on spirals of information, misinformation, anddisinformation”, obscuring the divisions between “what is seen and what is heard,what is known and what is suspected, what is feared and what is fantasized, what isfact and what is fiction” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).

But while the internal dynamics of riots can be described as highly disorderlyand subjectively fragmented, there is definitely a structured pattern to be foundwithin ethnic rioting, a structure that is defined by rules of provocation, choice oftargets, intensity of violence and termination (Horowitz 2001, p. 4). As the violencewas dominantly labelled as xenophobic, one can discern many theoretical similari-ties with riots coined as ‘ethnic’. An ethnic riot can be defined as “an intense, sud-den, though not necessarily wholly unplanned, lethal attack by civilian membersof one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group, the victims cho-sen because of their group membership” (ibid., p. 1). And, the author argues, ethnicriots are thus synonymous with what are variously called “communal,” “racial,”“religious,” “linguistic,” or “tribal” disturbances. In the case of South Africa, whilethe victims were dominantly chosen because of their out-group membership –beingnon-South African–, we will see that ethnic, communal, racial, linguistic and even

46 RECONSTRUCTING THE “DAYS OF NOISE”

tribal disturbances complicate the coinage of ‘xenophobic’.What will follow now is a reconstruction of the days of violence from the victims’

point of view, corroborated by theory, analysis and statements of South African in-formants. In this reconstruction I will try to answer the important questions of whathappened, who did it and why it happened (at that particular time) eventually sit-uating these events within the socio-historical landscape of Alexandra. Reading ariot is a difficult task, but can provide clues, not only to the character of the violence,but also to the substance of group relations and the socio-economic context withinwhich it occurs (Horowitz 2001, p. 8).

Reconstructing the “days of noise”

“It was Sunday that day”, Raphael started telling me, “I was staying with my wife.We looking at tv. I heard the people, just crying. Just the shacks [makes thumpingsounds]. Hey, my friend, it was terrible. Eish, eish, eish. I see the people comingleft and right, carrying the bags, carrying the TV’s” (Raphael Mozambique 2009).Raphael had been staying for several years in a small shack nearby the Zulu-hosteland while his car was lit alight a year ago by somebody he was “clashing” with, hischeerful nature was appreciated by his neighbours. He owned a small spaza-shopnearby his house where he sold the regular items of bottles of beers, cold-drinks,cigarettes, cookies, toiletries, bread and the like. While many victims were ‘pin-pointed’ by their close neighbours as foreigners during the violence (Ellen, SouthAfrica and Themba, Zimbabwe 2009; Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009), Raphael got tremen-dous help from his neighbours when the rioters came. As the crowd passed by andasked people “where are the Shangaan?1”, his neighbours told the crowd day in dayout they did not know any Shangaans. After which the crowd continued their eth-nic investigations at the other shacks (Raphael Mozambique 2009). When Raphaeldecided to go back to Mozambique for a month until the violence calmed down, hisformer neighbours even begged him to come back: “And people said, hey come myfriend hey. The people are suffering, no cold drinks, no beers. Come, to open thebusiness, we’ll help. Come back, just come back. Then we go there. They helped a

1While Shangaan is an ethnic affiliation both to be found in South Africa and Mozambique, inmany stories it seemed that the label Shangaan was conflated with the Mozambican nationality


lot” (ibid.).While Raphael perceived the majority of his neighbours as “like brothers”, for

many other victims, neighbours constituted a highly ambiguous category. For it wasoften the neighbours that told the rioters where to find the foreigners and took theopportunity to loot when they were chased away. “The people who took things,must be guys who know us, who are around”, said Mozes to me and identifiedthis as the very reason he was “scared of his neighbours” (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009).Nevertheless, another South African neighbour helped Mozes by stocking his pre-cious belongings inside her house and Mozes stressed that “not every South Africanwas like those guys who was chasing us away” (ibid.). An old Zimbabwean manI accidently interviewed aptly described the violent event as “those days of noise”(Robert, Zimbabwe 2009) and this was a term that many coined to refer to thosedays. As the attacks predominantly happened at night, when most were sleeping,the first memory many had when waking up was hearing... noise:

Hm, the day of the attack, it was like, by that day, it was on Sunday, yeah it was

Sunday. And I think I was sleeping, it was about 9 O’clock. And by that time I

was sleeping and I heard a lot of noise from outside. So when I woke up I tried to

see what is going on. So I thought it was just people gathering, church services

or something. But I heard that no, it’s not church services, it is a fight and people

are being beaten and by the time I came out of where I did stay, I found out that

there is already someone that is killed (Collen, Zimbabwe and Friends 2009).

While people were sleeping, mobs of furious and often intoxicated people, armedwith guns, iron sticks and all sorts of tools capable of (lethal) injuries were chantingand singing and banging the doors of perceived foreigners to force them to iden-tify themselves. Having the ‘wrong’ identification, being identified wrongly, beingunable to identify yourself, having the ‘wrong’ bodily markers or just being in thewrong place at the wrong time could mean targets would have to leave everythingbehind, be burned, or even killed. ‘Noise’ seemed for many victims to symbolizethese hours of chaos, terror and uncertainty. Part of this noise was a traditional Zulusong: Umshini Wami.2 As the song was chillingly used during those riots by rioters,the song is highly associated with memories of those days in 2008:

2Umshini Wami, translated as ‘Bring me my machine gun’, is a popular Zulu song, formerly usedduring the apartheid struggle by members of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African


Because when they sing that song [..] When they were singing [sings part of the

song] They were coming! You see? [sings again] Otherwise, that song. It’s a

mob. I tried to stay here, myself. But it was difficult, because, you heard your

neighbours being KICKED. In his room or her room. Being RAPED! (Ndundu

and family, Zimbabwe 2009)

Hearing the song being sung during those days was for many foreigners a signthat they were in grave danger. While Ndundu was brave enough to stay in hishouse the first day while he could hear his neighbours being kicked and raped, oth-ers decided not to try their luck and used various places to hide themselves. The roofwas one of the common hiding places. As soon as some informants woke up and re-alized the ‘noise’ they heard wasn’t a church-gathering of some sort, they quicklyclimbed on top of their roof while the rioters broke into their house and looted theirproperty as they were lying there, not able to do anything but watch (Robert andRoommates, Zimbabwe 2009; Benneth, Mozambique 2009; Patrick, Zimbabwe 2009).Others ran away and went to the riverbank or even the graveyard to spend the night(Benneth, Mozambique 2009; Benneth, Mozambique 2009; Ndundu and family, Zim-babwe 2009; Aunt Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009). The ones who were not so lucky to es-cape before the crowd knocked on their doors had to face them and try to convincethem within minutes they were ‘Zulu’. If they would not be able to do this, theywere chased away, beaten or even killed while their assets were taken:

Eh, somewhere like in May when the xenophobia started. Yeah. It started about

2 AM. At night. Yeah. A group of people, more than 200 people were singing,

running, along the streets. Carrying sticks, iron bars, hummers, some have got

guns, by that time. Yeah. They just come to your house to room ne. They knock,

they say [speaks Zulu], meaning to say, open the door. If you are a Zulu speaking

person, show that you are a Zulu. If you’re do not respond in a period of two

minutes, they just break the door, get inside, they beat you. They take your

assets, they go. Some were killed, but myself and my friends we managed to

escape (Tendai, Zimbabwe 2009).

South African newspapers documented many angry attackers during the xeno-phobic violence who predominantly legitimized their actions with perceptions that

National Congress (ANC). Nowadays, the song is often used by president Zuma, stirring up contro-versies as being inappropriate in the context of rise of violent crime since the democratic transition


foreigners are “taking people’s jobs and reaping the benefits of our freedom” (Tsha-balala and Dibetle 2008). Not surprisingly, in Alexandra –one of the most denselypopulated and impoverished area’s in South Africa– informants shared similar ex-periences of Alexandrians blaming them for their socio-economic hardship and highcrime-rates. “Why they were chasing?”, Prince asked himself, “they said foreign-ers were causing crime here in South Africa. They were taking their wives, theywere taking their houses, taking jobs” (Prince, Zimbabwe 2009). These notions thatforeigners are stealing jobs and houses are partly a result of various governmentalpolicies that exclude foreigners from access to the formal employment and housingmarkets and make them a very real competitor with South Africans for jobs andhousing within the informal sector (CORMSA 2008). “It is the AUTHORITY thatneeds to CHECK those things” as Ob said, clearly identifying the root of these prob-lems as lying with government policy too. Because many immigrants are unable tofind formal employment and mostly have no families to rely on, they are often forcedto work for below-average wages in order to survive and are therefore preferred byemployers as cheap labour within the informal sector. Jeffrey’s South African wifeexplained that she wouldn’t work for the wages that her Malawian husband wouldwork for in order to survive:

You see, you can say yeah or no about maybe they are taking their jobs. You see,

when Malawians, like he’s Malawian ne? Indians, they are looking for some-

body to work. Then they say, you are looking for somebody. I’m a South African,

he’s an outsider. Then they say, ok, I’m going to give you 150 a week. Myself I’m

going to say no, I don’t want that fee. Because what can I do with that 150?

Then he [her Malawian husband] said, because he came here because he wanted

work, then he say: ‘eish, if I lose this job, maybe I’ll stay more months without

getting a job’. Then he say: ‘ne, I’ll take it’. you see? (Jeffrey, Malawi and his

wife, South Africa 2009)

Within the housing market as well, foreigners are easy targets for exploitationby private landlords and corrupt officials due to their exclusion from governmentalhousing plans. “It‘s the South Africans that should be blamed”, said Kumalo. Afterall, he argued, it’s the South Africans themselves that are the ones that make it pos-sible that foreigners are jumping housing queues and make sure they are forced todo the “hard labour jobs”:


We came here, they allowed us. They gave us accommodation, they gave us

work. So then now, eh, they say we are taking their houses. How can we take

their houses, their land? Whilst they are the ones who are selling us shacks,

shacks are too much in Alexandra, mkuku3. Yeah, they are the ones who sold

us or sell us, they are the ones makes us renting their houses. So now they are

saying we are taking their accommodation and jobs, did you see, I haven’t seen

any foreigner in the bank. I haven’t seen any foreigner, soldier, who’s a foreigner.

I haven’t seen a minister who’s a foreigner. But, in this ehm, hard labour, you

see, hard labour jobs. They don’t want to do it. So, we just do it as we are from

somewhere else (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009).

The widely analysed xenophobic mindset of South Africans amongst all seg-ments of their post-apartheid society (Cejas 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Har-ris 2002; Landau, Ramjathan-Keogh, and Singh 2004, amongst many others)4 is clearlyreflected within the daily experiences of immigrants in Alexandra and identified bythem as how perpetrators of violence legitimized their violent actions. As we will seeAlexandrians have historically always constructed localized forms of belonging andnotions of entitlement by defining who is a legitimate Alexandrian and who is not.This empty form of local authentic belonging was malleable to fluid interpretation sothat its Other could be constantly redefined (Geschiere 2009). By legally formalizingthe rights to employment and urban residence within categories of (il)legality, boththe apartheid regime and its post-apartheid democratic successor have politically in-terpellated categories that provided impoverished Alexandrians with a vocabularyin order to claim what ‘belongs’ to them. Although the content of these categorieshas shifted over time, the vocabularies, discourses and forms of conflict in whichthey are mobilized for scarce resources are strikingly similar.

3Township slang for a shack4According to a survey conducted in 1997 and 1998 by the Southern African Migration Project

(SAMP), South African attitudes towards foreigners strongly resemble the Oxford definition of xeno-phobia as “[the] intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries”. Particularlyimmigrants from African countries were thought by 37 percent to be “a threat to jobs and the econ-omy”, while 48 percent perceived them as “a criminal threat” and 29 percent associated them withbringing deseases. Not surprisingly, 25 percent wanted a total ban on immigration, while approxi-mately half of the population demanded “strict limits on the number of foreigners allowed into thecountry”. Only 6 percent (which dropped to 2 percent a year later) said that the government “shouldlet anyone in who wants to enter” the country (Danso and McDonald 2001)


Alexandra and its history of redefining the outsider

Since its early years of community formation Alexandra’s inhabitants have alwaysbeen preoccupied with the definition who ‘truly’ is an Alexandrian and who is not.Rapid population growth, economic deprivation, overcrowded and impoverishedconditions have resulted in a constant struggle within Alexandra’s community forscarce resources and the rights to space. The shortage on housing in particular hasbeen an enduring source of conflict within the township, one that has created fault-lines between ‘native’ Alexandrians (identifying themselves as bona fides in orderto affirm their historical beloning) on the one hand and rural-urban migrants andshack dwellers on the other. Insider/outsider notions have therefore been a fun-damental aspect of the community’s discourse on identity. Although Alexandra’sspatial composition strongly resembled ethnic clustering since its early years, thisgradually broke down under the tidal wave of sub-tenants who were desperatelylooking for accommodation that could be provided for by bona fide property owners.Towards the 1950s, out of these unequal power relations that crystallized into a semi-permanent struggle over resources and space, arose a class of landlords (Bonner andNieftagodien 2008, pp. 86-9). Shortage of space and housing and a rapid popula-tion growth –catapulted by the search for labour in the informal sector of urbanizingJohannesburg– increased this tension between stand-holders and tenants and forcedmany rural migrants to erect shacks on the outskirts of the township (ibid., pp. 93-4,108-9,302).

Alexandra became a hub for many rural-urban migrants to access Johannesburgsemployment market and its population increased rapidly during the 1950s5. In or-der to control this ‘influx of natives’ into South Africa’s urban confines the apartheidregime introduced the “Influx Control Act”, a permit system that formally deter-mined the rights to urban space and employment of ‘natives’ perceived to be “stream-ing” into Johannesburg’s labour market. This system legally classified the black pop-ulation within urban areas in categories of ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’ which determinedtheir rights to space and employment in the cities. Although many ‘illegals’ were re-moved to homelands6 in the early 70s, overcrowding and lack of housing remained a

5In 1955 the Alexandra’s population grew allegedly to somewhere in the region of 135.0006The Group Areas Act, passed in 1950, geographically defined ethno-racial segregated ‘native’

homelands designated for the various ethnic and racial groupings within South Africa

52 ALEXANDRA AND ITS HISTORY OF REDEFINING THE OUTSIDER

significant parameter of Alexandra’s spatial life. The continuous influx of new immi-grants who mainly occupied the migrant hostels or the erected ‘illegal’ settlementswithin Alexandra constantly reshaped the character of its population (Bonner andNieftagodien 2008, pp. 232-3). The state’s classifications of ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’ wereincreasingly politically appropriated by bona fide residents in order to claim scarceresources. ‘Legal’ residents often complained that ‘illegals’ were undermining theiraccess to housing. These notions exposed an important fault-line between thoseapartheid-created categories of ‘legal’ permit holders and ‘illegal’ outsiders/non-permit holders. This malleable way of defining who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’ made itpossible for newcomers to eventually become bona fides themselves, while the en-during influx of newcomers made sure there would always be a group of ‘others’,‘aliens’ or amagoduka’s who could be blamed for the shortage of housing and othersocial ills (ibid., pp. 312-3).

When the restrictive influx control system was abolished in 1986, a mass exodusof South Africans from impoverished areas moved to urban townships. The statefailed miserably in the provision of adequate housing and during the late 80s andearly 90s the number of shacks rapidly outstripped formal dwellings7 (ibid., p. 329).These socio-economic changes resulted in a series of interlocking problems of over-crowding, unemployment, poverty, crime and shifting political rivalries that threat-ened to tear the community apart (ibid., p. 329). Promises of service delivery largelyremained just that: a promise and conditions in the township deteriorated rapidly8.These developments were embedded in rapid political changes, of which the releaseof Nelson Mandela and the negotiations to end apartheid created new fault linesbetween several interest groups.

Political contestations were hardly new and were an integral part of Alexandra’s

history, but new political fault lines were emerging in the early 1990s as several

interest groups, representing different sectors of the township’s population be-

gan to articulate and mobilise around particular socio-economic interests that

had tended to be obscured under apartheid (ibid., p. 345).

7By January 1991 a staggering 17.000 shacks were counted, compared with only 7.372 formal units.8In mid-1991, 80 per cent of the residents were still living without water, sewerage or electricity, 75

per cent of the households were living of a monthly income of below R1000 and employment levelsrarely exceeded 50 per cent (Bonner and Nieftagodien 2008, pp. 332-3)


And as the democratic transition opened up previously forbidden cities to theformer oppressed population, Johannesburg’s popular imagination as “the city ofgold” attracted many South African rural migrants and foreign border-crossers tomove to its urban spaces. The population of the Gauteng province, the Johannes-burg inner-city and Alexandra expanded significantly within a time-span of just fiveyears9. The result was an ever-increasing proliferation of shacks within Alexandraalong the benches of the Jukskei-river. Councillors from Alexandra soon formulatedplans to drastically reduce the population by removing 150.000 people and iden-tified targets for removal as “illegal immigrants, people living in hazardous areassuch as the banks of the Jukskei River and those living on land zoned for use otherthan residential” (ibid., p. 342). The echoes of apartheid-plans for de-densificationby classifying authorised and unauthorised residents as bona fides and newcomerswere striking. By categorizing Alexandra’s population in terms of who qualifies forhousing and who doesn’t, the perennial division between insider and outsider wasagain brought into sharp relief.

The shortage of housing continued to be a main source of conflict. As service-delivery was perceived to be slow by Alexandra’s inhabitants, struggles amongstthem began to intensify over the allocation of resources. The definition of who wasentitled for service-delivery became a central point of friction in the township andsharpened the enduring divisions between insiders and outsiders, the bona fidesand the newcomers. Who counted as newcomer now became more fluid than everbefore, which led to a fracturing of the community in the form of the proliferation oforganisations who represented the interests of the various segments of the township.Alexandrians increasingly perceived newcomers to be jumping housing queues tothe detriments of ‘legal’ residents as in May 1991 when rooidoeke10 attacked the shackarea within Beirut as a way of “getting rid of squatters”, perceived to be jumping thehousing-queues with the help of corrupt officials (ibid., pp. 352,413).

Less than a year after the ANC took power armed gangs collected and evictedforeign immigrants perceived to be ‘illegal’ for a period of weeks between December

9Between 1996 and 2001 Gauteng’s population grew from 7.843.820 to 9.390.680, Johannesburg’spopulation expanded by nearly 600.000 and Alexandra’s population stood at an official 350.000, fivetimes the number it was designed to accomodate (ibid., p. 390)

10Hostel dwellers wore red bands around their heads in order to distinguish themselves

54 READING THE RIOTS AGAINST EARLIER COMMUNITY CONFLICTS

1994 and January 1995 (Park 2009). Although similarities with the events in 2008could be observed, the striking difference was that the crowd handed the migrantsover to the police with the message that they were “simply doing the job of thepolice by handing them [undocumented immigrants] over and asking them to bedeported back to their own countries” (ibid., p. 18). While reading the events of2008, a radically different picture emerges. Although perceptions of foreigners being‘illegal’ and to be blamed for transitional ills were similar, the community took thelaw in their own hands in ways that indicated a fundamental lack of trust of thelocal police-force and the national government at large (ibid., p. 19). It is againstthis historical background of community conflicts around housing-provision that therecent upsurge of violence has to be understood too argued Salani, a South Africanby birth.

Reading the Riots Against Earlier Community Conflicts

Four structural reasons for rioting can be distinguished: First an ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’antagonism; second a ‘reasonable’ justification for violence; third a response to a cer-tain event; and fourth, aggression in a situation where the mob does not face any, oronly a small, risk of punishment (Horowitz 2001). Salani, a close friend of my land-lord Kgakgi, managed to reconstruct a plausible and complicated detail-rich story,in which he identified these distinguishable structural reasons from a historical per-spective. Salani observed a “gross unhappiness” within Alexandra the week beforethe violence broke out. Unhappiness because it was announced that week that shack-dwellers who erected their shacks within the dangerous area of the flood-line of theJukskei-river –popularly known as ‘the Graveyard’– would be given fast preferencefor housing in Extension 711 over those who were already had been waiting for years.Salani identified this as the “the main spark”:

No, it was definitely the main spark. Because if you look at those attacks, it

was not the first time in Alex. You see. When the flats that were build next to

Joe12 where you were. You see, when you are next to Joe, there are actually huge

flats around there. One day, the people got so tired of it and said like now, we

11Extension 7 is a newly build area of RDP-houses north of the Jukskei river12Joe’s Butchers, a legendary meat ‘n braai place, transformed into a club-scene in weekends


are going to take those people out of the flats now. And they took them! They

took them out! They went there one day and actually took out their furniture,

everything. Everything and said like, you get out now. So the people went there

and do the same thing. To said like, people who are corrupt to put in people who

don’t even qualify. We’ll show you, we are taking them out of the place (Salani,

South Africa 2009)

Most of the residents within the Graveyard were Mozambicans”, argued Salani,who as ‘unauthorised’ residents don’t officially qualify for RDP-housing. “Nowthen, how do you spread that programme to foreigners, before you have addressedthe needs for South Africans”, Salani asked after which Kgakgi acclaimed: “Yeah forsure! That was a spark!”. When I asked why it was mainly foreigners that bribedthemselves into RDP-housing, Kgakgi angrily interrupted: “I’m registered! Whyshould I pay you?” Kgakgi referred to the registration by C-form, a document thatlegally entitles ‘eligible’ citizens to be on the waiting-list for RDP-housing. The al-ready lingering frustration on housing-delivery that existed within Alexandra thusseemed to be exacerbated by the announcement of the authorities and Salani recalledhe clearly felt there was something “brooming”: “You started hearing it, at each andevery corner”, Salani continued, “I was around Saturday here, whenever I was infifth avenue, I could hear it, I went home, went to 18th avenue, it was actually thesame talk” (ibid.).

Salani and Kgakgi clearly identified the decision to move the flood-liners to Ex-tension 7 as having “sparked the anger which people had already” and created anatmosphere in which the violence could break out. The actual trigger that made therioters decide to riot was by many informants identified as a perceived conflict be-tween a foreigner and a South African. Salani also mentioned there were two casesof rape the day before the riots broke out in which the rapists “unfortunately hap-pened to be foreigners”. Those foreigners, he explained, could not be found to bearrested due their illegal status after which the community decided “to do it our-selves”. From then on people were moving “from the side of the hostel” in order totake “the Shangaans out of the area” and incited people on their way to destructionby saying “they take our houses, they take our jobs” by using the mood of peoplethat were “already very angry at that time”. As many Alexandrians decided that“these people are right, let’s join them”, the rioters were able to mobilize many oth-

56 READING THE RIOTS AGAINST EARLIER COMMUNITY CONFLICTS

ers (Salani, South Africa 2009).Although mainly African foreigners were targeted during the violence, it was the

corrupt officials who made it possible for people to “jump housing queues” whichSalani identified as the root cause of the problem. “The people were actually stand-ing against corruption”, he said, “rather than actually xenophobia as people thoughtabout it”. When I asked why it was the foreigners and not those corrupt officialswho bore the brunt of the attacks , he replied:

Who are they? It is actually difficult to identify them. So it’s another way of

putting pressure to that individual that is corrupt. It was not only, because the

xenophobia people are taking it wrongly: that it was only foreigners. There

were a lot of people that were taken out of those houses who were legitimate

Alexandrians. Who weren’t qualified to have been put by those people. That

is why when you talk to someone about xenophobia in Alex, he says but what

xenophobia. Because, like, if I bought my way through and I go into that house,

I would have been taken out. Even if you are an Alexandrian (ibid.).

Salani’s observation, that growing frustrations over housing-delivery and cor-rupt officials can indeed be seen as a “main spark” and a ‘reasonable’ justificationfor violence, cannot account for why it was “those deemed to be non-South Africanswho bore the brunt of the vicious attacks” (Neocosmos 2008). A post-apartheid hege-monic xenophobic discourse has provided for politically interpellated post-apartheidcategories of the insider and the outsider. Whereas those fault-lines historically havebeen constructed within Alexandra between newcomers –often South African ruralmigrants– and bona fides the violence in 2008 was predominantly targeted towardsforeign African newcomers. Nevertheless, old insider/outsider fault lines seemedto be conflated with those between ‘South-African’ and ‘foreigner’ within the courseof the events. Although the riots left 62 dead and was largely coined as xenopho-bic, amongst them were 21 South African victims. Listen to Ndima’s story, a SouthAfrican by birth who was chased out of her house during the xenophobic violencebecause her neighbours said she was a foreigner:

Ndima: They said to me: you are a Shangaan from Gyani, took your things and

go back. I said, what things I have to took, there’s nothing inside in the shack.

They said, ok fine, if you need to sacrifice your life. Just GO! You are foreigner.


Me: But you are a Shangaan?

Ndima: Yes I’m a Shangaan from Gyani from Limpopo

Me: And they know that?

Ndima: Yes! They know that!

Me: So why do they call you foreigner?

Ndima: They didn’t chase me only. Even Sotho’s, even Tswana’s and even

Venda’s. Who left there, it was only Xhosa and Zulu.

Me: So why do they consider you as a foreigner?

Ndima: They said just because of, we know how to buy some things and put

it back and take those things at home. Which means they need us to buy some

things and put it in the shack and so they can take it. Simple, as they take it,

everything, simple (Ndima, South Africa 2009).

After the xenophobic riots Ndima was transfered by the local government to thetransit camp together with roughly 80 other people displaced due to the violence.The hostel she stayed in was in embarrassing and deteriorated conditions: all win-dows were broken, the tiny separate rooms had no roof, there was no running waterand no working toilets. She lost her shack in the Beirut area and was promised anew house at that time by the local government. Six months after the violence, shewas still left in the dark about her future. “Maybe it could be better when I was aforeigner. Because now we’re just dumped like rubbish” she told me in tears. Andwhile, technically speaking, she ‘is’ no foreigner, but a South African citizen, her ex-perience during the violence and the lack of help she received from the governmentafterwards clearly makes her feel as one.

South Africa and the quest for Belonging

Although the hegemonic stereotypical xenophobic perceptions of the African mi-grant within South African society were appropriated by South African perpetratorsto legitimate claims to resources that they felt entitled to, the riots cannot be under-stood without contextualizing it within older community conflicts that were mobi-lized around insider/outsider cleavages. Deprivation and scarcity of housing andjobs have always been a daily reality of Alexandra’s socio-economic conditions andthe source of conflicts between authentic bona fide residents and those perceived to be

58 SOUTH AFRICA AND THE QUEST FOR BELONGING

outsiders. The Apartheid-regime created vocabularies of ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’ thatwere used by bona fides in order to exclude the newcomers, often originating fromSouth Africa’s rural areas. The economic attraction of post-apartheid South Africafor many foreign border-crossers has provided for the emergence of a hegemonicxenophobic discourse which mainly stigmatizes African immigrants to be competi-tors for jobs and housing. These political interpellations of insiders and outsiderswere appropriated by Alexandrians to express their frustrations of enduring strug-gles for space and housing by chasing away African immigrants who they perceivedto be jumping housing queues. Although Alexandrians predominantly perceivedforeigners to bribe themselves into RDP-houses with the help from corrupt officials,old insider/outsider community fault lines seem to have complicated the coinage ofthe violence as xenophobic.

Of the 62 people killed during the xenophobic violence little has been said of the21 of those victims who were classified as South African. During my fieldwork I metseveral South Africans who were also affected during those “days of noise”. They,like many African immigrants I spoke to, came to Johannesburg to seek for “greenerpastures” (Witness, South Africa 2009) and their experience in their daily interac-tion with Alexandrians was closely related to those border-crossers from across theLimpopo-province. Judging from Ndima’s experience, one could argue that in thenewly imagined South Africa the question of who belongs and who does not –andultimately who is the stranger and who is not– remains unresolved– or at least spa-tially fragmented. Because what is ‘home’ if you are a South African who is chasedaway from your residential area because you are said to be a foreigner by your veryfellow-nationals? Ndima’s perception on where she belongs closely resembles thatof a Stranger being “no longer classified and not yet classified” (Malkki 1995a):

I’m a South African, I’m supposed to go where? At Zimbabwe? I don’t know

what Zimbabwe looks like. I can’t go and live there. Without knowing some-

body else. But now, since like all of us we are foreigners except for Zulu’s...

(Ndima, South Africa 2009)

Witness, a South African identifying himself as a Venda from Limpopo who waschased away from his house by South Africans too, expressed similar feelings ofuprooting: “There I’m a foreigner and here I’m a foreigner, I don’t know where


I belong” (Witness, South Africa 2009). As the front of the apartheid struggle hasbeen mainly fought within urban cities in ways that Blacks embraced urbanism asresistance, “the migrant worker embodied the oppressed peasant life the freedomfighters had fled from”. Especially the imagination of the makwerekwere has becometo represent for many black post-apartheid citizens the peasant life which they havehistorically tried to escape by moving into the cities (Matsinhe 2009). Whereas theapartheid state ruralized blacks and urbanised whites, this dichotomy has shifted to-wards one in which Africa is imagined to be backwards and South Africa to be mod-ern (ibid.). These conflicting historical and post-apartheid notions of belonging andstrangeness have only exacerbated the already ambiguous nature of the Stranger.In post-apartheid South Africa, a society in transition whereby its nation buildingproject is primarily concerned with the construction of the self and a demarcationfrom others, the boundaries between the insider and the outsider or the national andthe foreigner seem to be highly ambiguous.

It seems there is more at stake than these well-known perceptions of foreignersas economic parasites and criminal ‘illegals’ (Blom Hansen, Jeannerat, and Sadouni2009). Although there’s no doubt many ordinary South African citizens –“still trappedin shacks, shanty towns, joblessness, poverty, uncertainty and the illusion of citi-zenship” (Nyamnjoh 2007b) – feel highly disillusioned with the promised changesof the ‘new’ South Africa, there’s a more fundamental and troubling question lin-gering underneath. In a society that “is so deeply segmented that people [were] al-ways strangers to another” (Blom Hansen, Jeannerat, and Sadouni 2009), one can askwhether ‘the South African’ really exists and how one should define South Africansociety in a nation that “does not cohere”(Chipkin 2007; Blom Hansen, Jeannerat,and Sadouni 2009). In urban spaces where economic competition is high, the Strangeris not necessarily one of another ‘National Order’. Rather than just a national/non-national construction, the boundary between fellow nationals and strangers seems tobe blurred by rural/urban divides, complicated by ethnic affiliation, physical char-acteristics and linguistic dialect.

It is stigma that “seems to be a convenient weapon in the defence against theunwelcome ambiguity of the stranger”, essentializing difference by means of bodilyor cultural attributes. But even stigma attributes cannot fix identity with certaintyand provide far from a secure classificatory system for signifying otherness. The

60 SOUTH AFRICA AND THE QUEST FOR BELONGING

next chapter is concerned with the ways how during the violence and its aftermathstigmata were used by South Africans in order to overcome the ambiguity of theStranger.

Chapter 4“You can’t judge a book by its cover”.The Ambiguities of Otherness

During the xenophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008 rioters employed manytechniques for exploring, marking and classifying those who might be African for-eigners. As the figure of the Makwerekwere is highly racialized within dominant dis-course, it was primarily skin color that identified those to chase out. But many othermarkers of difference were perceived by rioters to be able to differentiate betweenSouth Africans and Strangers. This chapter will foreground the ways how stigma is(perceived to be) used by South Africans to classify others within social, ethnic andnational categorical orders. Historically, criteria such as language, (bodily) appear-ances, behaviour and names, have always been used in order to differentiate ‘types’or ‘species’ of people (Pohl 1998). The ancient old bible, for example, provides atelling example on how language was utilized by Gileadites during their war withEphraimites in order to identify those that should be killed:

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and when-

ever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked

him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say

‘Shibboleth.”’ He said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word

correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two

thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time1.

1Judges 12:5-6, New Jerusalem Bible

61

62

Shibboleth, originally a Hebrew word that literally means the part of a plant con-taining grains, since then defines any distinguishing practice which indicates one’ssocial or regional origin and usually refers to features of language and pronuncia-tion that identifies speakers within particular identity categories2. Within daily so-cial life, interactions between groups are often organized on the basis of stereotypesthat classify individuals in terms of their basic, most general social identity (Barth etal. 1969; Larsen 1982). Such stereotypes can be used to guide behaviour by means ofprocesses of identification that are highly routinized and utilized by members of onegroup as ‘models’ to predict behaviour of perceived others (Larsen 1982). The fea-tures of those cultural distinctions are not the sum of ‘objective differences’, but aredependent on what actors themselves regard as significant for the particular context:“some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences,others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played downand denied” (Barth et al. 1969).

Seen from this angle, it is not the ‘cultural stuff’, but the social interaction main-tained and persisting boundaries that define the group, since markers of differenceare obviously subjectively fragmented, context-dependent and extremely subjectiveto change over time (ibid.). Identity then –be it social, national, ethnic or otherwisecategorized– is no natural, inborn, delineated and immutable fact, but is only givensignificance by individuals within daily interaction with particular others by whichboundaries between insiders and outsiders are maintained. Put differently: they arethus no more than (discursive) acts of identification by which members can imag-ine their sameness or otherness with others. These imaginations of difference arenot diminished by social interaction, but, on the contrary, daily encounters betweenmembers of society are often the very foundation on which processes of inclusion andexclusion are based upon (ibid.). Especially due to modernity that is predicated uponthe scientific search for regularity, Otherness is often perceived to be an unchang-ing reality which has a nature that can be apprehended, classified and theorized.National identifications, which are predicated upon fuzzy and changing categoriessuch as race, nation, religion, language etc., are therefore notoriously susceptible toideological manipulation: “Almost everyone can find an imagined origin for ‘their’group if they look hard enough” (Hinton 2002, pp. 13,15).

2See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

CHAPTER 4. “YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER”. THE AMBIGUITIES OFOTHERNESS 63

The stigma of otherness

Violence can fabricate a horrific form of certainty and can become a ruthless, vivi-sectionist technique about the Other and, therefore, about the Self (Appadurai 1998).And, in a similar fashion one can argue that the xenophobic violence in South Africawas a horrific method of social engineering and a means of ensuring social homo-geneity by distinguishing between those who were perceived to be ‘legitimate’ SouthAfricans and those who were said to be strangers that don’t belong. But how, then,does one recognize the Stranger? How does one ‘read’ bodies in order to classifythem in particular categories? How can it be possible to identify an individual withcertainty enough to kill? It is the concept of stigma that has become “a convenientweapon in the defence against the unwelcome ambiguity of the stranger” (Bauman1990). The essence of stigma is to reify difference which is by nature irreparable andthus warrants a permanent exclusion (ibid.) And of course, individuals often per-ceive stigmatized people to be not quite human (Goffman 1986). Within violent con-flict stigma provides a way of stereotyping others which allows perpetrators to movefrom the didactical to the practical, feeding on intolerance by “making race, ethnicity,religion, language, class, doctrine, nationality, etc., decisive in ‘reordering”’ (Mehta2002; Apter 1997).

When a stranger comes into our midst, social agents are likely to gauge his per-sonal and structural attributes. Personal attributes –such as ‘(dis)honesty’– and struc-tural distinctions like ‘occupation’ can quickly become negative indices that distin-guish the Stranger from others in the readily available categories of persons in dailylife. In the extreme, the Stranger will then be perceived by others as a person of aless desirable kind, “a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak”(Goffman 1986). Stigma then, is “an attribute that is deeply discrediting”. Once astigma is known about by the person’s immediate surroundings, the stigmatizedagent is discredited. If the individual’s stigmatized attributes are still concealed inone way or another to others s/he is discreditable (ibid.). Durable ways of standing,speaking and walking of individuals in the lived world –one’s body hexis (Bourdieu1990)– can be used as attributes by social agents to define an Other as a stigmatized,discredited person. By reading those signums, many agents assume, you can ‘tell’who’s the stranger and who is not. Often by ways of ‘telling’, the rendering of the

64 THE STIGMA OF OTHERNESS

body as an ideological text, social agents classify individuals within particular cate-gories:

“Telling” constructs a conjuncture of clothing, linguistic dialect, facial appear-

ance, corporal comportment, political religious insignia, generalized spatial move-

ments, and inferred residential linkages. These signs cohere into an iconography

of the ethnic Other that regulates informal encounters with particular others

(Feldman 1991).

In contrast to the careful designation and visible marking of victims within actsof genocide, riots are often distinguished by a more spontaneous and disorderlynature in which rioters have to make instant decisions on the spot about whom tovictimize. And as victim identity is characterized by ambiguity and presumption,it is useful to analyse which features served as signifiers of foreignness in order tounderstand how these culturally dictated scripts could be utilized by immigrantsin order to employ strategies of invisibility (Matsinhe 2009; Einwohner 2008). For,while during the violence such strategies could make the difference between lifeand death, techniques of reading and inspecting bodies are everyday practices of ex-clusion that many immigrants still have to deal with in daily life. It must be stressedthat those practices of telling are not mainly informal ways of boundary makingby South African citizens, but are simultaneously institutionalized in ways that un-documented immigrants are often identified by government authorities on the basisof similarly unreliable means. Many documented cases reveal instances of personswho claimed to be arrested for being “too black,”, “having a foreign name,” or evenbecause the individual was perceived to “walk like a Mozambican” (Matsinhe 2009).

As I walked the urban paths of Johannesburg or the dusty streets of Alexandra,desperately looking for informants, I not could help but wonder: how does one rec-ognize who is South African and who is not? Of course, there are those immigrantsfrom Western Africa that have a distinctive darker skin complexion and are easilystigmatized as an Other. “Easy! They will know straight away” as Ob (Ob, Ghana2009) emphasized to me, easily discreditable as from Western Africa by his distinctivefacially appearance, dark skin complexion and thick accent. Most of my informantsmentioned a whole variety of social signums that could be used in order to ‘tell’who is South African and who isn’t. Often, the question “can you tell the differ-ence between a South African and a foreigner”, seemed to be taken as one of which


the answer was obvious: “I mean, if you are from outside, you know when walk-ing, anybody can identify this person”, said Themba. “But what’s the difference?”, Ireplied after which he answered with confidence: “You can tell, for sure, even myselfI can tell, I can see, this one is a foreigner, this one is not a foreigner” (Ellen, SouthAfrica and Themba, Zimbabwe 2009). Reading bodies in order to ‘tell’ the categoricalorder the particular individual belongs to was for many perceived to be an activitythat could hardly go wrong. Many African immigrants themselves often employeda readily set of ideological signifiers that presumably classified significant Others ina variety of national or ethnic categories:

Yeah, foreigners, sometimes, they are not similar to South Africans. So, the guys

from outside countries, like your friend, the Nigerian, have you realized that he

is not straight. He is like this, can you see this? [Kumalo places his legs more

apart from each other] Yeah! So, they can identify you like that. And, by your

eyes. If you go to Congo, to Rwanda, Ghana. You can see, even though they are

black, but they are not, I can say, Western Africa, Eastern Africa, Central Africa,

they are not the same. That’s why you can see the Negro’s, the black Americans.

They were taken from Gambia, Mali, you see? Tunesia, Nigeria, you see? You

can see that these people how they cut their hairs, you see? Especially those

who are in North America. Then, South America, this side. Cuba whatwhat.

You can see that these people are from Angola, South Africa, they are just like

these Southern African people. So, the people from outside, they are just seen

here. A guy from Malawi can judge him. By his or her movement or the way

that he or she wears (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009).

Although it seemed Kumalo regarded those signifiers as a fairly accurate wayof classifying individuals in national orders, he simultaneously and unknowinglytouched upon the ambiguous nature of such classificatory systems: my friend, whomKumalo assumed to be Nigerian due to the placement of his legs, was as a matterof fact originally from Ghana. And although some informants, such as Kumalo per-ceived difference to be an essential fact, others expressed the exact opposite andstressed the ambiguous nature of identification:

Me: But when you walk on the streets, people can tell you are not from here?

Jerry: No no, we are just the same. Ah, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. Even a

person from Zimbabwe, it’s just the same

66 XENOPHOBIA AND INTERROGATING OTHERNESS

Me: Not by way of dressing?

Jerry: No, not by way of dressing. Everybody dress different style (Sibusizo and

Jerry, Zimbabwe 2009).

These ambiguities of identification by the use of telling can prove fatal, but canalso save lives of possible targets within violent conflict. Depending on the circum-stances of violent riots various insignia like skin color, names, dress, bearing, facialhair and circumcision can be employed to distinguish victims from attackers. Asnone of these attributes for differentiation, especially within ethno-cultural and lin-guistic heterogeneous societies, are entirely fool-proof potential targets can assim-ilate temporarily, while nonmembers of the target group may be accidentally per-ceived to be included in it (Brass 2001, pp. 125-129). Although South African riotersemployed many different ways of telling in order to select their targets of the vio-lence, perpetrators frequently utilized the Zulu-language as a shibboleth in order toidentify someone as foreign.

Xenophobia and Interrogating Otherness

In the Alexandrian context, neighbours often provided clues during the xenophobicviolence on where to find foreigners. But where doubt and uncertainty was at play,(physical) interrogations were used as methods of identification. An often quoted ex-ample is that rioters asked their targets trivial Zulu-questions3: “These people can’teven pronounce easy words like indololwane [the Zulu-term for ‘elbow’]. We have alist of other words that we tell them to say and they fumble and bite their tongues”,explained a South African rioter in May 2008 (Tshabalala and Dibetle 2008). The fol-lowing conversation exemplifies the ways the Zulu-language was used as a shibbolethfor target-selection by the rioters during the xenophobic violence:

“Yini le?” (What is this?) demanded Sipho, a teenager, pointing to his elbow,

of a man wearing a red cap and whose skin Sipho believed was too dark for a

South African.

“Indololwane mfana,” (It’s an elbow, boy) replied the man, a Xhosa, who was

asked the question because few foreigners know the Zulu word for elbow.

3Zulu’s belong together with the Xhosa’s to the largest ethnic affiliations in South Africa


Unconvinced, Sipho demanded: “Uma umuntu ekhala kuphumani emehlweni?”

(When you cry, what comes out of your eyes?).

“Izinyembezi” (tears) responded the man (ibid.).

Although perceived to be “too dark for a South African”, the man was able to‘prove’ his South African identity by giving the correct answers. Failing to respondon the rioters’ ethnic investigations in the proper way could mean the difference be-tween life and death for possible targets. Raphael explained to me how the use ofthe Zulu-language during the violence was not only used to differentiate foreign-ers from South Africans, but also made it difficult to ‘tell’ which ethnic backgroundSouth Africans rioters themselves appeared to be:

Me: But the people who attacked, where were they coming from?

Rahael: I don’t know, because it was lot of people, it was crowd, yeah, it was

crowd and doesn’t know where it come from. It was mixed, of course. Everyone

was talking Zulu that time. Anyone was talking Zulu, everyone. Doesn’t know

this is Zulu, or a Pedi or a Shangaan, you know

Me: Why?

Raphael: I think it was simple language, haha, maybe if I’m Shangaan, I’m talk-

ing Zulu, you’ll think I’m a Zulu. You know, it’s like that (Raphael Mozambique

2009).

Obviously the composition of the rioters was far from a homogeneous crowd. Butas the majority of my informants identified the origins of violence with Zuluness andthe Zulu language served as a major differentiator during those days to “tell” whois South African or who is not, those widespread perceptions of Zuluness being con-nected with the origin of the violence deserves closer attention. For many foreignimmigrants within Alexandra it was the Zulu-language that served both as an ulti-mate potential stigma-differentiation on the one hand and as a possible assimilatingsignum on the other.

Zuluness and the origins of violence

Right on the corner of 4th London road towers the impressive structure of the Madelahostel above the surrounding shacks. It’s a building that you can practically see

68 ZULUNESS AND THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE

from wherever you are in Alexandra and as an enclave inhabited by mainly maleZulu’s known to be a Zulu hostel. The Zulu hostel is infamous by Alexandrians intoalmost mythical proportions, well connected to the popular perceptions of Zulu’sbeing aggressive and warlike, but also due to the hostel’s history of playing a centralrole in the township wars in the beginning of the 90’s. During the negotiations ofSouth Africa’s democratic transition a bloody wave of violence swept across town-ship spaces and culminated in the deaths of thousands of people. While the violencemainly manifested itself between ANC aligned township residents and IFP4-alignedhostel dwellers, the underlying dynamics were obviously more complicated. Causesof the conflict could not be simplified to political antagonisms, but were rooted inthe legacy of apartheid, a continuous struggle for resources and the politicisation ofethnic divisions. The Madela hostel, firmly under IFP control, became the epicentreof the conflict in Alexandra and non-Zulu speakers were evicted from the hostels,which closely resembled a form of ethnic cleansing. Gradually the whole area ofBeirut became an IFP-stronghold and a “no-go zone for members of the ANC” (Bon-ner and Nieftagodien 2008, pp. 359-383).

This history has led Beirut5 to be imagined by Alexandrians as a ‘Zulu neigh-bourhood’ epitomized by its popular nickname ‘KZN’6. Although some argued thisimagination was largely due to the fact that the Zulu-hostel was located in the area(Zulu and Two Zimbabweans 2009), the township wars seems to have shaped theAlexandrian collective imagination of the Beirut area as ‘dangerous’ and its inhabi-tants as predominantly Zulu7. Many South Africans, Alexandrians and foreign im-migrants alike perceived Zulu’s as inherently violent, “stubborn”, “stupid minded”,“full of tribalism”, as who “didn’t go to school too much” and wanting to “claimownership of South Africa”. They are predominantly regarded as the ones to haveincited the violence.:

They [Zulu’s] are black beasts man [...] You know, when we, you know when

4The Zulu-aligned Inkatha Freedom Party5The area popularly known as Beirut is cornered roughly between 2nd and 6th avenue and the

main Roads London road and Selborne street.6KZN is the abbreviation for KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu province7During the elections of 2009 one could infer this ‘ethnic segmentations’ from the political pam-

phlets hanging around the area. In contrast with other areas, within the area of Beirut IFP-posterswere overwhelmingly in the majority


we talk of, you know, South Africans. Ne? South Africans, we talk of Zulu’s.

Mainly. Because, they are the ones who start everything. Tormenting others

(Sibusizo and Jerry, Zimbabwe 2009).

This discourse of the Zulu’s perceived notoriousness and warriorhood is con-stantly foregrounded by respondents within perceptions about the violence. And asimmigrants predominantly perceived the instigators to be Zulu, they firmly situatedthe spatial rooting of the start of the riots within the area of Beirut. While percep-tions on the origin of the violence often differed, not one of my informants did notconnect the start of it with perceptions on Zuluness and/or the Beirut area. Manysimply identified the origin by mentioning the notoriousness of Zulu’s, claimingZulu’s wanted to take ownership of Beirut and even South Africa or being “jealousabout people who might have one or two things” (Robert and Roommates, Zim-babwe 2009). Others mentioned the violence sparked in that area when there was aconflict between a Zulu and a foreigner while, while, when macro-political causeswere provided, they were constantly connected to the upcoming presidency of Ja-cob Zuma (a Zulu) and his political rivalry with Thabo Mbeki (a Xhosa), the currentpresident at that time.

Not surprisingly the perceived notoriousness of Zuluness and its associated spa-tial locations shaped in many respects the ways my informants were talking aboutthe violence and the strategies they could employ in order to avoid being identifiedas foreign. Before I proceed to those strategies of invisibility in order to deal withpossible harassment, let’s consider the ways stigmata were used by South Africansduring and after the violence in order to differentiate between South Africans andforeigners. The various identity-markers that my informants distinguished can beroughly categorized within three different types: (semi-)permanent bodily signifierssuch as morphological and linguistic features, style signifiers such as clothing andhairstyles and finally those what can be called ‘contextual signifiers’ such as patternsof residence and occupational background. Informants often coined the process of‘telling’ someone’s ethnic or national category as “judging”. Of course, the visibilityand (im)permanency of those attributes that can disclose information of one’s cate-gorical order implies the ease to with which someone can be stigmatized as an Other(Goffman 1986).

70 “JUDGING” THE BODY

“Judging” the Body

The dominant imagination of the figure of the Makwerekwere constitutes not only ahighly racialized figure. The very name implies that individuals who are identifiedas such are talking an unintelligible language. Not surprisingly, both language andskin color were for the majority of my informants mentioned as “the two major dif-ferentiators” (Salani, South Africa 2009). The first being, according to Salani, “is theskin color”. “Once you have seen the color then what could be the confirmation isactually the pronunciation of words”, he added (ibid.). The darker the skin, the big-ger the chance someone was stigmatized as a foreigner explained Sibusizo: “In factall Zimbabweans are dark in complexion, rather than here in South Africa, they arelighter” (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b). Nevertheless, agreement on what constitutesas the ‘first’ or the ‘second’ differentiator to judge someone as foreign was a matterof perspective. “The language is the key” commented another, identifying himselfas Zulu (Zulu and Two Zimbabweans 2009). As did Ellen, when I asked her how Icould recognize Themba as foreign:

Except when he talks, then you can realize that this person is a foreigner. Just

like Themba, he doesn’t talk now. Can you realize he’s from Zimbabwe? You

can’t. The accent explains everything (Ellen, South Africa and Themba, Zim-

babwe 2009).

But in a country with eleven official languages, the question immediately ariseswhich words that cannot be “pronounced properly” indicate one’s foreignness. It isthe Zulu-language that once again provides a major differentiator according to Jef-frey’s South African wife: “they can hear when you’re talking. Because [foreigners]and the Zulu-nation, they are not pronouncing the same Zulu”. Both differentia-tors were predominantly mentioned by immigrants and South Africans as the mostobvious signs that fairly accurately provided clues to categorize a particular individ-ual within a national or ethnic categorical order. But of course, colours and soundswere not all there is to it. Very much like ‘the peasant’ –who “always walked withtheir legs bowed, as if they were knock-kneed, with their arms bent”– is stereotypedas ‘backwards’ and ‘clumsy’ due to his body hexis in urban areas (Bourdieu 2004),foreigners are stigmatized by their “ways of walking” too:


If you just walk slowly, or just walk... they can judge you that you are from...

you must have a South African step, like, pantsula’s. Walking like this, walking

like this [walks in a cool, gangsterish way] (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009)

In the same vein as when one’s pace and style of walking often symbolizes one’s“economic and social standing” (Bourdieu 2004), one can be “judged” as foreignjust by walking slowly or be perceived as South African by one’s gangsterish “SouthAfrican step”. Linguistic and racial features are well-known differentiators for targetselection within ethnic riots (Brass 2001, p. 129). A less obvious one in the context ofSouth Africa is the use of inoculation marks as a discreditable symbol. Similar to thestigma sign of the needle mark which policemen utilize to identify junkies (Goffman1986), African foreigners have equivalent experiences. Most Southern Africans havebeen vaccined by birth, which has left a little ‘fingerprint’ behind where the needlehas been stuck into. Salani explained it has become a possible signifier to categorizesomeone into the ‘National Order of Things’, because the vaccination techniquesdiffer per country:

You know what’s the most differentiator also is like what they call the BCG-

injection. There’s a vaccination where they actually use a lot of needles together

[leaving a distinctive pattern of a circle of needle marks on the left upper-arm]

You can call any South African and then look at the BCG injection. So, that’s

where we have it. Whereas Zimbabweans have it at the other side and have one

big dot. And also, it’s like for the Swazi’s, they did the BCG here [underarm] and

for the Mozambicans it’s here [on the left shoulder]. So when you come with a

South African passport and you have your BCG here [not on the South African

side], you’re gonna be locked up anyway (Salani, South Africa 2009).

Instances of South African police officers using these needle marks as a way toidentify (illegal) immigrants have been documented widely (Cejas 2007). Patrick ex-plained to me that the needle mark could also prove dangerous for possible targetsduring the xenophobic violence: “They are going to see [I’m a foreigner], becauseof what? Because of this thing [slaps on his arm], this thing is dangerous. Theyare going to get you and then, they can kill me” (Patrick, Zimbabwe 2009). Linguis-tic dialect, skin complexion, body hexis and needle marks are to different extents(semi-)permanent signs (Goffman 1986), which relatively easily signify difference

72 PANTSULA SELVES, FONG KONG OTHERS

and point out foreignness in a way that is immediately visible (Matsinhe 2009). TheSouth African citizenry and state-institutions have assigned these physical attributesto foreign nationals as evidence of their otherness, strangeness and undesirabilityin ways that this established fantasy has acquired a reality for immigrants in dailylife. Many informants mentioned other stigmata, such as style, patterns of residenceand occupational background, that could be seen as impermanent signums to beobserved.

Pantsula selves, Fong Kong others

Hmmm, eh, they they like, eh, casual things, stylished things, you see. Like

Dickies, this is an old fashion. From... even the people who lived in 1930’s,

it was there. Even the Dickies, you know it, from America. From 1920, it is

written from 1920. So, the South Africans, they don’t wear this... they call it

Fong Kongs. Like to wear trousers for forty rands from the Chinese. The police

will stop you. They know that you are budgeting, you are from another country.

Yeah (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009)

Kumalo explained –and this was often mentioned by other immigrants and SouthAfricans too– that especially South African township residents dress pantsula style,a localized cultural expression for township-youngsters which can be described asa combination of (clothing-)style and musical preference. The typical pantsula-look,as many explained, consists of a Levi’s 501 or Dickies jeans, classic All-star shoes,a t-shirt or blouse –combined with a striped or otherwise patterned spencer– and afisherman’s hat that is placed on a bold shaven head. Immigrants predominantlyperceived South africans to “wear expensive”, to “want the real stuff” and not to“mind to pay a thousand bucks for a teki or a shoe or a t-shirt” (Ellen, South Africaand Themba, Zimbabwe 2009). Foreigners on the contrary, as most informants ex-plained, wear Fong Kongs, “these fake brands from the Chinese guys” (ibid.), becausethey “can’t afford to pay for the genuine thing” (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009). Dress-codeis a non-congenital way of differentiating a foreigner from a “a kasi-boy8, a tsotsi from

8Kasi is a township slang-word derived from the Afrikaner word lokasi, translated as location. Akasi-boy thus means, a local, someone how lives in the location


the location” (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b). Of course, this is a masculine way of dif-ferentiation. Tendai argued South African that women “expose most part of theirbodies” whereas he perceived Zimbabwean ladies to “wear normally”, morally im-plying South Africans do not:

Ehm, in Zimbabwe we dress like casual. Here, you can see the majority of

women, they wear trousers whatwhat, you know? Mini-skirts, what, they smoke,

they drink. But in Zimbabwe, there’s is nothing like that. We wear normally,

long shirts, long skirts, trousers, big trousers you know. Something that is nor-

mal, something in line with Christianity. (Tendai, Zimbabwe 2009)

Also hair could be used as an ethnic differentiator according to Kumalo, who hadbeen living in South Africa for approximately 15 years, making his living by stylinghair on the streets of Alexandra. Right down at pan-Africa he owned his own stall:a simple structure of an iron frame with a roof made of a red piece of plastic. Sittingon his white plastic chair alongside his equipment consisting of a little mirror, somescissors and a rusty trimming machine –firmly connected to his noisy, little electricitygenerator– he observed the following:

Yeah, some.... ladies, especially ladies. Their hairstyles, their hairstyles. Here in

South Africa, South African ladies, they don’t do perm curls, they don’t do it.

But the outside ladies, they do it. And then they, do, they push back. The South

African ladies, they do it nicely, like Americans. Because, they know it from a

long ago, their style. Yeah, but then a lady from outside, ah, she’ll need a perm

only, only what she knows from back to the country (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009).

Perceptions were abounded that it was especially those that were not familiarwith these cultural and symbolic indices of same– and otherness could be easilyidentified as foreign. Of course, clothing styles and haircuts can be changed at willand are therefore highly unreliable markers of difference. Identifiers that are per-ceived to convey information about an individual’s identity always vary accordingto whether or not they are congenital (Goffman 1986). But permanent and imper-manent symbols are not simply two opposite states, but rather a continuum withinwhich an attribute can be indexed: while skin color can be defined as a highly con-genital stigma symbol which isn’t easy to conceal, linguistic incompetence can bemastered in time, while styles can be changed at will. Identity-signifiers which are

74 DRAWING BOUNDARIES BY SPATIAL AND OCCUPATIONAL INDICES

easy to conceal are thus simultaneously relatively easy to appropriate as attributes topass as South African. It is therefore, these differentiators in particular that producepossibilities for African immigrants to employ strategies of invisibility.

Drawing Boundaries by Spatial and Occupational Indices

Another signifier of foreignness has already been briefly touched upon by describinghow I was able to find possible informants during the course of my fieldwork. Occu-pational background provided me with a fairly accurate clue where to find possibleimmigrants to interview. Since many immigrants have hardly any social network torely on, feel highly responsible to provide for families back home and are simulta-neously excluded from the formal employment market, selling goods on the street isindeed for many one of the few opportunities to make for a living. People who workevery day, Sibusizo inferred, surely “must be from another country:”

The things you do, like, you work everyday. And mostly South African boys,

some do work, but not every day. Cause they’ve got greater privileges than us,

foreigners. So, one man, one person, can tell that this guy is after something, you

see? He must be from another country, he’s here for work (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe

2009b)

Because I tried to socialize with street-hawkers on a daily basis I was able toobserve how policemen often used this signifier in order to identify possible undoc-umented immigrants. While policemen were patrolling amongst the many stalls inPan-Africa they frequently ordered street-sellers to identify themselves. If unable to,the individual was often given the choice: either to be arrested in order to be lockedup in the Lindela deportation centre, or bribe themselves out of it. “You just pay 20rand and then they go”, Robert told me and added with a wink of an eye: “I thinkto accept bribes is much better than to be taken and deported home” (Robert andRoommates, Zimbabwe 2009). Sometimes, just a simple cold-drink could be enoughto satisfy the particular police officer:

Then me, they ask me, for sure I have to identify myself, because I’m not a South

African. And when I do, then he wants a cold drink. If I don’t have, then it’s

trouble, I have to sleep in the cell (Sibusizo and Jerry, Zimbabwe 2009).


Immigrants often appropriated these occupational indices of foreignness to drawmoral boundaries between themselves and South Africans, in which foreigners aredepicted as hardworking entrepreneurs, while South Africans were simultaneouslyportrayed as passive citizens waiting for something to happen. Ob, provided mewith an example of a Stimorol advert that he perceived to symbolize the differencebetween “the foreign Africa” and “the South African”. “There is this Stimorol adverton the TV, that says that”, he started telling me and imitates the advert speech:

There are people who wake up in the morning and they have dreams. But they

do nothing about those dreams. They only sit by the roadside and watch people

pass by, just like the day passes by. And the cars are going up and down. And

then when you greet them, they respond: heitah! Sharp sharp! And they’re still

sitting down there. You wake up in the morning, you are going to work and they

are sitting down there. There are others who also have dreams and they go out

there and make sure the dream they have come to pass. They put it into reality.

They go beyond what they saw in the dream, they go beyond what they are

talking about. They don’t just talk, they go beyond talk. They don’t just dream,

they go beyond dream. To make sure what they see, what they talk about is put

into reality (Ob, Ghana 2009)

After this stereotypical image, he concludes: “And these are the two different,this is how different, the foreign Africa, the African foreigners here, is how differ-ent we are with the South African.” The fact of immigrants institutionally beingexcluded from formal governmental services has shaped occupation as an index offoreignness, which in turn has rendered foreign bodies highly visibible in daily life.A Zimbabwean man, who sold boxes on the street which he personally handcraftedout of metal plates, observed the following: “And you know this job, it’s a sign youcan get recognized from this job. Without saying what kind of person are you orwhere you are coming from. The most of the people who do this stuff, they comefrom outside, you see?” (Friend Ndima, Zimbabwe 2009). “So”, adds Kumalo, “itis about, against, about what you work, where you work”. And even for whom youwork, he continues: “If you work for the Indians, you’ll be judged that you are fromanother country. And if you are in Shoprite, Spar [South African shopping-malls] oreven if you are a security guard. You are always... in trouble of being a foreigner”(Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009). Yet, although such signifiers sometimes become fairly

76 “A MISTAKEN IDENTITY”. THE UNCERTAINTY OF OTHERNESS

accurate classificatory devices due to formalized processes of exclusion, encodingone as an ethnic Other is risky business, especially when violence comes into play.The ambiguity of stigma symbols also made South Africans sometimes “in troubleof being a foreigner”.

“A mistaken identity”. The Uncertainty of Otherness

We have seen that South Africans use various stigma signums in order to differ-entiate between South Africans and foreigners. A major differentiator during thexenophobic violence was said to be the Zulu-language and therefore perceptions onthe origin of violence were by most informants well-connected to Zuluness and itsimagined spatial location Beirut. But many other indices of Otherness, such as skincomplexion, ways of walking, clothing– and hairstyles, inoculation marks and oc-cupational backgrounds were used during and after the violence to ‘tell’ who was aforeigner. While some informants perceived the above mentioned (non-)congenitaldifferentiators to be fairly stable according to national and ethnic divides, they wereclearly far from a reliable source of classification. The ambiguous nature of (non-)congenital stigma signums is reinforced by the fact that what is perceived as a re-liable signifier of foreignness varies amongst stigmatizers. As Kumalo explained,foreigners could be distinguished by their slow ways of walking, a South Africantaxi marshall mentioned the opposite: “Ah foreigners, many of them, they walk likethey are scared. They are always in hurry, they rush, like eish, maybe somethingbad can happen. They don’t see anyone, you see, they already go” (Taximarshalland Friends, South Africa 2009). In a similar vein, whereas Themba explained Zim-babwean women wear “formal”, a South African man acclaimed: “A Zimbabweanwoman, you can see about those animals clothing. There’s an impala, there’s anwhatwhat. Something like elephant, like traditional kind of clothing” (Lucky, Zim-babwe and Zulu-friend 2009). A stigma attribute is obviously not a discreditable signon it’s own (Goffman 1986).

Within ethnic riots it happens often that mistakes are made by rioters in the pro-cess of target-selection (Brass 2001, p. 128). Especially in (ethnically) heterogeneoussocieties,such as South Africa, there are an abundant array of possibilities in the se-lection of victims for violence (ibid., p. 128). In cases of doubt, the crowd often takes


extraordinary opportunities to interrogate or physically inspect the identifying cuesfrom potential victims. Many informants explained to me that during the xenopho-bic violence the rioters took far less effort in order to be certain about their choiceof victims: “At first”, Ellen said, “there was something that went wrong for surebetween the South Africans and the foreigners”, but after that “people were just tak-ing advantage”. Themba added that at that point people “never even asked, wheredo you come from or whatever. They just went in straight away, take whateverthey want and just go” (Ellen, South Africa and Themba, Zimbabwe 2009). He thenmentions another stigma signum that seemed to define foreignness during the xeno-phobic violence: “As long as you’re in the shack they just attack you. They just thinkeverybody in the shack is a foreigner” (ibid.). Although incriminations of violenceare a well-known aspect of ethnic rioting, a mistaken identity was not always due topeople taking advantage of the violence in order to loot or to settle old scores.

Also the Zulu language proved to be a poor indicator of ethnicity. Not all Venda’s,Sotho’s and other South African ‘ethnics’ will speak Zulu fluently or will even un-derstand each other’s language. South Africa’s racial, linguistic and ethnic hetero-geneity, its historical ethnic and linguistic ties with neighbouring countries by waysof mutual migration, its socially segmented legacy of apartheid and the diversitywithin bordering countries themselves make classifying an individual in a categori-cal order far from foolproof. Sibusizo and Jerry mentioned the historical ethnic andlinguistic ties between Zimbabwe and South Africa that complicated the linguisticstigmata to differentiate between Zimbabweans and South Africans: “Then othersfrom Venda9 were said to be Shona10. Because Venda and Shona can understandeach other. And in zimbabwe there is also Venda. So that kind of a person, gets tobe affected as well” (Sibusizo and Jerry, Zimbabwe 2009). In a similar fashion, thepredominant perceptions amongst South Africans that they are light-colored peoplein ways that individuals can be qualified as “too dark to be South African” (Crush1999), is problematized due to the fact that “there are some Zimbabweans who arealso light and also some South Africans who are also dark” (Jeffrey, Malawi andhis wife, South Africa 2009). A young South African man, who identified himselfas Venda from Limpopo, was chased out of his house in the Beirut area. Because

9a South African ethnic group10a Zimbabwean ethnic group

78 “A MISTAKEN IDENTITY”. THE UNCERTAINTY OF OTHERNESS

his Zulu was “not perfect” and his skin-complexion was fairly dark his attackersperceived him to be Mozambican:

Like, if you get there. And when you are talking Zulu language, you under-

stand? You are not perfect, it’s not a language, eh mother language, you under-

stand? They say ‘hey man you are not perfect about Zulu, you are a Shangaan,

from Mozambique,’ you understand? You are a foreigner, something like that,

you understand. Yeah (Witness, South Africa 2009).

Many South Africans themselves do not measure up to the profile of the imag-ined citizen as ‘light skinned bodies’ and are therefore often arrested due to a mis-taken identity. One in five detainees at the Lindela repatriation centre appeared to beSouth African citizens that were not able to identify themselves, while about 30 per-cent of people being arrested due to their presumed illegality are in fact legal citizenswho are mistaken to be foreign due to their skin complexion, according to a HumanRights Watch report (Matsinhe 2009). South Africans, be they ordinary citizens orofficial authorities, often profile the non-citizen on the basis of unreliable markersof identity, such as skin-tone, language, manner of dress and hairstyles, which theygrade and code in order to determine one’s citizenship. But as useful as those at-tributes appear to stigmatizers in their obsession with categorical orders and thusform a possible dangerous sign for those stigma-bearers within hostile societies, theambiguous nature of these signifiers simultaneously create leeway for African im-migrants in order to employ creative strategies of invisibility to renegotiate theirforeignness within public space. It is these strategies with which the final chapter isconcerned.

Chapter 5Covering the Self, Performing the Other

As this chapter will foreground creative strategies1 immigrants were able to em-ploy in order to renegotiate their foreignness in their daily interactions with SouthAfricans in Alexandra’s public spaces, it is necessary to consider the parameters thatdelineate the possibilities for creative action. The concept of habitus, which refersto a general disposition that operates at a level below consciousness and allows forintelligent and strategic action within the context it is practiced, is a useful conceptin order to explore the limits of human agency. For, although “creativity is an essen-tial element of all activity that deserves to be placed at the center of theorizing abouthuman agency” (Dalton 2004), creative actions are always restricted sets of strategiesembedded both within the agent’s bodily hexis and the logics of his or hers habitus.In other words, although individuals are able to make their own choices, both the(im)permanency of their identity-signifiers and the specific cultural and social set-tings in which social agents operate shape the principles of their choices and restrictwhat types of innovation can occur. Such dispositions that suggest practical actionsfor social agents are inherited from the active construction of differences among so-cial groups out of which individuals can choose from a variety of possibilities forstrategic action (ibid.). Simultaneously individuals are distinguished in their vari-ous choices of action by the their very own subjective “modes of perception, affect,thought, desire, fear, and so forth” that animates the ways they act (Ortner 2005).

1The reason that I am using the term strategy as opposed to tactics or practices is that my infor-mants were consciously acting with a specific goal in mind: to render themselves invisible withinAlexandra’s public spaces in order to avoid possible harassment

79

80

While many of my informants employed particular strategies to deal with their hos-tile environment, the decision to employ them or not and in which form, were al-ways shaped by their own subjectivities. With these shapers of creativity in mindthis chapter will analyse and describe the ways immigrants were employing strate-gies of invisibility in order to deal with their exclusion within daily life by means ofthe disclosure or appropriation of the particular signifiers South Africans consideredmeaningful within Alexandra in order to identify foreign bodies.

Two types of “strategies of invisibility” can be distinguished out of the varietyof repertoires my informants employed in order to conceal their foreignness or to“pass” as South African. The first type can be defined in terms of what is coinedas “stigma management”, the second type as “performances of misrepresentation”(Goffman 1986; Goffman 1959). The main difference between the two is that stigmamanagement is merely concerned with the managing of one’s discreditable stigmasignums in order to conceal one’s personal identity, while performances of misrepre-sentation are additionally concerned with the appropriation of attributes that are as-sociated with the identity category one is trying to “pass” into (Goffman 1986; Goff-man 1959). When individuals are actively pretending what one is not, these strate-gies of misrepresentation can be understood as a form of theatre play in which they(un)intentionally convey and/or conceal information in order to give way a certainimpression of the self towards their audiences (Goffman 1959). A ‘person’, from thispoint of view, is in its first meaning a mask, recognized by the fact that “everyoneis always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role” (ibid.)2. Whenindividuals intentionally convey misinformation their expressive equipment can beclassified within to different kinds of sign activity:

The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different

kind of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he

gives off. The first involves verbal symbols or their substitutes which he uses ad-

mittedly and solely to convey the information that he and the others are known

to attach to these symbols [...] The second involves a wide range of action that

2Although the theory seems to be primarily concerned with daily personal and professional rou-tines employed in a society that seems to function in its ‘normal’ harmonious mode –in opposition toa setting where intersubjective routines, relationships, and are disrupted by violence (Green 1999)– itis stressed that it seems to apply everywhere in social life (Goffman 1959)

CHAPTER 5. COVERING THE SELF, PERFORMING THE OTHER 81

others can treat as symptomatic to the actor [...] The individual does of course

intentionally convey misinformation by means of both these types of communi-

cation, the first involving deceit, the second feigning (ibid.)

In other words, in order to deceive their audience individuals need to managestigma-attributes that may disclose their discreditable identity, while performance ofotherness is highly dependent on the appropriation of identity signifiers that enablethem to feign another identity. Some items of expressive equipment for conveyingsigns in order to perform a particular appearance, such as racial characteristics, sexand age, are relatively fixed, whereas vehicles for conveying signs as clothing, fa-cial expressions, bodily gestures and the likes can vary during a performance fromone moment to the next (ibid.). While physical characteristics are not easily hiddenor appropriated, impermanent signums, like clothing-style, can relatively easily bechanged in order to ‘pass’ as same. Both strategies are comparable to the “jugglingwith identities” to “unmark” oneself as a stranger that Rwandan town refugees inTanzania employed in order to deal with the possible consequences of being iden-tified as a refugee in their daily interactions with Rwandan citizens and officials(Malkki 1995a). But in a similar vein, homeless women in England often employstrategies of invisibility by ‘looking like everyone else’ and disguising inappropriateactivities, such as sleeping, in public places (Casey, Goudie, and Reeve 2008).

Being conscious of the ways South Africans read personal attributes in orderto distinguish between fellow nationals and strangers, African immigrants activelymanage “undisclosed discrediting information about self” (Goffman 1986). In or-der to employ strategies of invisibility they particularly need to draw on the widevariety of culturally and contextually specific signifiers of foreignness in order tomask their difference. The tendency of audiences to accept signs of performancesas (dis)creditable attributes of identity, this sign-accepting tendency simultaneouslyputs the audience in a postion to be deceived by the performer, “for there are fewsigns that cannot be used to attest to the presence of something that is not reallythere” (Goffman 1959). Their habitus, in other words, provides culturally dictatedscripts which immigrants can utilize in order to negate their difference and simulta-neously establish their sameness to successfully pass as South Africans (Einwohner2008). In this way, their strivings to become invisible and the ways immigrants tryto do so, seems to be a direct response to the South African construction of the Mak-

82 SUBJECTIVITY AND MODES OF FEAR

werekwere which mobilizes exclusionary praxis in Alexandra’s public spaces. As theprevious chapter already analysed these various identity signifiers that define for-eignness within the context of Alexandra, this chapter will draw on these classifica-tory signums in order to delineate the possibilities of strategies my informants couldemploy. Of course, the question of “to display or not to display; to tell or not to tell, tolet on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, tho whom, how, when andwhere” (Goffman 1986), depends on the congeniality and visibility of the particularstigmata and the extent to which creditable attributes can be appropriated. More-over, the strategies they employ are simultaneously shaped by the settings in whichthey occur and the audiences immigrants were performing identity to. Before I willanalyze the ways the violence has transformed their movement in public spaces andtheir interactions with particular others, I will first consider how the subjective (fearof) hostility that immigrants receive within South African society animates the needfor them to employ these strategies in the first place.

Subjectivity and Modes of Fear

The subjective feelings of my immigrants form a necessary part in the understand-ing how they tried to deal with their daily realities of hostility within Alexandra.The strategies they employe do not originate from “some natural or originally will”,since agency “takes shape as specific desires and intentions within a matrix of sub-jectivity – of (culturally constituted) feelings, thoughts, and meanings” (Ortner 2005,p. 34). Immigrants clearly expressed the need to render themselves invisible due toan omniscient presence of fear of the violence happening again “because that thingjust died away too quickly”. Moreover, many explained they were still dealing withpublic harassment by South Africans on a daily basis who, according to my infor-mants, repeatedly warn that “they want to start it again” (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009;Robert and Roommates, Zimbabwe 2009). Particularly the end of the 2010 soccerWorld Cup –which is organised for the first time in (South) Africa– is said by immi-grants to be identified by South Africans as a period of renewed violence:

We are scared for after 2010, you see, people they still promise again to after

2010. They are just waiting for after world cup and then after world cup. You

see, the violence stopped because of 2010. It was people, they come outside, they


was talking about... that problem you see. You see. And then, ok, they tried to

shoot those people to stop it. They say, after 2010, maybe after world cup. They

say that and then they want to start again (Patrick, Zimbabwe 2009).

Immigrants who still live in or eventually returned to Alexandra, are living in aspace which evokes memories of violence, burning houses, angry mobs and otherimages of terror. Nevertheless, many chose to return or to stay after the xenophobicviolence, often because South Africa still provides them with more economic oppor-tunities in comparisation to their home-country. But living in a social space that was–and still is– very hostile to them, imbues immigrants within Alexandra with greatcautiousness, anxiety, or fear:

You see? So for people to go around to beat individuals, look at the way today

foreigners are living. Most of them are living with FEAR, great fear within them.

You are in the taxi, this is one of my fear which I didn’t mention to you. When

I PAY, eh, I mean a taxi, that EVERYBODY in the taxi is speaking a language,

another South African language. And then, I don’t understand, if I pay my fee,

let’s say to Jozi, it’s nine rand. If I give ten rand and within a period of time he’s

not given me the change of one rand, I don’t ask! And we have a lot of guys like

that who don’t ask. Because immediately you ask he’s telling you [feigns thick

heavy South African accent] ‘my friend, you didn’t give me anything. Why you

didn’t ask me long time ago?’ You understand? So people, are living with fear

today in South Africa. A lot of the foreign guys. A LOT of them. I say foreign,

they said Africans are the foreigners here. These are people who live in fear (Ob,

Ghana 2009).

Ob, who was easily discreditable as a non-South African by his distinguish-ing facial features and thick accent, therefore interacted very cautiously with SouthAfricans in public space in order to avoid harassment. Another immigrant provideda telling example how she was ridiculed within a bus when she was discredited as aforeigner due to her inability to speak Zulu:

I was going to visit my friend. When I got into the bus everybody knew I was a

foreigner. The bus driver talked to me in Zulu. I didn’t know how to respond.

So they shouted Kwerekwere! And everybody went crazy laughing at me. I was

ashamed asking myself what I have done. I just got into the bus like everybody

else but they treated me like that. I was ashamed (Matsinhe 2009).

84 SUBJECTIVITY AND MODES OF FEAR

The fear many informants expressed in their interaction with South African citi-zens since the xenophobic violence has dramatically transformed their “patterns ofintersubjective connectedness and trust” with South Africans within Alexandra andhas created self-consciousness on the ways they navigate social and public space.Jeffrey, for instance, said to me his life since the violence had changed because hecannot trust anybody anymore and identified this as the reason he could not feelfree to do anything that he wants. Before the violence, he elaborated, it was “sim-ple” to reveal his nationality, but he now regarded it too dangerous to disclose inpublic he’s from Malawi (Jeffrey, Malawi and his wife, South Africa 2009). Kumalomade a similar observation:

By those days we were hiding ourselves from the police, not from the commu-

nity. We could even drink, get drunk and sing, I’m from Zimbabwe! whatwhat!

You see. No one would say, go out South Africa. But now, it’s too hard to say

I’m from Zim... (Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009).

Discreditable persons are always insecure within their interactions with otherpeople, an anxiety that arises from their inner ‘true’ self they know they cannot fix(Goffman 1986). Due to possibilities of violent harassment when their personal iden-tity would be disclosed, immigrants are living in a constant state of fear in waysthat they are very careful to conceal their ‘real’ identity. Of course, the contingenciesfor the management of social and personal identity are restricted by the individ-uals’ habitus and the particular social setting and its audience in which they per-form (ibid.). In private–, or back places, immigrants can feel relatively safe sincetheir direct social surroundings are more or less acquainted with his or hers per-sonal identity. Public spaces, on the contrary –where communication is heavily ap-pearance dependent– are highly informal places of social interaction in which it isdifficult to counteract stereotypes (Gardner 1995). While immigrants “just movedalone, without talking” (Tendai, Zimbabwe 2009) within Alexandra’s public spacesduring the xenophobic violence, their experiences with violence and hostility has in-fused Alexandra’s many spaces over which violence and harassment occurred withspecific value (Mehta 2002). Although spatial navigations of social agents are oftenembedded in the casual routines of daily life and therefore not easy to observe, theircautiousness within public space was clearly visible in cases of rumours of upcoming


protests against socio-political issues which for many immigrants within Alexandrawere sources of considerable concern for renewed violence.

Fear and the Transformation of Public Space

During my last month of fieldwork in Alexandra a taxi-strike was announced asa protest against the pending introduction of a ticket system. The South Africantaxi-branch, which is highly associated with Zuluness, is a fairly unregulated tradeand consists of a number of rival associations “based on existing networks of ethnicbonds or political affiliation” (Blom Hansen 2006). It has a violent history of recurrentshoot-outs between rival associations, popularly known as taxi-wars and “fueled byrivalry in business, politics, and underworld activities” (ibid.). When the strike wasannounced my informants often reminded me that it would result in renewed vi-olence against foreigners. “Tomorrow you’ll be able to observe xenophobia if youwatch from the roofs”, Lucky told me laughingly the day before. The day of thestrike I woke up with the sound of hovering helicopters as Harry called me to in-form me that groups of people were marching through the township, armed withsticks and clubs and singing warsongs. While I was following the helicopters in or-der to locate the protesters, I walked through the winding paths between shacks andhouses. Occasionally I ran into little groups of men, often clearly drunk, who werearmed with iron sticks and wooden clubs. Many of them wore a red band aroundtheir head as a mark of Zuluness. When I was unable to locate the main group ofprotesters I headed to Pan-Africa in order to meet some informants. Once I arrived,the place –normally brimming with life of hooting taxis, shopping consumers andstalls of street-sellers, often foreigners– was as good as empty. The silence and ten-sion that I clearly felt was occasionally disturbed by patrolling cars with drinkingyoung men. Although the day was relatively calm in Alexandra, the day after it ap-peared the strike was marked by many violent incidents in the city-centre of Johan-nesburg. And many other days, rumours of new protests against housing-policiesor other socio-political issues were sources of great anxiety for many immigrants,which resulted in heated discussions whether to come to the township for businessor to stay at home.

It are especially public spaces, such as public taxis, the Beirut area and Pan-Africa,

86 FEAR AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

because they are “open for all” (Gardner 1995), where the interaction with familiairs,but particularly strangers occurs. For many immigrants various spatial locationswithin Alexandra were perceived to be far from “open for all”, but deemed to be“forbidden or out-of-bounds places” where the possibility of being identified as for-eign could possibly lead to public harassment of even (violent) expulsion (Goffman1986). My informants therefore graded their various settings of public performancewithin Alexandra into different types of dangerousness, which established “the go-ing price for revealing or concealing and the significance of being known about ornot known about, whatever [their] choice of information strategies” (ibid.).

Of course, especially what was regarded by immigrants as the Zulu area was re-garded to be a dangerous out-of-bounds place, which they perceived to be impreg-nated with “the entire symbology of purity and impurity” (Feldman 1991). Collenmentioned there had already been “a separation” in Alexandra and stressed hispoint by explaining most foreigners were chased out of the area of Beirut (Collen,Zimbabwe and Friends 2009). Informants frequently described the violence as a sortof ethnic cleansing by which the Zulu’s were said to have ensured the ethnic ho-mogeneity of ‘their’ area, which reified the substantiation of ethnicity in the “in-side/outside division of space” (Feldman 1991). Certain places in Alexandra wereso much infused with Zuluness that the sheer idea of walking around there wasregarded as unthinkable. Mozes explained to me how he remapped his “personalgeography” (Gardner 1995) on his way back from work since the violence:

Yeah, places I don’t go anymore now, by that side, London road [nearby the

Zulu-hostel]. I don’t move around anymore that side. I’m scared that side. Yeah,

only firstly in the morning and when I come from work, I changed the way,

coming through Pan-Africa Yeah, from Pan, because it’s almost the same way.

That side it’s easy cutting through (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009).

Although most of the displaced victims eventually returned back to Alexandra,targets who were chased away by the rioters from the Beirut-area did not return,but rather found themselves another place to stay in Alexandra (Alexandra RenewalProject 2008). Beirut is an area which is populated by many shack-dwellers and formost of my informants their former space of residence. However, almost all of themwere chased out of their houses and to return to Beirut to reclaim their belongings issomething many informants would not even dare to think of:


I will never try to go there [the Beirut-area]. I will never go there, just because

of: one of us, he tried to go there. He came back with a big injury. So they shows

us that they could kill us. If they know you. They can’t let you stay, never. They

want to be, they said it’s called KZN that place (Ndima, South Africa 2009)

Although those strategies and spatial mappings of personal geographies are shapedaccording to individual subjectivities and the particular setting they are operatingin, the possible choice of actions are simultaneously shaped by their very own bodyhexis and visibility of potential discreditable stigmata. Those who were easily dis-creditable as foreigners often were very careful by navigating the township, whileothers perceived themselves to be relatively safe due to their physical, and linguisticsimilarities with what is perceived to be a stereotypical South African. It were es-pecially the Zimbabweans, explained Mozes, who “look like South Africans in theirfaces” (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009). And because of their physical and linguistic sim-ilarities with the stereotypical South African, many of them were able to employstrategies of invisibility. Simultaneously, the nature of their association with theiraudiences shapes their decision to perform a South African identity or hide theirpersonal one.

The Self and its Audience as Parameters for Performances

The strategies of invisibility that will be outlined in this chapter can thus not be gen-eralized to all African immigrants in general living in Alexandra, but are mainlyshaped by the predominance of Zimbabweans amongst my informants. The strate-gies Zimbabwean informants employed however, were also highly dependent ontheir own body hexis and ethnic affiliations. Within Zimbabwe’s two dominant eth-nic affiliations –the Shona and the Ndebele– the Ndebele are historically closely alignedwith Zulu ‘ethnics’. Josef –who identified himself as Ndebele– exemplified this by anorigin myth on the emergence of the Ndebele tribe, an illuminating illustration on thesocial, political and historical constructed nature of ethnicity:

The Zulu’s, they are more or less like the Ndebele’s. Because of, Shaka Zulu

ne? Was the king, there by that time. Mzelekasi was his assistent. So, they had a

fight. So, you know what Mzelekasi did ne? He took some of the people, some of

88 THE SELF AND ITS AUDIENCE AS PARAMETERS FOR PERFORMANCES

his followers. So what did he did? He went to, to Zimbabwe. You see? So, that’s

where, the Ndebele’s what? Started to... because the Zimbabweans, they were

Shona’s ne? So, the Ndebele’s they came here from South Africa to Zimbabwe.

So that’s why the Zulu’s and the Ndebele’s are more or less the same. Even their

language, doesn’t differ that lot. They like violence, even the Ndebele’s as well.

Because, even at home there’s tribalism between the Ndebele’s and the Shona’s

(Josef, Zimbabwe 2009).

As the Ndebele were said to be “more or less the same” with Zulu ‘ethnics’ andtheir language “doesn’t differ that lot”, it seemed that performances of misrepre-sentation were predominantly employed by those identifying themselves as Ndebele.Many Shona said they were unable to speak Zulu fluently and thus predominantlyrelied on the coverage of their identity signifiers that could discredit them as foreign.

Moreover, the choice of strategy to be employed was simultaneously highly de-pendent on the particular audience immigrants were interacting with. Particularto strangers immigrants were very careful with the management of their undis-closed stigma attributes. Sibusizo expressed he was afraid to disclose his Zimbab-wean identity towards South Africans who he mainly doesn’t trust, because he “justfreak[s] out when it comes to this conversation of Zimbabweans and South Africans”(Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b). As immigrants clearly expressed considerable distrustto South African strangers an appropriate strategy of invisibility depended on theknowledge of their audiences about the particular individual’s identity as Jeffreyexplained: “sometimes you have to hide, because that face is the first time to see.Sometimes you don’t need to hide, because they know us” (Jeffrey, Malawi and hiswife, South Africa 2009).

Although many interacted very cautiously with South Africans in general, theygraded their possible audiences in various levels of dangerousness. Immigrants per-ceived Zulu’s frequently to be the most dangerous category when one’s personalidentity would be discovered: “Actually, I don’t talk to Zulu’s, I react as if I’m aSouth African”, explained Prince (Prince, Zimbabwe 2009). Similarly, a Zimbabweanbarber expressed too, that it are particularly Zulu ‘ethnics’ he conceals his identityto: “Ah, some people they know, some people they don’t. So few people know I’mfrom Zimbabwe, but almost the Zulu’s, they don’t know” (Barber, Zimbabwe 2009).While other informants especially considered policemen to be significant others in


front of whom they had to conceal there identity:

It’s the fear is too much. Because, a Zimbabwean man, saw the policeman com-

ing. He’s already running, you see the policeman coming closer, he’s on top-

speed, running running away. [laughs] Even though, he hasn’t done anything

wrong (Ob, Ghana 2009)

As I have considered the various parameters of performance and strategic ac-tion, subjectivity, body hexis, setting and audience, that shape the contingencies forperformances of otherness or strategies of sameness I will now describe the variousways informants were covering their identity before I proceed to performances ofmisrepresentation.

“You have to hide yourself”. Employing strategies to

cover one’s Otherness

Obviously, the ability of the coverage of one’s identity is dependent on both the vis-ibility and the (im)permanency of its contextually meaningful signifiers. In the con-text of the second world war, for instance, Jews were able to conceal their Jewishnessby simply removing the star from their attire that artificially rendered them visible(Einwohner 2008). Rendering one’s identity invisible, however, doesn’t require theliteral hiding of the physical form. Homeless women, for instance, are able to rendertheir homelessness invisible in the midst of hundreds of people by concealing at-tributes, such as disguising inappropriate activities and hiding the luggage they of-ten carried with that could signify their personal identity (Casey, Goudie, and Reeve2008). In a similar vein, African immigrants were often navigating within Alexan-dra’s densely populated spaces, such as Pan-Africa where foreign street-hawkerswere selling their goods in the midst of thousands shopping consumers. Althoughoccupational background provided me with a fairly accurate way to identify possi-ble foreigners, foreignness remained highly invisible for me when I walked acrossthe many street-hawkers who might have been foreign. Ambiguous indexes of iden-tity, such as physical characteristics and clothing-styles, became for me too classifi-catory devices by which I tried to identify informants. Obviously this led to manysituations in which the particular individual I approached and of whom I eventually

90“YOU HAVE TO HIDE YOURSELF”. EMPLOYING STRATEGIES TO COVER ONE’S

OTHERNESS

tried to infer his or hers nationality appeared to be South African. Nevertheless, I wasnever sure whether the person was simply conveying the truth or was also conceal-ing their nationality in front of me. The touchy subject that I was conducting myresearch on made the latter highly plausible.

Ob, who was a well-known and respected figure at Pan-Africa, frequently helpedme with the identification of immigrants to interview. One particular man, a taximarshall who was working right next to Ob’s stall, was a Zimbabwean accordingto Ob. “But he will never tell you”, Ob added and laughed. When I asked Ob howhe was so sure that the particular man was Zimbabwean, he stated the obvious: “Ijust can tell by observing him”. Confident that Ob was telling the truth I decided toapproach the man. When I introduced myself and my research subject, I started toask him questions that could indirectly disclose his nationality. However, the manclearly implied he was South African. Although I couldn’t help to feel slightly disap-pointed, we made an agreement with an interview. During the interview I carefullytried to catch him on any inconsistencies when I was interviewing him, but the mannever disclosed any information by which Ob could be proven true that the inter-viewee actually was Zimbabwean. The man, whether it was his ‘real’ or ‘performed’identity, presented himself convincingly as South African. But I still wasn’t fullyconvinced since the man was accompanied by three South African friends for thefull duration of our conversation. I reckoned he was possibly concealing his Zim-babwean identity in front of me because his friends were unaware of his nationality.After the interview ended we walked to his mothers house and I decided to ask himif I could ask him some more personal questions. “Nooo, I don’t have time any-more”, he replied. As I had become very obsessed with possible signs that coulddisclose people’s possible foreignness I thought I could see a slight glint of panicin his eyes, which could confirm my suspicion that he simply was pretending tobe South African. Nevertheless, I didn’t dare to confront him with what could beregarded as an offensive question, seen the hostile perceptions towards foreignershe expressed during the course of the interview (Taximarshall and Friends, SouthAfrica 2009). “I told you, he is too scared to tell he is Zimbabwean” Ob said, whenI told this story to him the next day and his clear confidence made me even moreconfused and uncertain. During my very last day within Alexandra I accidentallymet the taxi marshall again. When we exchanged some formalities about the fact


that I was leaving I couldn’t help to finally try to fulfill my curiosity. After carefully Irestated my research subject and particularly stressed my interest stemmed from mysympathy with the difficulties immigrants were dealing with, I finally came to thepoint: “I actually thought at first you were a Zimbabwean too”. Probably becauseI was once more afraid to offend the man, I reflexively patted him on the shoulderand laughed simultaneously. The man started laughing too and replied: “aah nooo,I am South African. I am born and bred in Alexandra”.

Up to this day I still wonder: was I simply too obsessed with reading bodies inorder to signify foreignness, or was I confronted with those very strategies I triedto research and did he manage to conceal his personal identity up to the very endbecause I might had given the impression that I was joking? I too belonged to anaudience in particular settings and, likewise, I too could have been misled numer-ous times by immigrants that were very cautious to convey information that couldrender them vulnerable. Especially because of this uncertainty and the very essencethat strategies of invisibility are primarily concerned with duping the performers’audiences, my information is mainly extrapolated from interview-material of my in-formants. The only strategy of ‘covering’ that I was able to observe has been brieflyexemplified in chapter two when Prince, able to cover his nationality due to hisphysical characteristics and linguistic competence, only disclosed his Zimbabweanidentity to me when we were out of ear-reach of his South African customers. With-out practically lying to me in front of his customers, but simply telling me “that heknew some Zimbabweans down the road”, he used common communication tech-niques such as innuendo, strategic ambiguity, and crucial omissions that can be usedto misinform audiences without practically lying (Goffman 1959).

Covering, also known as dissociation or camouflage, is probably the easiest wayof concealing stigmatized identities. Instead of actively trying to convince audiencesto identify the discreditable person as what one is not, the performer solely needs tobehave as if s/he is not part of the stigmatized group to which s/he actually belongs.Techniques that allow them to do so include the engagement in performances suchas “modifying one’s physical appearance, avoiding contact with others like your-self, or remaining silent when one’s group is being publicly disparaged” (Kanuha1999). All three types were predominantly mentioned by my informants too. Mostforeign interviewees were especially very cautious with the management of social re-

92“YOU HAVE TO HIDE YOURSELF”. EMPLOYING STRATEGIES TO COVER ONE’S

OTHERNESS

lationships. While some informants explained they only disclosed their nationalityto those whom they perceived to be trustworthy (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009; Sibusizo,Zimbabwe 2009b; Josef, Zimbabwe 2009; Kumalo, Zimbabwe 2009), others even lim-ited their social network to those who were not South African (Jeffrey, Malawi andhis wife, South Africa 2009). By maintaining this distance with particular others, theywere able to restrict the possibilities of South Africans from constructing a personalidentification of them (Goffman 1986). Mozes, for instance, explained to me he notonly limited his spatial navigation and social lifestyle, but also restricted his socialnetwork to those friends he deemed to be trusted:

I’m no longer moving around anymore. I liked to move around, to drink outside,

because I did have some friends over that side. But I’m no longer going and see

them now. I’m not there anymore, I already changed my life. I’m trying to

minimize friends. I don’t wanna have too much friends, you know. Only the

ones you can trust, with you are close, you know? (Mozes, Zimbabwe 2009).

And even when informants categorized particular others as friends, this not nec-essarily meant they would expose their personal identity to them. Josef explained hehas South African friends, of whom “some do” but “others they don’t” know wherehe is originally from, which forced him to live a double life containing those famil-iairs who think they know his identity and those who ‘really’ do (Josef, Zimbabwe2009; Goffman 1986).

Discreditable persons who successfully ‘pass’ into a new social category oftenexperience considerable feelings of disloyalty and self-contempt when members ofthe category s/he is passing into make “offensive” remarks against the category theperson is passing out of – especially when the individual can face exposure whens/he refrains from joining in this vilification (Goffman 1986). Josef explained thatwhen his South African friends “talk bad things about Zimbabweans”, he cannot doanything but “just keep quiet” (Josef, Zimbabwe 2009). Sibusizo employs a differentstrategy in this case:

All I do is, just, you know, compliment on what they say, you know. Just say,

yeah, just compliment on what they say. But, if they start talking bad about

foreigners, I tell them. No, those people they are people you know, all they want

is to survive. Cause, I know, on my side that I’m a foreigner. But as for my


friends, they don’t know. So I always try to, you know, to advise them, no to

cause violence, to do any harm, to other foreigners. Whilst they don’t know that

they speaking to one of the foreigners, you see? (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b).

Immigrants who were not able to speak a South African language “properly”,often “tried to to avoid or limit contact across the boundary” by employing perfor-mances whereby they pretended to be a person that was not really talkative (Larsen1982; Ndundu and family, Zimbabwe 2009). As did Ndundu’s sister, who just ar-rived a few months ago in South Africa:

[We] don’t try to talk too much, because we could be identified. So pretend you

are the type of person that doesn’t like to talk to people. Pretend you are a quiet

someone. Because that you won’t be able to make them identify you. Yeah,

so you have to pretend you don’t like talking (Ndundu and family, Zimbabwe

2009).

Jeffrey, who sold shoes and bags at Pan-Africa, employed similar tactics of strate-gic avoidance, by which he very pragmatically solved the problem on how to livewith possibilities of (violent) harassment (Larsen 1982). In order to lessen the chanceto be identified as foreign, he kept his verbal interactions with his customers to aminimum: “You don’t talk to them, when they ask how much, you tell them. Whenthey want to buy, they buy, when they don’t want, say thank you” (Jeffrey, Malawiand his wife, South Africa 2009). Although not frequently mentioned, behaviour andphysical appearances were sometimes modified too, in order to engage in strategiesof invisibility. Ndundu’s sister, for instance, mentioned how she had “been givensome tips by some, how to respond, how to walk on the street” (Ndundu and fam-ily, Zimbabwe 2009). A very drastic solution to hide the inoculation mark is exem-plified by immigrants who try to acidize or burn their left arms in an attempt toerase or obliterate this signifier of foreignness (Matsinhe 2009). Ndundu confirmedthis: “Yeah, they remove the scar with those scar-removals, like bio-oil” (Ndunduand family, Zimbabwe 2009). Others employed a less drastic strategy and simplycovered the inoculation mark by wearing long sleeves (Matsinhe 2009; Salani, SouthAfrica 2009; Ellen, South Africa and Themba, Zimbabwe 2009). Situational rules forthe coverage of foreignness went beyond appearance and language skills to includebehavioral symbols as well. For instance, a Zimbabwean barber explained to me he

94 “YOU HAVE TO PRETEND”. PERFORMING IDENTITIES BY MISREPRESENTATION

did not flee the violence during the xenophobic riots, simply because it would createsuspicion among his friends:

Ah, I’ve got a lot of friends. So, some people, if you run away, they are gonna

see, this guy is not from here. But some people if you don’t run away, they

don’t know, maybe this guy is from South Africa. That’s why I didn’t run away

(Barber, Zimbabwe 2009).

Although especially those who were not able to speak South African languages‘properly’ were very limited in their strategies of invisibility, they were still able increative ways to somehow navigate as ‘undercover agents’ within in the midst of ahostile community. Strategies of misrepresentation are a considerable more complextype of “identity work”. As the strategies of concealing stigma signifiers are pre-dominantly concerned with negating foreignness, strategies of misrepresentation areadditionally concerned with the performance of sameness (Einwohner 2008). Dis-creditable persons who successfully pass into another category by performances ofsameness thus face considerably more danger of being exposed by the very weak-ness they are trying to hide in their daily interaction with South Africans (Goffman1986). It was Prince’s brother, Lucky, who was placed in an extremely vulnerable po-sition when I conducted an interview with him in the presence of a youngster whoI at first assumed to be familiair with Lucky’s Zimbabwean nationality. Fortunately,I realized just in time that the boy who Lucky identified as his friend wasn’t awarethat he was Zimbabwean and that Lucky even actively gave a performance in whichhe presented himself as a fellow Zulu.

“You have to pretend”. Performing Identities by Misrep-

resentation

“Ah, you did a really good job there, I was really feeling nervous for a moment”,Lucky said to me as we were returning to his street-stall at Pan-Africa. I met Lucky,a Zimbabwean street-hawker during my first month in Alexandra. One day Luckytook me out for a walk through the area of Beirut and showed me some formerlyforeign-owned shops that were closed or demolished due to the xenophobic vio-lence. He appeared to be more than happy to talk with me about those days of


violence from his Zimbabwean perspective and I made an appointment with himfor an interview. Although my original intention was to interview Lucky only, weaccidentally met a friend of him on our way to Lucky’s residential area. “I can tellyou a lot about xenophobia too”, Lucky’s friend said to me after I explained whatwe were up to. Glad with this opportunity to be able to get some insights on myresearch subject from more than one perspective, I asked them both if they wouldbe fine to conduct the interview with the three of us. “Ah, no problem”, both Luckyand the undisclosed man replied and together we resumed our journey on foot toLucky’s living-room.

As I switched on my recording device and gave a short introduction on my re-search subject, Lucky started by explaining to me that xenophobia was something“that came out of space” due to an incident when a Zimbabwean “took the Zulu’swallet”. After this happened, Lucky explained, “those Zulu guys became angry”and said to each other: “This guys from Zimbabwe, Maputo, whatwhat, they’ve gotfull of crime!”. That’s what “caused of the matter”, concluded Lucky and clearlyidentified the spark of the violence as with Zulu’s being fed up with what they per-ceived to be criminal Zimbabweans. So far, Lucky’s friend occasionally stressed thepoints that Lucky made to me by shouting short statements like “YAH” with his verydeep rough accent. When Lucky explained that the Zulu’s “took them out becausethey are the one who are coming with CRIME”, the other man suddenly angrily in-terrupted: “Zimbabwe guys, Maputo guys, they want gun, they want crime! Theytake money, they take whatwhat wallets, whatwhat, they point guns!”. I suddenlyrealized Lucky’s friend was a South African who by no means held positive per-ceptions towards Zimbabwean immigrants. “Back! They are taking our jobs! Theymust go!”, he shouted after Lucky stated Zulu’s were “crying about Zimbabweanguys taking our whatwhat”.

Slightly confused whether the man was aware of Lucky’s nationality, I realizedI had to be careful with my formulation of questions. But although Lucky at firstseemed to be reproducing South African perceptions towards foreigners from a neu-tral point of perspective, he all of a sudden radically changed his frame of refer-ence: “Zimbabweans hijack people, taking people’s money, feeding themselves withpeople tears”, he shouted to me in a rough tone of voice similar to his friend’s.The course of the interview changed dramatically when both Lucky and his friends


started reproducing a wide range of negative stereotypes about African immigrantsfrom a South African perspective. I became even more puzzled and assumed Luckywas acknowledging those perceptions as a Zimbabwean due to his friend’s hostilenotions about many of Lucky’s fellow nationals. But I soon realized Lucky wasnot only concealing his Zimbabwean nationality, but even pretended to be a SouthAfrican Zulu. “Zulu! Me, I’m a Zulu. I know Zulu, this is a Zulu” Lucky states ata point by referring both to himself as his South African friend and acclaims thatSouth Africa is “our” “Zulu country” (Lucky, Zimbabwe and Zulu-friend 2009).

Lucky was clearly performing a South African identity in front of his South Africanfriend who appeared to be oblivious to Lucky’s Zimbabwean nationality. AlthoughLucky was talking from a South African point of reference, he implicitly motivatedthe necessity to misrepresent himself by stating that many Zimbabweans “pretend”to be South African “because of fear” and therefore “don’t come with their own im-age and everything” (ibid.). Due to his mastery of the Zulu language, the appropria-tion of the very stereotypes that make it necessary for him to render himself invisibleand his morphological features he was able to feign sameness while simultaneouslyperforming Zuluness. The very ways foreign and South African bodies are profiledwithin South African society which are outlined in the previous chapter were uti-lized by immigrants to misrepresent themselves as South African citizens and thusto render their foreignness invisible. As soon as many foreign nationals realize thattheir own personal attributes, such as clothing styles, biographies, names and lan-guage put them in a vulnerable position, immigrants, like Ndundu, readjust theirself-presentation by appropriating those attributes that allow them to pass as SouthAfricans:

Why you have to pretend to be South African, what’s the problem? If you, if you

can be seen otherwise you are coming from... outside. Eish, you don’t survive.

Why? I’m struggling. Otherwise, you can see I’m coming from there. Because

I used to work with guys, you see? South African guys. So, if I work with

them. I have to hide myself, you see? Identity, my identity (Ndundu and family,

Zimbabwe 2009)

Language always remained a crucial signifier of foreignness and especially im-migrants from Southern Africa have the advantage over those from farther afieldto learn South African languages to perfect their skills of mimicry (Matsinhe 2009).


Ndundu, who identified himself as Shona, stated he had been able to make him-self familiair with several South African languages such as Venda, Pedi, Zulu andShangaan due to his long-term residency in South Africa. In his daily interactionwith strangers and colleagues he used these different ‘native’ languages in creativeways to hide his identity:

By now you are going to force a language, you see. I’ve got my Shona language.

But, by now, you see, I can speak those languages. So I have to speak their lan-

guage. You see. Otherwise, maybe, this one is a Shangani, this one is a Pedi, this

one... I’m going to say. What I did like, because I know... several languages. If

I saw you, this one is a Pedi. This one is a Venda. I"m going to speak Shangani.

Or Zulu! I’m going to say [speaks Zulu] Because, people of here ne? They are

going to speak their language, home language. That’s only. If it’s a Pedi. Pedi.

Yeah! No more languages. Pedi is Pedi. Always. This one is Shangani. Shangani

always. So, if I see this one speaks Shangani, this one speaks Pedi. Ok? I’m go-

ing to speak Zulu [everybody starts laughing] (Ndundu and family, Zimbabwe

2009).

By utilizing the fact that many South Africans not always understand each otherdue to South Africa’s linguistic diversity, he intelligently alternated between the dif-ferent South African languages in order to ‘juggle with identities’. In a similar veinof the strategies of invisibility of Rwandan ‘town-refugees’ in Tanzania, Ndundu’s“multiple identities were shaped by many different nexuses of relations with diversecategories of people, and in a multitude of shifting contexts”. By employing them,depending on the category he perceived his audience to ‘belong’ to, “these multipleidentities operated as strategies of invisibility” (Malkki 1995a). Of course, strategiesof immigrants varied according to their audiences. For discreditable individuals thesocial identities of the ones he is interacting with can be used a source of informationconcerning the social identity he should pass into in order to let his audience assumethat he is what they themselves are (Goffman 1986). We have already seen that im-migrants especially perceived Zulu’s to be a audience in front of whom they partic-ularly felt the need to employ strategies of misrepresentation and coverage. Manyimmigrants perceived policemen to be another category for whom they needed tohide their identity from, out of fear to be arrested or to be forced to bribe them toavoid detention and even possible deportation. Ndundu explained to me how he


deals with this anxiety when the taxi he is travelling with is stopped by the police ata roadblock:

They are pretending they are searching for guns, for eh... Zolo’s, you see, those

drugs, you see? But they are looking for? For foreigners. So you have to hide,

Yeah! Look here, look here, I am Shona. From Zim. But by now, if there’s a

roadblock, there’s a roadblock. I am going to say, I am Shangani. Shangani here,

means, I’m a Pedi, from where where homes, there. I’m a Pedi. For what? If I’ll

be arrested, I’ll bribe (Ndundu and family, Zimbabwe 2009).

Language is a highly ambiguous signifier of identity within the Southern Africancontext. For many South Africans Ndebele and Zulu are virtually indistinguishable.Primarily native Zulu-speakers are able to distinguish the subtle differences betweenthe two forms of speechmaking and thus more prone to scrutinize accents in orderto determine if the other individual sounds native too. For, communication in aSouth African language is not always sufficient in order to pass as same, but maysimultaneously depend on the passer’s accent. However, Ndebele is not the onlytongue that has many similarities with Zulu. The reason that Ndundu was able tomisrepresent himself as Pedi in front of policemen was largely due to the fact thatsome South African languages are also spoken outside its borders

Swazi is spoken both in South Africa and Swaziland. Non-Swazi and non-Zulu

speakers can barely distinguish between the two languages. Thus in principle,

one should not be arrested for speaking Swazi. South African Swazi and Swazi-

land Swazi are almost indistinguishable. The same applies to Tswana, which

is spoken in South Africa and Botswana; with Sotho, which is spoken both in

South Africa and Lesotho; with Tsonga or Shangana, which is spoken in South

Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe (Matsinhe 2009).

Many Southern Africans are thus not easily distinguishable from South Africansand are rendered practically invisible within South African society. These culturaland linguistic similarities between South African’s citizenry and it’s foreign border-crossers signify the concept of the Stranger who is neither friend nor enemy and evenmay be both since South Africans have no way of knowing (Bauman 1990; Matsinhe2009). The body-hexis of immigrant thus largely shapes the possibilities to employstrategies of misrepresentation. Even during the violence, Themba utilized this as a


way to present himself as a fellow South African in front of the passengers he wastravelling with in the taxi:

That’s why I’m saying, sometimes there are people that you can identify and

there are some people that they fail to identify. Because, the last time when this

thing still very hot, this xenophobic thing. I was in the taxi! And most of the

people that were there, they were South Africans and they were busy talking:

hey, you know these people, we must attack them, they must go man! These

people they must go! And hey, what do you say, you know? People were just

like talking and eh... I was also there! And I said, yeah, but guys, you know,

we must try to think about these other things, you know, before we are doing

whatever we’re doing, you know? I was acting as if I was one of them. And they

never even saw that I was not from here. Even if you talk to them and your Zulu

is not so good, but they can actually, ok this guy, well he’s trying his Zulu. But,

they might think maybe he’s a Venda or Shangaan... [Ellen interrupts] Because,

most of us, Shanghaan and Venda, they don’t really exactly speak this language,

you see? They’re not proper Zulu’s (Ellen, South Africa and Themba, Zimbabwe

2009).

Of course, language wasn’t the only signifier which immigrants could appropri-ate in order to employ their performances of sameness. While language, and espe-cially its subtleties, have to be mastered in time before individuals can convincinglyutilize it to sound like South Africans, clothing style was for immigrants an easiersignifier to appropriate in order to look like a stereotypical South African townshipresident. However, Robert explained to me that these strategies to “want to lookmore like South Africans” are dependent on both the linguistic competence of indi-viduals of a South African language and their (im)permanency of residence withinSouth Africa:

Yeah there are people who do that, especially those who come from Ndebeleland

in Zimbabwe. They want to look more like South Africans, than us. We are from

maShonaland. So all those people, they speak Ndembele, which is more like

Zulu. So, they want to look more like Zulu, than us from maShonaland. Yeah,

those are the people that wear those All-Stars, Taeki’s. The clothing of the Zulu’s,

yeah, the way like that. So it depends here you are coming from yeah, what you

want to do. If you are here for a visit, you might do just what you are doing. But


if you are here for good, you have to adopt to that kind of culture or that kind of

life. So that’s what they do (Robert and Roommates, Zimbabwe 2009).

Especially what was described in the previous chapter as pantsula-style, was con-sidered by informants to be a clothing style which represented ‘the South African’as opposed to fong kong which was predominantly perceived to be associated withthe stereotype of the Makwerekwere. Patrick, for instance, paid particular attention tohow he dressed by reflecting on which style South Africans considered to be mean-ingful in order to draw boundaries between nationals and foreigners so his audiencecannot ‘see him’ :

I’m supposed to wear lebo. It’s very important, you see. Just because, people

they see you are wearing fong kong there from pan, you see. Just cheapy things.

Something like that. They take you easily, others, like, ok, this one is a fong kong

guy. You see, something like that. When I supposed to go to buy something. I’m

supposed to buy nikes, or all stars, something like that, like South African things,

you see. They can’t see you. (Patrick, Zimbabwe 2009)

Although immigrants may successfully pass as South Africans by means of soundsand looks, they are likely to have to recourse to other signifiers in order to give a con-sistent performance when their interactions with their audiences requires them todisclose personal information. Sensory ways of identifying identity are often accom-panied with efforts of constructing personal identifications of immigrants by theiraudience. Immigrants who pass successfully as South African are often prone tobe confronted with additional tests of sameness whereby South Africans try to cor-roborate their identity-claims with personal biographies. Therefore, my informantsoften had to anticipate to questions such as “‘What’s the name of the village primaryschool and who’s the principal?’; ‘What’s the village high school and who’s the prin-cipal?”’ when they fabricated a place of birth within South African in order to sustainthe impression that they were South African (Matsinhe 2009). Immigrants, therefore,often carefully constructed a fictive personal biography that they could rely uponwhen South Africans would interrogate their claims of sameness. “You must alwayshave a story”, Josef said to me (Josef, Zimbabwe 2009). Sibusizo provided me withan example when I asked him whether he told his South African friends he was fromZimbabwe:


Sibusizo: Ah, no. I don’t. All they know, my friends, I always tell them I grew

up in north-west, in Mafikeng. That’s where I grew up, that’s where I learned.

But I was born and raised, I was raised in Durban. Because I can’t speak Tswana,

but, when I tell them I was born in Durban, it’s more understandable. Because I

know Zulu. And in Mafikeng, it’s only Tswana only. So I tell them, I was born

in Mafikeng, but I grew up with my mother, there in Durban

Me: Why don’t you tell you were just born in Durban, why make the story more

complicated?

Sibusizo: Yeah, but, my brother came here eight years ago. My brother, he

always told all the guys that he’s from Mafikeng. So, we didn’t like to change

the story, no. I come this side and I tell my brothers friends that, me I’m from

Durban. It was going to be a problem, you see? Because, my brother, he’s the

one who started with this thing. But lucky though, him he’s got an ID. (Sibusizo,

Zimbabwe 2009b)

Sibusizo thus even tried to make sure his fictive storytelling was compatible withhis brother’s in order to make his performance less prone to be discredited. Ofcourse, if individuals want to fabricate their personal biographies convincingly, animportant part of it to sustain the impression of their performance is a name whichfits into this fictive (hi)story. Although a name is not a very reliable way of fixingidentity, it is commonly employed in respect to legal aspects of personal identifica-tion, in the case of draft dodgers and motel guests for example, or in respect to theissue of social identity when individuals feel the need to conceal their personal one(Goffman 1986). Jewish activists who worked on the German side during the secondworld war, for example, adopted Polish nicknames together with other attributes inorder to successfully pass as Aryan (Einwohner 2008). Many informants adopted aZulu name as soon as they arrived in South Africa explained Sibusizo: “All of them,they’ve changed their names to English names and Zulu names. There are few Zim-babweans who are using their original names, like Shona names, there are few, yeah”and added he himself adopted a Zulu surname in order to hide:

Me, I don’t tell people I’m from Zim. Even here, they don’t know where I’m

from. I’ll tell them I’m a Zulu. I use a Zulu surname, Buthelezi. Because, eish, it’s

hard. You have to hide yourself. Because if you don’t hide yourself, eventually

if xenophobia comes back, you see, you’ll be the first target. You see? So, it’s

better to hide yourself (Josef, Zimbabwe 2009).

102 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Clearly those painful memories of the xenophobic violence still shape the needfor African immigrants to employ strategies of invisibility. Although immigrantswere particularly careful with the management of their stigma-attributes in their in-teraction with Zulu’s, many strategies of invisibility were paradoxically employed inorder to pass as Zulu. It has been suggested that the cultural and linguistic similaritybetween Southern Africans and South Africans which renders many African immi-grants invisible within public spaces stimulates anxiety within the South Africanimagination. In order to overcome this ambiguous nature of Strangeness, SouthAfricans attribute many stigma-attributes to black foreign bodies. These South Africanattempts to accomplish the ideological construction of the Makwerekwere by means ofstigma thus seems to take the form of the narcissism of minor differences by meansof South African exceptionalism and a peculiar imagination of the South Africanwho has lighter skins than Africans from across their borders (Matsinhe 2009).

Concluding Remarks

I have tried to show in this chapter how foreign immigrants deal with their exclu-sion in daily life within South African society. By drawing on the very attributesthat South Africans predominantly perceive meaningful to be able to recognize for-eigners, African immigrants are able to perform themselves as sames or cover theirotherness. I identified the limits to which immigrants could employ these strategies,such as the settings they were performing in, the audiences they were performingto and their subjective perceptions, while the previous chapter already elaboratedon the possible attributes they could appropriate to render themselves invisible.Many informants deemed these strategies of invisibility necessary due to their dailyexperience of hostility in their interaction with South Africans. While covering isconcerned with hiding one’s personal identity by concealing possible discreditablestigma-attributes, such as language and inoculation marks and the management oftheir social interaction with South Africans, strategies of misrepresentation are ad-ditionally concerned with a conscious performance of South African identity by ap-propriating attributes, such ass style, fictive biographies, and speech, which SouthAfricans perceive to signify their very own identity.

Although immigrants were thus often successfully resisting their marginaliza-


tion within South Africa’s public spaces, one must be careful not to see resistanceeverywhere (Ortner 2005). Creative agency is often readily categorised as resistance(Scott 1990), which glosses over many of the other possible sources of action, suchas emotions, ambiguities, insecurities and other subjectivities (Bähre 2007; Ortner2005). Although strategies of invisibility were often based upon such subjectivitiesand therefore indeed cannot be seen solely in terms of resistance, immigrants werecertainly resisting the ideological construction of the makwerekwere and its marginal-ization within society and often reversed these notions by feelings of ‘pride’. Ob,for example, expressed to me he was too proud to ‘compromise’ on his very ownsocial identity and consciously decided to render his foreignness clearly visible inAlexandra’s public spaces:

You know, today, you have to, if you want to be aware. If you want to ditch some

of these things, it means you have to start BEHAVING like that ignorant young

man on the street. Do you understand me? Which some of us cannot do. Never!

No, I will not do it, believe me, I won’t do it. You can do what you want, but

believe me, I won’t act, accept that. No matter what you say. You understand?

But there are people who have to dress, you know, you see, you see a very very

noble person from maybe the neighbouring countries who dress looking like a

South African. You’re asking why do you dress like a South African, “ey, my

friend [laughs], you see this people, who am I staying with, must always be like

them”. You know, people are compromising on issues, things that if it would be

back home, they will not do it. Whilst most of us will call SA home also. Do you

understand? (Ob, Ghana 2009)

Due to his subjective feelings of pride, Ob refused to engage in strategies of invis-ibility, which he clearly regarded as undermining people’s dignity. Jerry used prideas a form of regaining dignity by re-inverting the negatively valued status of themakwerekwere within South Africa’s national imaginations by reinstating his moralsuperiority over South Africans:

“They are sick and tired of our intelligence. They know that we are very sharp,

yeah very sharp. A person who’s my age, who is in South Africa. There is

nowhere that he’s as educated as I. Here they only have that metric. That metric

I can write ANY DAY! And I can get eight credits and what not, because, ah man

[laughs]” (Sibusizo and Jerry, Zimbabwe 2009).

104 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Finally, one must be careful to classify strategies of invisibility too easily as theresistance to essentialized notions of identities or as a romantic celebration of the di-alectical nature of identity. Although my informants were utilizing the performativeand socially negotiated aspects of identity in order to (mis)represent themselves,they, like Sibusizo, frequently expressed pride in their ‘true’ ‘authentic’ inner self:“But, deep down I know I’m a Zimbabwean, I’m a Zimbabwean, I’m a Zimbabweanby birth, I’m a Zimbabwean. I grew up in Zimbabwe, I stayed in Zimbabwe, sinceI was born until the age of eighteen” (Sibusizo, Zimbabwe 2009b). By doing this,immigrants themselves often reproduced the very essentialized conceptions of dis-crete identity-classifications on which their otherness was constructed by in the firstplace.

Chapter 6Conclusion

It is now exactly two years ago that South African society was ruptured by xenopho-bic riots that eventually left 62 dead, injured hundreds and displaced thousands ofothers. Sadly enough, African immigrants are still being stigmatized as undesirableoutsiders by various segments of South African society and have to deal with con-siderable amounts of hostility on a daily basis. Once again, just a month ago, SouthAfrican citizens chased away hundreds of foreign immigrants who were forced toerect temporary spaces of refuge, away from their homes and hostile neighbours.The upcoming event of the 2010 soccer World Cup that is held for the first timein (South) Africa in July this year generates considerable anxiety amongst Africanimmigrants in South Africa. Many of my informants expressed to me that SouthAfrican citizens repeatedly warn them they will chase them away for good once theWorld Cup has ended. The strategies of invisibility that this thesis mainly focussedupon are thus still deemed very necessary by the many African immigrants who livewithin South Africa borders in order to deal with their fears. These fears that ariseout of the various hostile and exclusionary practices, with which immigrants clearlystill have to deal with daily from within all ranks of South African society make thatthe subject of this thesis unfortunately remains a highly relevant issue.

This thesis started by stating that the very fact that African immigrants are ableto render themselves invisible within South Africa’s public spaces is largely due tothe particular highly ambiguous nature of the Stranger in South African society:

My aim is to show that the Stranger is particularly within the South African contexta highly ambiguous figure, which creates considerable leeway for creativity that African

105

106

immigrants in the Alexandra township are able to utilize by means of strategies of

invisibility in order to render their foreignness invisible

Strangers are always highly ambiguous figures because of occupying liminalspaces within nations and are therefore often perceived by state-authorities and theirsubjects to be threatening the orderly world of nationness. The propensity of citizensand national authorities to exclude the stranger from legitimate claims to resourceshas led to the global trend to draw boundaries between ‘authentic’ autochthons andnon-belonging allochthones. Globalised flows of interconnectedness that seem todissolve national boundaries and thus fundamentally are perceived to threaten na-tional hegemony have increasingly led to obsessions with who belongs and whodoes not. Within South Africa’s collective post-apartheid imagination the Africanimmigrant has become to represent this global obsession to exclude strangers in theform of the ideological construction of the Makwerekwere. This hegemonic xenopho-bic political discourse that imagines African immigrants as highly undesirable andunintelligible figures who usurp resources, foster crime and deseases and thus fun-damentally threaten the national body arose in tandem with South Africa’s post-apartheid process of nation-building. A process, which is primarily concerned witha non-racial re-imagining of its national identity, but which has paradoxically ren-dered the undesirable outsider visible by means of superficial physical features. Asa perverted parody of South Africa’s apartheid past, the ultimate Other who is de-marcated from South Africa’s newly imagined Self is predominantly defined withinthis dominant discourse on racial and physical characteristics. The Stranger, in theSouth African context, is predominantly imagined as black and thus constructedupon those very essentialized apartheid-categories that the ‘Rainbow nation’ tries toovercome.

The nature of the Stranger is particularly ambiguous within the South Africancontext for two important reasons. First, South Africa’s internal ethno-racial and lin-guistic heterogeneity makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between fellow na-tionals and strangers with certainty. Although South Africans predominantly imag-ine themselves to be light colored, in reality they can by no means be solely iden-tified on the basis of physical characteristics, such as language and skin color. Tomake matters even more complicated, in a similar vein, South Africans share manyphysical, cultural, racial, ethnical and linguistic similarities with the very nationals

CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION 107

they consider to be a threat. The many African immigrants that reside within SouthAfrica’s national borders are often not easily to distinguish from its citizens on thebasis of such physical features. Second, South Africa’s apartheid history of racialsegregation made sure that many South Africans were always strangers towardsanother. The apartheid regime interpellated many black rural migrants, whetherSouth African or not, as illegal aliens that were legally excluded from the rightsto space and employment within South Africa’s urban cities. This made sure thatblack urban residents could appropriate these categories of il/legality to claim re-sources they perceived themselves to be entitled to. These political interpellatedcategories rendered apartheid insider/outsider cleavages and forms of belongingas fundamentally different from their post-apartheid equivalents. Whereas the de-marcation between the self and the other in post-apartheid South Africa is largelybased on a national/non-national divide, the Stranger in the apartheid context waspredominantly constructed by rural/urban divides.

Stigma is often considered to be a convenient device by citizens to overcome theambiguities of the Stranger. By rendering certain body attributes, such as clothing-styles, morphological features and languages as meaningful identifiers of foreign-ness, South Africans are able to reify their differences with African immigrants.South Africa’s hegemonic xenophobic discourse predominantly imagines immigrantsas individuals who are pitch-black, speak unintelligible languages and even walk ordress in specific manners. By employing these superficial attributes in order to iden-tify who is foreign or not, both state-authorities as citizens themselves use bodiesas texts in order to determine citizenship by perceiving that African immigrants arerecognizable by their looks, sounds, behaviours or even smells. These stereotypi-cal perceptions are clearly reflected within the daily experiences of immigrants. Notonly do they have to deal with hostility and marginalization in their interaction withcitizens who infer their foreignness on the basis of such stigma-attributes, even po-licemen are known to profile supposedly illegal immigrants on these superficial fea-tures. Of course, body attributes provide far from a secure technique of classifyingindividuals in national, racial, ethnical or otherwise designated orders. Especiallyin the context of South Africa where linguistic and racial diversity is high, readingbodies appears to be highly deceptive.

The xenophobic violence of May 2008 seemed to be a horrific expression of the

108

frustrations of many South Africans who are disillusioned with the materializationof change of South Africa’s democratic transition. South Africa’s former oppressedpopulation re-imagined their post-apartheid nation as a country with renewed pos-sibilities by which they would finally reap the fruits of freedom. However, manycitizens feel for them little has changed. The post-apartheid political interpellationsof the Stranger are increasingly appropriated by these disillusioned citizens in waysthat they scapegoat African immigrants to blame for their social ills. Within Alexan-dra South African rioters during the xenophobic violence predominantly legitimizedtheir violent actions on the same hegemonic perceptions that foreigners are steal-ing their houses, jobs and women and are responsible for high crime-rates. Like-wise, they singled out their targets on the same superficial features that define thehegemonic stereotypical Stranger. Skin-color, language, clothing-styles, inoculationmarks, modes of walking, occupational background and behaviour were all used byrioters in order to identify their victims. Nevertheless, the violence cannot be un-derstood without placing it in the context of Alexandra’s socio-economic historicallandscape. Alexandrians have always distinguished between insiders and outsidersand used these divisions throughout its impoverished history to exclude the othersfrom scarce resources. However, during apartheid the outsider was in Alexandranot necessarily from across the border, but often a fellow national from rural areas.

Since the violence, African immigrants in Alexandra are still dealing with consid-erable feelings of fears of ‘it’ happening again. Due to their experience of (past) vio-lence and hostility many are very cautious in their interactions with South Africans.The far from fool-proof method of body-reading by which their South African neigh-bours often try to identify foreigners has created considerable leeway for immigrantsto render themselves invisible. As identity is always established within social inter-action and group-membership can never be defined in unambiguous rules of mem-bership space for creativity emerges to (re)negotiate their identities in public spaces.The highly ambiguous nature of the Stranger and the uncertainty to identify himby reading body attributes are clearly reflected in the many South Africans that arearrested by the police due to perceptions that they are foreign. Such ‘mistaken iden-tities’ often had tragic consequences during the xenophobic violence too. Rioterschased away or even killed South Africans too in their obsession with the exclu-sion of others. Although mistakes are always made within (ethnic) riots due to the

CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION 109

very uncertainty to identify on the basis of body attributes, it seemed that old ru-ral/urban divides and forms of belonging were conflated with the post-apartheidinterpellations of who belongs and who does not. South African informants whowere victimized during the violence often came from rural areas and expressed therioters who chased them away were very conscious of their South African identity.Such South African urban immigrants ultimately seemed to represent the ambiguityof the stranger, who is no longer classified and not/yet classified.

My informants were able to utilize these ambiguities of strangeness in order toemploy strategies of invisibility. Within the midst of a community they still experi-enced to be very hostile they used two methods to render their foreignness invisibleand/or pass as same. Both methods were based on the appropriation of the veryculturally dictated scripts that defined which body attributes are deemed useful bySouth Africans in order distinguish between fellow nationals and foreigners. Thefirst, coverage, is based on the management of stigma-attributes that could discloseone’s foreign identity. By hiding their inoculation marks, limiting their social net-work, keeping their verbal interactions with South Africans to a minimum, immi-grants are able to keep their identity hidden. The second method some employed,strategies of misrepresentation, depends on both the management of discreditablestigma symbols as the appropriation of attributes, such as clothing style, fictive bi-ographies, that are perceived to be meaningful in order to perform a South Africanidentity. Both strategies are made possible due to the ability of immigrants to re-flect upon the ambiguous nature of which attributes are deemed useful to signifystrangeness and which signify South Africanness. Although this clearly exemplifiesthe performative and socially constructed nature of identity, this did not necessarilymean immigrants were not expressing very essentialized and stereotypical notionsabout themselves and South Africans. “What is a makwerekwere? We are all black.We are from the same place”, an informant once said to me (Kumalo, Zimbabwe2009) and many informants expressed similar appeals to Pan-Africanism. Seen fromthis angle immigrants’ strategies of sameness could indeed be seen as a confirmationthat people are actually not that different, but are sometimes deemed necessary be-cause people themselves are often very preoccupied with constructing difference.

(a) A mob of South African rioters (b) Mozambican immigrant Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuavewho was set on fire

(c) Displaced immigrants in one of the refugee camps (d) A rioter demolishing a shack

Figure 3: Images of the xenophobic violence. See:http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/xenophobia_in_south_africa.html,http://www.msf.org/source/countries/africa/southafrica/2008/43232.jpg,

http://www.joaosilva.co.za/images/series_eight/sa2_big.jpg

(a) Criminalizing the Immigrant (b) Polarizing reporting during the vio-lence

(c) Alien iconography (d) Suggestions of immigrants ‘flood-ing’ into the country

Figure 4: Stigmatizing reporting in newspapers

(a) Outside view (b) Inside view (c) One of the many communal kitchens

Figure 5: The Madela Zulu-hostel

(a) Street-view (b) Street-view (c) Bird-eyed view of shacks in Beirut

(d) Playing children on the playgroundin the park

(e) Playing children within the Transit-camp

(f) Young men in front of their house

Figure 6: Images of Alexandra

(a) Sweets, cigarettes and chips (b) Brooms and buckets (c) Typical street-stall

(d) Dried mopani worms (e) Pirated DVD’s (f) Leather belts and caps

(g) Sewing (h) Hair salon (i) Chicken intestines and –feet

Figure 7: A variety of goods and services many (foreign) street-hawkers sell

(a) Club Jazz (b) ‘Xenophobia Attack’ slogan on a taxiin Zimbabwe

(c) Inoculation-mark Zimbabwean

(d) An advertisement for sending remit-tances to Zimbabwe

(e) Inner view of a spaza shop (f) Zimbabweans preparing their food

(g) A shack in the Beirut area (h) A regular night out with friends (i) A fitness club in Alexandra

Figure 8: Miscellaneous

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Interviews

Aunt Sibusizo, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 23rd.Barber, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 30th.Benneth, Mozambique (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 24th.Collen, Zimbabwe and Friends (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, January

13th.Ellen, South Africa and Themba, Zimbabwe (2009). Personal Interview. Alexandra,

January 19th.Friend Ndima, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 25th.Innocent, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 5th.Jeffrey, Malawi and his wife, South Africa (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra,

February 22nd.Josef, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, April 1st.Kumalo, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 25th.Lucky, Zimbabwe and Zulu-friend (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, Febru-

ary 7th.Mozes, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, January 31st.Ndima, South Africa (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, January 1st.Ndundu and family, Zimbabwe (2009). “Group Interview”. Alexandra, April 8th.Ob, Ghana (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, February 6th.Patrick, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 30th.Prince, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, January 31st.Raphael Mozambique (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, January 17th.Robert and Roommates, Zimbabwe (2009). “Group Interview”. Alexandra, February

11th.Robert, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 6th.Salani, South Africa (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 16th.Sibusizo and Jerry, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 25th.Sibusizo, Zimbabwe (2009a). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 6th.— (2009b). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 25th.Taximarshall and Friends, South Africa (2009). “Group Interview”. Alexandra,

March 31st.

Tendai, Zimbabwe (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 20th.Witness, South Africa (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, March 28th.Zulu and Two Zimbabweans (2009). “Personal Interview”. Alexandra, February

18th.

constructing otherness, strategies of sameness

Documents

creative strategies

grades of otherness

structions of otherness

african immigrantsin

national identity andor

alexandra township

national subjects

national imaginations