Letter: Xenophobia rears its head again - Business Day

The controversy surrounding Chidimma Adetshina’s participation in the Miss SA pageant has placed into focus, again, the questions of xenophobia, Afrophobia, belonging and what it means to be South African.

Hostility towards Adetshina was apparent even before the department of home affairs confirmed suspected irregularities by her mother in documenting her birth. Predictably and rightly, such hostility has attracted widespread condemnation, including in your publication. But this understates the issue.

Lacking a common ethnic, cultural or religious identity, SA has attempted to build a sense of citizenship on civic grounds. Rather than on ties of blood, what it means to be a “South African” rests (at least nominally) on civic ties of allegiance to a common homeland, and to the shared values of a constitutional democracy.

For this to be credible, citizenship as a state of belonging to the polity, and an entitlement to participate in public life, cannot be qualified by whether one holds that citizenship by virtue of birth and descent or by lawful naturalisation. Xenophobia ultimately refuses to recognise this, making one group of citizens perpetual outsiders, never able to be “one of us”. The consequences of this are not only on display in crass public discourse, but in outbreaks of physical violence.

Citizenship cannot rest on one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or any other ascriptive characteristic. Yet a large body of legislation is explicitly indexed to race. More to the point, a great deal of our public conversation is built around narratives of exclusion. Think of such descriptors as “land thieves”, “settlers”, “alien cultures” or “the Indian question”.

Impugning the legitimacy of anyone’s citizenship undermines — possibly intentionally — the civic bonds that are the best hope for social cohesion. That this is often done with a patina of intellectual respectability or an appeal to SA’s painful history, or to “social justice”, makes no difference to its deleterious impact.

Hostility to SA citizens based on origins beyond the country’s borders cannot be disentangled from a willingness to agitate against those of different races or cultures. One inevitably leads to the other. They jump borders.

Those concerned about xenophobia or Afrophobia would do well to bear this in mind.

Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2024-08-18-letter-xenophobia-rears-its-head-again/