South Africa's Xenophobia of a Special Type
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- Published on Thursday, 14 May 2015 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1116 .... May 15, 2015
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South Africa's Xenophobia of a Special Type:
Historical and Global Perspectives
David Moore
In the past weeks a few South Africans -- possibly inspired by an artificially resuscitated Zulu ‘king’ who mused that it might be a good idea for foreigners to go home to till their fields -- murdered seven migrants, pillaged hundreds more and scared thousands into temporary refuge camps. The vast majority of their compatriots responded in shock and sympathy with the victims. Most South African interpreters of this carnage repeated a tendency typical to that corner of the planet: exceptionalism. It might be helpful to challenge this patriotic particularism with wider global and deeper historical comparisons.
Even whilst nearly 1,000 other Africans seeking refuge from zones of war and economic... devastation were drowning in the Mediterranean, South African discourse about its latest round of xenophobia remained provincial. As in the past, South Africa's intellectuals focused on the ‘special types’ of this country's interactions with a long history of global transformations. From the South Africa Communist Party's (SACP) "Colonialism of a Special Type" (CST) to invocations for ‘national democratic societies’ (down a few notches from NDRs, but on a distinct detour to socialism's road nonetheless), South Africans tend to think they're unique.
