‘Strangers in their own country’: interpreting xenophobic symbology and gang subcultures in vulnerable coloured communities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa54i2/9Keywords:
coloured identities, gang subcultures, xenophobic symbology, vulnerable communitiesAbstract
In South Africa, xenophobia is most used and understood in relation to people from different nationalities, cultures or languages other than South African. Xenophobia is often interpreted as South Africans exhibiting prejudice or discrimination against people of other nationalities. This article seeks to reconstruct this “externality” notion, by arguing that xenophobic attitudes can also be directed internally. Du Pre (1992) in Strangers in their Own Country provided a political history of the coloured people of South Africa. A dominant feature of his analysis is the stigmatisation and marginalisation of coloured people throughout their history. This article posits that the stigmatisation and marginalisation of vulnerable coloured communities continue, and should be regarded as xenophobia. With reference to gang subcultures, the article shows how this xenophobia manifests in vulnerable gang-affected coloured communities, not only from the outside, but even within coloured communities themselves.
Downloads
References
Adhikari M. 2005a. Not white enough, not black enough: racial identity in the South African coloured community. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Adhikari M. 2005b. Contending approaches to coloured identity and the history of the coloured people of South Africa. History Compass 3(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00177.x [accessed on 20 July 2021].
Adhikari M. 2006a. Hope, fear, shame, frustration: continuity and change in the expression of coloured identity in white supremacist South Africa, 1910-1994. Journal of Southern African Studies 32(3): 467-487.
Adhikari M. 2006b. ‘God made the white man, God made the black man…’: popular racial stereotyping of coloured people in apartheid South Africa. South African Historical Journal 55(1). Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC93705 [accessed on 20 July 2021].
Adhikari M. 2009. Burdened by race: coloured identities in Southern Africa. Cape Town: UCT Press.
Ahuja KK, Banerjee D, Chaudhary K and Gidwani C. 2020. Fear, xenophobia and collectivism as predictors of well-being during Coronavirus disease 2019: an empirical study from India. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 67(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0020764020936323 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Ariely G. 2017. Global identification, xenophobia and globalisation: a cross-national exploration. International Journal of Psychology 52(1): 87-96.
Associated Press. 2015. Xenophobic violence in South Africa leaves at least five dead. The Guardian. 14 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/south-africa-xenophobic-violence-outbreak [accessed on 8 July 2021].
Batasin SJA. 2020. Combating xenophobia in the Covid-19 pandemic: the importance of health literacy. Inquiries Journal 12(7). Available at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1786 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Beetar M. 2018. A contextualisation of the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic attacks: tracing South African necropolitics. Current Sociology 67(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0011392118807528 [accessed on 8 July 2021].
Beller J. 2020. Xenophobia trends in Germany: increasing negative attitude towards foreigners in younger birth cohorts. The Social Science Journal. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/03623319.2020.1735855 [accessed on 29 June 2021].
Berman G and Paradies Y. 2008. Racism, disadvantage and multiculturalism: towards effective anti-racist praxis. Ethnic and Racial Studies: 1-19.
Boas F. 1945. Race and democratic society. New York: J.J. Augustin.
Caliguire D. 1996. Voices from the communities. In: James W, Caliguire D and Cullinan K (eds). Now that we are free: coloured communities in a democratic South Africa. Colorado: Lynne Rienner.
Cornelius S. 2010. Ancient Egypt and the other. Scriptura 104: 322-340.
Dhanani LY and Franz B. 2021. Why public health framing matters: an experimental study of the effects of COVID-19 framing on prejudice and xenophobia in the United States. Social Science & Medicine 269. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113572 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Dodson B. 2010. Locating xenophobia: debate, discourse, and everyday experiences in Cape Town, South Africa. Africa Today 56(3): 2-22.
Du Pre R. 1992. Strangers in their own country: a political history of the “coloured” people of South Africa, 1652-1992: An introduction. Johannesburg: Southern History Association.
Du Pre R. 1994. Separate but unequal: the “coloured” people of South Africa: A political history. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Esses VM and Hamilton LK. 2021. Xenophobia and anti-immigrant attitudes in the time of COVID-19. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 24(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1368430220983470 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Faulkner J, Schaller M, Park JH and Duncan LA. 2004. Evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary xenophobic attitudes. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 7(4): 333-353.
Gaignard O. 2018. Etienne Balibar and the issue of racism in Race, nation, class. Savoirs et Clinique 24(1): 131-140.
Hickel J. 2014. “Xenophobia” in South Africa: order, chaos and the moral economy of witchcraft. Cultural anthropology 29(1).
Jensen S. 2008. Gangs, politics and dignity in Cape Town. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
John R. 2007. Ethnocentrism, ethnopreference, xenophobia: Peace in race relations – a new understanding. The Occidental Quarterly 7(2): 1-25.
Kirik VA, Popov AV, Posukhova OY, Serikov AV and Shevchenko OM. 2015. Conceptual and methodological research of xenophobia in social sciences. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 6(4): 183-189.
Mamun MA and Griffiths MD. 2020. First COVID-19 suicide death in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: possible suicide prevention strategies. Asian Journal of Psychiatry 51. Available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ajp.2020.102073 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Maregele B. 2017. John Fredericks: “I’ve been labelled a skollie all my life”. GroundUp. 15 September. Available at: https://www.groundup.org.za/article/helping-kids-road-hell/ [accessed on 23 July 2021].
Matema T. 2020. Populism and voting: don’t blame migrants for country’s woes. News 24. 12 June. Available at: https://www.news24.com/news24/columnists/guestcolumn/opinion-tawanda-matema-populism-and-voting-dont-blame-migrants-for-countrys-woes-20210612 [accessed on 28 June 2021].
Mhlanga A. 2021. A mathematical approach to xenophobia: the case of South Africa. Mathematical Social Sciences 110: 44-52.
Mlambo DN. 2019. A South African perspective on immigrants and xenophobia in post-1994 South Africa. African Renaissance 16(4): 53-67.
Moagi M, Wyatt G, Mokgobi M, Loeb T, Zhang M and Davhana-Maselesele M. 2018. Mozambican immigrants to South Africa: their xenophobia and discrimination experiences. Journal of Psychology in Africa 28(3): 196-200.
Mutanda D. 2017. Xenophobic violence in South Africa: mirroring economic and political development failures in Africa. African Identities 15(3): 278-294.
Noy D. 2000. Foreigners at Rome: Citizens and strangers. London: Duckworth.
Papanikos GT. 2020. Philoxenia and xenophobia in ancient Greece. Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies 6(3): 237-246.
Peterie M and Neil D. 2020. Xenophobia towards asylum seekers: a survey of social theories. Journal of Sociology 56(1): 23-35.
Petrescu-Mag RM, Petrescu DC, Todoran SC and Petrescu-Mag IV. 2021. Us and them: is the COVID-19 pandemic a driver for xenophobia in land transactions in Romania? Land Use Policy 103. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105284 [accessed on 21 June 2021].
Petrus T and Isaacs-Martin W. 2012). The multiple meanings of coloured identity in South Africa. Africa Insight 42(1): 87-102.
Pineteh EA. 2017. Illegal aliens and demons that must be exorcised from South Africa: framing African migrants and xenophobia in post-apartheid narratives. Cogent Social Sciences 3(1). Available at: DOI: 10.1080/23311886.2017.1391158 [accessed on 29 June 2021].
Roth K. 2020. South Arica: Events of 2020. Human Rights Watch World Report. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2021/country-chapters/south-africa [accessed on 8 July 2021].
Ruiters G. 2020. Non-racialism: the new form of racial inequality in a neo-apartheid South Africa. Journal of Asian and African Studies 56(4): 889-904.
Scholte JA. 2008. Defining globalisation. The World Economy. 23 October. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9701.2007.01019.x [accessed on 28 June 2021].
Sumner W. 1907. Folkways: a study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals. Boston: Ginn and Co.
Turner V. 1967. The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Vahed G and Desai A. 2013. The May 2008 xenophobic violence in South Africa: antecedents and aftermath. Alternation Special Edition 7: 145-175.
Yerlikaya T. 2019. Neo-racism in the age of extremes. Politics Today. 12 July. Available at: https://politicstoday.org/neo-racism-in-the-age-of-extremes/ [accessed on 14 July 2021].
Zeng G, Wang L and Zhang Z. 2020. Prejudice and xenophobia in Covid-19 research manuscripts. Nature Human behaviour 4: 879.
##submission.downloads##
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Theodore, Chijioke Uwah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
