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 SamenessXenophobia, The Ambiguity of Strangeness and Strategies of Invisibility of African Immigrants in Alexandra, South Africa

B Y I LJA H EHENKAMPMA Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences in partial fullment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of nonWestern 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

AbstractGlobal ows of interconnectedness are widely countered within nation-states with exclusionary notions of autochthony and belonging. People who are perceived by state-authorities and their national subjects to be illegitimate competitors for stateprovided goods, a threat to national identity and/or to contaminate cultural values are increasingly constructed by them as non-belonging outsiders. Once these constructions of otherness are shaped by a dehumanizing, xenophobic state-discourse and accompanied by anxieties about who can legitimately claim scarce resources citizens sometimes resort to violent means to exclude these strangers they often perceive to be scapegoats for their social ills. Strangers, however, are frequently not able to be recognized as such and thus represent a highly ambiguous and liminal category within national imaginations. Therefore, citizens often employ stigma as a convenient device to reify their difference with strangers. Bodily attributes, such as morphological features, appearances, behaviour and languages are rendered by these stigmatizers as meaningful signiers by which they identify individuals who they perceive to be inherently different. Bodies and their attributes, however, provide far from a secure map for categorical order and can be highly deceptive. Particularly because of the ambiguous and performative nature of identity, individuals carrying a particular stigma especially when they live in spaces in which their intersubjective relations with others are radically transformed by violence and hostility can adhere to these culturally dictated scripts of difference making in order to hide their identity. Far from being passive victims on the margins from the public realm, these excluded others are able to employ creative agency to negotiate, manipulate or hide their otherness or feign sameness to avoid various forms of exclusion. By drawing on the case of the xenophobic riots in South Africa in May 2008, this thesis will identify the variety of ways African immigrants in the Alexandra township, South Africa employ creative strategies in order to render their foreignness invisible in their interactions with citizens they still experience to be highly hostile.

Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction: Grades of Otherness Localizing the Global . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Researching Strategies of Invisibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Race, space and Alien invaders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 You are eating everything that belongs to us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 From hegemonic discourse to hegemonic practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Aims of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Structure of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2 Research-parameters and context 24

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

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They were KILLING, you see?

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The riot and its structured chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Reconstructing the days of noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Alexandra and its history of redening the outsider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Reading the Riots Against Earlier Community Conicts . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 South Africa and the quest for Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4 You cant judge a book by its cover. The Ambiguities of Otherness 61

The stigma of otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Xenophobia and Interrogating Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Zuluness and the origins of violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Judging the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Pantsula selves, Fong Kong others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Drawing Boundaries by Spatial and Occupational Indices . . . . . . . . . . . 74 A mistaken identity. The Uncertainty of Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5 Covering the Self, Performing the Other 79

Subjectivity and Modes of Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Fear and the Transformation of Public Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 The Self and its Audience as Parameters for Performances . . . . . . . . . . 87 You have to hide yourself. Employing strategies to cover ones Otherness 89 You have to pretend. Performing Identities by Misrepresentation . . . . . 94 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6 Conclusion 105

List of Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Alexandra location and division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Map of Alexandra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Images of the xenophobic violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Stigmatizing reporting in newspapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 The Madela Zulu-hostel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Images of Alexandra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 A variety of goods and services many (foreign) street-hawkers sell . . 113 Miscellaneous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

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Figure 1: Alexandra location and division

Figure 2: Map of Alexandra

Acknowledgements

This thesis is rst and foremost dedicated to the inhabitants of Alexandra of whatever origin they are. Although the coming chapters may paint a picture of a hostile place towards strangers, my personal experiences have been predominantly on the opposite side. The warmth and hospitality I have received from Alexandras inhabitants since the rst days of my arrival can hardly be expressed in words. My ve months of residence in the township have fostered countless of memories which I dearly keep. How can I forget Alexandras vibrant liveliness, its constant rhythm of hooting taxi-drivers, the cute little children giving me a thumbs up and shouted mlungu or equivalent nicknames for white men to me when I was galavanting Alexandras dusty streets? I daily recall the warmth of people inviting me into their homes, prepared to cook me some pap and chakalaka any time. I often recollect the amusing memories of people calling friends or family-members Ive never met to ask them to talk to the white man theyve never met either; the experience of being invited in a shack on an early Sunday morning, only to nd the whole family very much drunk and one by one giving me a speech in an unintelligible African language. I look back with pleasure on the many days on which I socialized with the many friends I quickly made, who were always concerned of my well-being and even secretly followed me after I far from sober insisted on walking home alone at night. Of course it was not all uncomplicated happiness. There were those days in which I got depressed for simply being treated as White; for constantly being asked for money, beers or jobs by complete strangers; for radically being racially categorized with all its simplistic connotations and mainly perceived as a rich white man. Often, I ed the township to the nearby hipster suburb Melville to enjoy some privii

vacy, sushi and beers, only to return in the evening. But these feelings would never last 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 pleasant company which has enabled this thesis to become nally a reality. First of all, my informants 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 chapters will deal with their strategies of invisibility. I dearly hope there will be a day in which they feel there will be no need for them anymore to hide their identities. It is my South African friend Harry who has enabled me in the rst place to conduct my eldwork in Alexandra and to whom Im therefore indebted for in countless ways. His incredible dedication towards the community of Alexandra in the form of his work as an HIV and AIDS counsellor and the work he conducts for his own Alexandra Basketball Association in order to give young Alexandrians structure in life is greatly admirable. He is the perfect representation of a young and dedicated generation that makes the appealing slogan Its happening in Alex! certainly a reality. And how can I express my appreciations for the ways Kgakgi and Thoko Maloke have adopted me as a family-member? It is their luxurious and comfortable guesthouse/nightclub Club Jazz, their warmth and hospitality, the delicious meals Thoko cooked me on a daily basis and the many conversations we had in the evening, enjoying beers from their own bar, about issues of daily life, history, politics and personal matters that I will never forget. Hopefully there will be a day that Kgakgi, a former local Jazz-celebrity, will take up his musicianship again. When his other musician friends were paying him a visit (like the hilarious trio Mike, Mike and Mike) I could easily picture them smilingly playing the trompet, guitar, piano and drums. I thank Thapelo, Brian, Fifty, Gino, Judy, Kevin, Niels, Kitso, Giulia, Rhiana, Rianne, Wiesje, Jurgen and both Annas amongst others for the many hours we spend in clubs, taverns, pubs and shebeens in the company of many beers and the delicious Banana Ratz. These people are just a fraction of many other unmentioned individuals I am greatly indebted to. Of course, the process of transforming my eldwork data into a fairly structured and theorized written form could never have materialized were it not for the pleasant company of Saskia, Orsi and Anna who made these months of solitude within libraries bearable. They were crucial motivators to put me back on track to nalize

this project. Thanks to all the coffees, cigarettes, laughters, frustrations and the occasional beers and palinkas we shared I can even imagine I will eventually look back on these days as fun. The meticulous and insightful comments Yasmin, Lieve and Anna 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 countless improvements of my chapters. I also want to thank Thomas Blom Hansen who provided 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 thorough scrutinies he applied to and intellectual comments he provided on what he phrased as which doesnt have to be perfect. Although I am aware this thesis is indeed far from perfect, without professor Besniers motivating perfectionism and highly inspiring theoretical insights it would be rather close to the opposite.

Chapter

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Introduction: Grades of OthernessWhy are we so different", a passerby asks me laughingly. Im strolling down the streets of Alexandra and am not so sure how to reply to this question. So I just laugh back and continue my daily journey on foot, enjoying the vibrant street-life that surrounds me. The man just testied to my white skin I presumed, in contrast with the black ones that prevail in this poverty-stricken, overpopulated space of shacks, hostels, ats and houses. My white skin was a visible marker of otherness throughout my stay in the township, which I made my place of residence for ve months. It was a marker I could never conceal and which always made me a highly visible anomaly within Alexandras predominantly black public spaces. Despite my efforts to live my life as a township-resident, I always remained a white outsider and a constant source of enthusiasm, laughter, interest and amazement. I even became a public asset to be paraded around by unknown pedestrians in front of their peers in order to enhance status. I became someone who was often perceived as benecial to the community for the mere fact of being White and thus highly associated with economic prosperity and a Western lifestyle12 . In May 2008, markers of difference proved lethal for many immigrants from neighbouring African countries within the informal settlements and inner-cities of1

From now on I will refer to a racial category in capitalization when it is not an adjective in order to

differentiate between the socially and politically constructed nature of racial identity and the natural, inborn perceptions of racial difference 2 It must be said that being a European White made a difference too, since South African Whites were predominantly perceived as being racist who would never come to the township

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2 South Africa. While scattered xenophobic3 attacks against African immigrants have been increasingly witnessed since South Africas democratic transition, the scale and vigor of the May attacks have been unprecedented. Within the course of just two weeks 62 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in a chain of riots that rapidly spread throughout the country. As the victims otherness couldnt be 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 practices in order to tell who was a foreigner. Language, skin complexion, vaccination marks, identity documents or simply neighbours pointing ngers served to identify those to chase out. Rioters motivated their criminal actions by stating that those makwerekweres4 were to be blamed for South Africas societal ills. Popularly depicted within dominant discourse as economic parasites and illegal criminals ooding by the millions into the re-imagined Rainbow nation, African immigrants are increasingly scapegoated for the perceived lack of materialisation of change for the black urban poor. The Alexandra township was where the violence was most intense. Although xenophobic notions are by no means particular to South Africa, the South African version is remarkably disturbing because of its violent manifestation. Together with a growing disillusionment, hostility against African foreigners has been on the increase within post-apartheid society5 , culminating in these violent events of 2008. The euphoric era of the democratic transition appeared to have provided a huge incentive for African immigrants to try their luck in the newly imagined rainbow nation. The abandonment of apartheid and the constitutional embracing of liberal values, imagined South Africa as a country brimming with possibilities (Morris 1998). While South Africans gradually became disillusioned, the perception of African im3

Xenophobia may be dened according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition

as the intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries 4 The popular phrase to depict Black African immigrants, meaning: those who speak an unintelligible language 5 The rst documented violent instances said to be based on xenophobic motivations date back to the very rst year of the transition towards democracy: in 1994 and 1995 armed youth gangs in Alexandra demolished homes and properties of suspected undocumented immigrants, while in 1998 two Senegalese and a Mozambican were thrown of a train by a group of South Africans returning from a rally, organised on the perception that foreigners are to blame for societal social and economical ills (Valji 2003). Those are just a few examples out of many documented others.

I NTRODUCTION : G RADES OF O THERNESS

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migrants said to be pouring into the country resulted in them increasingly being scapegoated for the failed materialisation of change. Analysts have mainly rooted their explanations in one of two contexts: that of nation-building and a new formulation of citizenship or that of the nation that suddenly has been incorporated into globalized ows of interconnectedness.

Localizing the GlobalSince the demise of communism and the collapse of the wall, globalization has gained enormous resonance in popular, political and scientic discourses as a process that increasingly puts (identity) boundaries into question. Globalization is said to be the driving force that transcends all borders and interconnects the world at large by ever-owing and intersecting streams of migration, technology, ideology, goods, capital and labour (Appadurai 1990). Often the impression is given that the agents on the ground can only obey globalizations enormous power and cannot but comply with its everlasting drive towards the future of modernity. In reality, globalization as an autonomous and sweeping force disguises the agency that it is rooted in. And as those agents catapult those streams around the globe and create a complicated and ever-changing web of intersections, dissolving (identity) boundaries is not necessarily what they have in mind. A great deal of their agency is also involved in generating cultural diversity, cultural closure, boundary and meaning making, selng and othering. Brands that ow into their spaces are remade in culturally specic forms of meaning making, ideologies are moulded into local belief systems and the whole concept of interconnectedness leads to new possibilities of postmodern selng, naturally excluding the others as non-belonging strangers However, the notion of ows that circulate and are interconnected draws attention away from the missed encounters, clashes, misres, and confusions that are as much part of global linkages as simple ow (Tsing 2000). As ows ow they simultaneously carve and transform the ground. Put differently, the distinction between global forces and local places obscures how these processes of force-making and place-making are both local and global. An important example of these local ways and processes, situated within globalized interconnections, is the increasing obsession with closure as opposed to ow. The world as an interconnected space

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L OCALIZING THE G LOBAL

that transcends boundaries has often led to the belief that the nation state is becoming obsolete. Both state-authorities as their subjects frequently perceive dissolving boundaries, powerful transnational corporations, new forms and means of postmodern identity-making and globalized ideologies to threaten the hegemony of nationness and national identities. This changing face of nationhood seems to have led to an explosion of identity-politics, an increase in rights claims as well as an obsession with afrming old and constructing new boundaries, all of which both strengthen as challenge perceptions on the rigidity of the nation-state, citizenship and national identity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Nyamnjoh 2007a; Geschiere and Meyer 1998). In this post-modern world that is said to be globalizing, large-scale national identity containers, generated by modern state-level forces, are increasingly becoming unimaginable due to the people falling into these containers are nding it harder to imagine themselves as part of this cohesive national identity, many of whom residing across large social, spatial, and political divides (Appadurai 1998; Geschiere 2009). The radical uncertainty that arises out of these unimaginable mega-ethnic groupings often creates anxieties about the relationship of citizens to state-provided goods (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 gure of the Stranger ultimately represents the anxiety and ambiguity about forms of belonging and notions of entitlement. Strangers not only sit uncomfortably between the insider/outsider division within the national order of things (Malkki 1995b), they are both strange and familiar, no longer classied and not yet classied (Malkki 1995a) and often occupy spaces in the midst of nationals of the country they have made their new home. Nation-states are thus often preoccupied with the policing of identity boundaries between citizens and outsiders. By promoting nationalism as a religion of friendship, the nation-state tries to enforce ethnic, religious, linguistic and/or cultural homogeneity in the form of nativism and excludes those strangers that do not t into this propaganda of shared attributes (Bauman 1990). This xation with who does or does not belong is matched by the urge to distinguish between locals, nationals, citizens, autochthons or insiders, on the one hand and foreigners, immigrants, strangers, autochthons or outsiders, on the other (Nyamnjoh 2007b). One kind of boundary making between nationals and strangers that seems to


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have taken root since the dawn of the new globalizing era is the distinction between autochthons 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 primordial 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 line of difference: autochthony constitutes the fundamental boundary with its Other a boundary which can be utilized by citizens as a powerful mobilizing force for claiming rights to priority for state-resources as well as the right to exclude alien strangers (Geschiere 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Despite the huge variety of possible differences within nations, autochthony serves as an umbrella to unify people based on birth or citizenship, while making it an ideologically useful concept to exclude the Other (Geschiere 2009). The result is that autochthony serves as an ultimate divider of difference, whereby citizen-subjects, despite other identities they may bear, are ultimately either an autochthon or an alien (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). While all human beings through history have always had a natural propensity to distinguish difference, modern societies are particularly distinguished by the degree to which such differences are reied (Hinton 2002, p. 12). By means of modernitys drive towards essentialized categorical order, identity boundaries within the state and popular discourses are more often than not reied in essential differences between species-like types or peoples (Malkki 1995a), and assume natural traits and appearances to those specimens of the ethnic, religious, racial and other categorical orders one is said to belong to. While academic discourses stress the socially negotiated construction of identity, people who themselves are said to construct those identity boundaries often utter rather essentialized ways of who is Us and who is Them. In reality identity boundaries are not as xed as many people assume them to be: labels such as Sikh, American and Tanzanian, that appear to be inborn, xed categories over time remain oversimplications of powerplays, historical and discursive processes, (political) agency and meaning making on the ground. Such labels as primordial and other supposedly natural categories of identication obscure those processes that crystallizes them into something that is. But to theorize them into something that is not real, but a discursive construction, is to blind oneself to their emotional power to guide agency, to do damage to the sub-

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jective experience and social reality of agents themselves and, more importantly, to ignore the deadly realities that can result in violent conict. Although it is especially within violent conict that identity boundaries acquire a polarized and essentialized quality, violent conicts simultaneously lay bare the ambiguous nature of these discrete racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, national and otherwise categorized identity classications (Apter 1997). Genocide is the ultimate violent representation of modernitys obsession with rational, social engineering; of its ght for determination and against ambiguity, the everlasting battle against fuzziness by articially bringing about that ambivalence-free homogeneity that the nondiscrete and continuous nature of reality fails to produce (Bauman 1990). In order to overcome the ambiguities inherent in identity classications, genocidal engineers had to employ methods of spatial segregation and articial markers of identication, such as identity cards and yellow Jewish stars in order to classify and stigmatize the members of the group that they had decided to annihilate. Where these articial means of identication were absent, agents of genocide were resorting to more pragmatic forms of victim selection by means of the reading of cultural, physical, behavioural and linguistic attributes that were perceived to classify individuals into a particular categorical order. Yet, reading bodies is far from a reliable method of identity classication and victim selection, being often characterized by uncertainty and presumption. In order to overcome the ambiguous nature of the Stranger, stigma provides a convenient device to classify a particular individual in the essentialized orderly world of binary us/them, insider/outsider, here/there orders. As identity classications are not given entities with unambiguous rules of membership, stigma provides a way to draw a limit within the uid and socially negotiated nature of ethnic, national, racial or otherwise designated indices of identity: outward signs may be concealed, but the bond between stigma-attributes such as morphological features, clothing styles, linguistic dialects, etcetera and inner truth cannot be broken (Bauman 1990; Barth et al. 1969). Nevertheless, stigmatized individuals are often able to hide their true self that is negatively valued within society. As social life can be seen as a theatre play, where individuals are constantly giving a performance in front of their audience by employing particular sign activities in order to give way a certain impression of the self, stigmatized persons are able to perform a certain identity in


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order to avoid social discrimination, marginalization or even prosecution (Kanuha 1999; Goffman 1959). Such strategies or tactics of individuals that are concerned with hiding ones identity or adopting a different one are known as passing (Goffman 1986; Einwohner 2008) Although many examples of passing are documented, such as homeless women concealing their homelessness in public spaces, homosexuals performing as straight or African Americans passing as white (Einwohner 2008; Casey, Goudie, and Reeve 2008), this thesis is primarily concerned with those strategies of invisibility of the gure of the immigrant within a host-society in which s/he is more often than not marginalized and excluded from access to resources. Moreover, when the propensity of nation-states to exclude the stranger that threatens the orderly world of nationness is accompanied with a xenophobic-tainted anxiety of socio-economic deprived national subjects to whom belongs a legitimate claim to state-provided goods, the propensity to exclude can gain a violent dimension. The modernist nation-state in particular seems to have shifted from the ideal of an imagined community founded on the ction of shared characteristics of its citizenry towards a xenophobic sense of heterogeneity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). Within the lived reality of large identity containers that are becoming increasingly unimaginable, violent action can become a means of satisfying ones categorical self, while these vivisectionist forms of bodily violence simultaneously offer temporary ways to render abstract ethnic labels of others intelligible (Appadurai 1998). The causal heterogeneity that is inherent in violent conict makes explanations of violence through a single theoretical lens problematic. The theorist should rather seek to identify, analyze and explain the heterogeneous processes that underly wideranging occurrences of what is all too easily lumped together under the rubric of ethnic, political, racial, or xenophobic, violence (Brubaker and Laitin 1998). Not only do heterogeneous processes and mechanisms of violence give more insights to violent dynamics and the varied ways of legitimizing violence, it also makes central what is often muted: the varying subjective experiences of agents and subjects of violent events and their aftermaths, and the ways perpetrators and victims legitimize and make sense of these violent actions (Warren 1993). To ask questions about local violent dynamics foregrounds not only the agency of perpetrators, but also the agency and subjective experience of those victims whose daily lives are so distorted

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by it. How do they deal with those uncertainties and dangers of (possibilities of) violence? How do they nd ways to represent the nature of terror and simultaneously employ strategies to resist its pressures? (Green 1999). Although the focus of this thesis is not so much the function and dynamics of violence per se, an understanding of the social, spatial, political and communal transforming power of violence is important to analyse the ways it shapes the experiences and strategies of victims of violent agency. Especially in a space where those victims and perpetrators are still living together, the lived reality of violence transforms everyday life. Family bonds and friendships are destroyed, social alliances are marked by suspicion, spaces and faces all bear memories that one has to live with, and the fear of it happening again shapes future plans and strategies. Indeed, the danger of being singled out as an other has profound implications for agency in social and public space. The specicity of the relations between daily face-to-face relations and the larger contexts that shape them reveals more about the nature of violence than a macro-analysis solely involving abstract theoretical forces (Warren 1993). By paying close attention to how violence operates locally and the mundane aspects of everyday experience my aim is both to do justice to the victimhood of subjects of violence as well to consider the possibilities for creative agency that may emerge from these processes (Green 1999). When violence is largely framed in xenophobic notions of belonging and il/legitimate claims to resources, the mobilization of identity classications by xenophobic rioters cannot be separated from existing political institutions that have legitimized and interpellated differences between who do and who do not belong (Chun 1996). Especially the concept of citizenship predominantly shapes the parameters by which national objects are able to draw boundaries between autochthones and allochthones. While xenophobia is far from particular to the African continent and can be observed in different forms around the globe, the concept of citizenship has shifted particularly in many African post-colonies from a unifying notion based on pan-Africanism during the struggle for independence towards one that is largely found on indigeneity and essentially exclusive. This post-colonial form of nationalist discourse frequently equates nationalism with access to state-provided goods by an emerging middle class in tandem with the adoption of liberal democracy and the celebration of global consumer capitalism (Neocosmos 2005; Nyamnjoh 2007b). As we will see,


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within South Africas post-apartheid project of nation-building, the fact that the gure of Makwerekwere has occupied centre stage within a national imagination can be largely attributed to a newly imagined self that is connected with notions of entitlement. Moreover, this stereotyped gure of the Makwerekwere is predicated on exactly the same discredited indices of races that were employed by the former apartheid regime to legitimize the oppression of the non-white population (Matsinhe 2009). As the gure of the Makwerekwere is highly racialized within the dominant discourse, it was skin color that primarily identied those to chase out during the xenophobic violence in South Africa in May 2008. But rioters employed many other techniques for exploring, marking and classifying those who might be African foreigners (Appadurai 1990). Seen from this angle, one can argue that black bodies were ultimately used as text whereby indexical markers or signiers of identity became legible as evidence, or counter-evidence, of imagined citizenship (Matsinhe 2009; Harris 2002).

Researching Strategies of InvisibilityMuch has been said about the root causes and the broader contexts in which the South African xenophobic violence should be contextualized. Less has been said about the local dynamics of violence, subjective perceptions of violence of perpetrators and victims and coping strategies of victims in those spaces of violence themselves. During my work as a volunteer in the Johannesburg Rie Range refugeecamp, the local governments constant threats to dismantle temporary shelters for victims of the violence6 caused a lot of tension and anxiety amongst the campresidents. Despite well-known cases of immigrants who were attacked again by local residents when they tried to return to their former community, the Gauteng7 provincial government stated that it was condent that favourable conditions now exist for the reintegration of displaced foreign nationals (Victor Khupiso and Nombembe 2008). The local governments gave displaced victims the choice to either cooperate with reintegration strategies into South African society, or to go back to their6

This term was preferred by the government in its ofcial rhetoric, since the denotation of dis-

placed foreign nationals as refugees and their sites of shelter as refugee camps would oblige them to comply with the UNHRs policies in corresponding situations 7 South African province

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R ESEARCHING S TRATEGIES OF I NVISIBILITY

own country. Statements like Id rather die in my own country than here in South Africa reected the fear and despair of many immigrants trapped between a highly hostile host-society and countries of origin that are themselves embroiled in internal violent conict and/or severe economical instability. Since the violence many foreign nationals have returned to their countries of origin, but numerous others remained behind or returned to South Africa after the situation calmed down. Those who remained somehow needed to nd their way back and indeed, reintegrate, into South African society. As the mere idea of returning to these formerly hostile places of residence became a source of extreme anxiety for many displaced immigrants in the Rie Range camp, I became interested in possible strategies African immigrants could employ in order to lessen the chance of violence or intimidation against them in their daily interaction with South Africans. Immigrants who could or would not return to their country of origin eventually needed to nd ways to re-engage with South African citizens whom they had experienced to be extremely hostile. Two immigrants from Zimbabwe provided me once with a snapshot of possible strategies to avoid harassment in public places. Due to his linguistic accent, the rst man told me, he could easily be singled out as a non-South African in public taxis and explained to me that he side-stepped this potential vulnerability by taking the exact amount of money for his fare in order not to have to speak in public. The other man described to me that he tried to avoid being identied as a non-native speaker by using chewing gum in his daily interaction with South Africans so his distinctive accent would not be noticed. These strategies not only exemplify the fears which African immigrants are living with, but also their creative capacities to deal with these fears. Moreover, they reveal various ways in which strangeness is identied by South Africans. Markers of difference such as skin-complexion, linguistic dialect, hairstyles, clothing style and other cultural and bodily identity signiers provide far from a secure way of identifying someones ethnic or national identity. Especially in extremely heterogeneous societies such as South Africa which has many historical, linguistic and cultural ties with neighbouring countries the process of identifying someone as a particular national or a particular ethnic reveals various ambiguities. In violent conicts where identity may become a deadly knife (Hintjens 2001) targets of violence can utilize


11

this ambiguous nature of identication in order avoid being attacked by giving way a performance in which they present themselves as what they are not (Kanuha 1999). But what does it mean when identities are socially constructed? This thesis particularly focusses on this theme by analysing how the ambiguities of identitysigniers and the performative nature of identity leave open space for social agents to employ creative strategies to renegotiate difference-making. My aim is to show that the Stranger is particularly within the South African context a highly ambiguous gure, which creates considerable leeway for creativity that African immigrants in the Alexandra township are able to utilize by means of strategies of invisibility in order to render their foreignness invisible.

Race, space and Alien invadersAlthough scattered attacks against foreigners had been observed around Pretoria the month before (Sowetan 2008), it was in Alexandra that the ofcial wave of violence began. On Monday-night the 12th of May, Alexandra transformed into a scene of nightly attacks, violent mobs, and burning shacks, eventually leaving two dead and 40 injured. Within days the violence spread to informal settlements and inner-cities throughout the country. Only on May 28th, two weeks later, the situation was nally said to be calm. Over 25.000 refugees ed the violence nationwide, 62 people were killed and 670 people badly injured (Kapp 2008). The months hereafter, thousands of displaced people were transfered to what the government called temporary shelters, clearly a sign that the government was not planning to provide these shelters for 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 communities to try and reintegrate them into their communities (Monama 2008). This period was marked by heated debates, lobbying and frustration amongst civil society organisations who accused the South African government of failing to deliver adequate humanitarian services, failing to address the issues underlying the xenophobic violence, but most of all of washing its hands of its responsibility to protect those who were displaced. The post-apartheid imagined rainbow country suddenly seemed to had lost its bright colors, quickly re-imagined as a dark xenophobic nation, hostile to its African

12

R ACE , SPACE AND A LIEN INVADERS

immigrant population and populated by citizens willing to kill in order to get rid of criminal, illegal and parasitic immigrants. Newspapers worldwide featured images of furious mobs spreading terror, with the image of Mozambican Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave in ames becoming a target for global moral outrage. Immediately the media, non-governmental organisations and politicians were keen to search for the root causes of these events. A growing frustration about lack of service delivery, the violent nature of South African society, a widening inequality, rising fuel and food prices, corruption, inadequate education, extremely high unemployment and high poverty were all mentioned by many analysts to underscore the complicated nature of this violent rupture within South African society. Although those distinguishable root causes are signicant underlying factors of the violence, they do not explain that the African immigrant was blamed by those perpetrators who were seeking a convenient scapegoat for their disillusion in socioeconomic change. The post-apartheid process of nation-building, primarily concerned with the construction of a non-racial South African identity, seemed to have constructed the Black African immigrant as the irreducible Other (Cejas 2007). In order to understand why African hairstyles, skin color and vaccination marks take on a xenophobic signicance, one must look at how foreign Africans are represented within South African society (Harris 2002). And once one analyses the ways the gure of the immigrant has been depicted in popular discourse by many politicians and media-authorities, a troubling image appears: a perverted parody of the past, the gure of the alien has ironically become a distinctive species in the popular imagination, primarily marked by skin color and dominantly associated by (media) authorities with illegality, usurping resources and fostering crime, prostitution and diseases (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). The foreigner, as an informant angrily expressed to me, is in the South African context not just anybody that crosses one boundary of a nation 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 nd it a bit disturbing. Because the word foreigner is anybody that crosses one boundary of a nation to another. It doesnt matter how close the countries are. You are a foreigner (Ob, Ghana 2009).


13

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

You are eating everything that belongs to usThe fact that South Africans who feel economically deprived should scapegoat foreigners, while many signicant others such as Whites, the new Black middle-class or politicians could be blamed, tells us something about possible political identications that were forged by state-discourse during and after the transition from apartheid to democracy (ibid., p. 4). South African post-apartheid democracy is largely constructed on a discourse of human-rights, non-racialism and individual equality. This institutionalized discourse of human-rights within the newly imagined nation is 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 specic 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 Discourse 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 freedom based on hegemonic neo-liberal notions and a culture of entitlement or a culture of rights, which has pacied the majority of the population away from tangible political participation. The post-apartheid process of forging a unifying national identity largely based on indigeneity and necessarily exclusive is not simply concerned with the re-imagining of a non-racial South African identity, but more importantly with a demarcation from others, based on rights and duties and socioeconomic benets for its citizens. It is therefore not only imagined, but materially

14

Y OU ARE EATING EVERYTHING THAT BELONGS TO US

experienced, notably by non-civilians who are excluded from community rights and access to resources (Neocosmos 2005, p. 90). As a consequence, chauvinism and xenophobia grip the masses, inuenced by the politics of the powerful, as they 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 is said to be obstructing socio-economic change by usurping jobs and resources, fostering crime, prostitution and disease (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Former Minister of Home Affairs Buthelezi immediately proclaimed during his rst speech in parliament that if we as South Africans are going to compete for scarce resources with millions of aliens who are pouring into South Africa, then we can bid goodbye to our Reconstruction and Development Programme (Buthelezi in Landau, RamjathanKeogh, and Singh (2004))8 . Despite the governments rhetoric of an African Renaissance in the form of the famous I am an African speech president Mbeki delivered in 1998 a universalising ideology of Pan-Africanism seems to have failed to take hold of the population. Within state-discourse, Africa is over and over again represented as the Other, a place over there and the place of the Other. Both South Africas economic dominance and its role as a bridge for Western political liberalism on the continent intensies this discourse of Africa being riddled with death, war, disease, starvation, corruption and helpless victims and a reproduced Western stereotypical image of the content as economically backwards and a political failure (Neocosmos 2005, p. 112). This quasi-colonial remnant of the past makes the slogan of an African Renaissance simply a vehicle for South African hegemony (ibid., p. 125). Ob, insightfully reected on the matter from his own experience:Most of them dont understand aaaall these things, when they talk about I am an African9 . They dont look at themselves as African, thats why they call US Africa. Me: What do they call themselves? I dont know! That one Ive 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 not8

RDP (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 to build millions of cheap houses, eligible for government subsidies 9 The African Renaissance speech Mbeki delivered was called I am an African

I NTRODUCTION : G RADES OF O THERNESSAfrica 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).

15

Clearly, ordinary South Africans and politicians alike perceive South Africa not as belonging to Africa and associate the continent with them, the Black foreign Other. In the same vein Ob recalled an anecdote where he was eating chicken on the 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 your country. You came here, you are eating everything that belongs to us (ibid.). Not only did these girls reproduce the stereotype of Africa not having what South Africa is perceived to have, their statement seemed to symbolize Black African foreigners as eating everything that belongs to us. And this notion of Africa being the Other that invades the country and eats South African resources is constantly reiterated in public discourse, by politicians and newspapers alike. Once again, former Minister of Home Affairs Buthelezi stated that South Africa is 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 pouring into the country are from Africa. That this deluge of migrants who are mainly illegals causes xenophobia and resentment, Buthelezi continued, should not be surprising. And because illegal aliens are predominantly perceived in the statediscourse to be blamed for obstructing the reversal of economic deprivation of indigenous South Africans, the Department of Home Affairs instructed all government departments that undocumented immigrants should be denied access to basic services like health-care, education and utilities (Peberdy 2001). To make matters worse, the then Minister of Defence remarked in 1997 that we have one million illegal immigrants in our country who commit crimes and who are mistaken by some people for South African citizens, and identied that as the real problem of South Africas high crime-rates (Landau, Ramjathan-Keogh, and Singh 2004). These examples are not merely incidents of irresponsible utterances by those in power, but are 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 and constructed as the real problem is not only shaped by a hegemonic xenophobic

16

F ROM HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE TO HEGEMONIC PRACTICE

discourse of politicians, but by media-authorities too. The many newspapers that dene South Africas media landscape reproduce the same stigmatizing stereotypes about immigrants in big fat capitalized headlines. A survey drawing on newspaper reporting on immigrant coverage between 1994 and 1998 concluded that the burden of press-coverage had been largely anti-immigration, unanalytical and reproduced racial stereotypes about African immigrants as illegal aliens predominantly associated with criminal activity (Danso and McDonald 2001). Although the debate on media representation is polarised around its role as shaper versus reector of public opinion, the report concluded that the print media does appear to be a signicant part of the equation (MMP 2008). Ob, commented on the alien vocabulary within newspaper coverage with his insightful, intellectual wit:They were calling us ALIENS. YEAH IN THE NEWSPAPERS! And Im so surprised. That, an editor, you edit the news that have the headline an alien from Africa has been killed. IM 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 American 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 DONT YOU GO TO THESE ALIENS AND LEARN THE GOOD THINGS THEY DO, that make them SUCCESSFUL 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. Utterances of politicians and media-authorities are reected, both verbally as in practice, in daily life.

From hegemonic discourse to hegemonic practice


17

While the violent events can be seen as the most dramatic form in which a hegemonic xenophobic discourse has been translated into action, documentation on South African xenophobia is replete with examples of daily xenophobic practice in all spheres of society. Asylum seekers are constantly arrested and detained, being identied based on supercial physical features such as skin color, vaccination marks, accent, linguistic competence and clothing (Peberdy 2001) or simply for tting a highly racialized prole of undocumented immigrants (Landau 2006). Even when African foreigners are able to identify themselves and produce valid documents, examples of police ofcers tearing them apart arguing it was a fake ID or that the person in question is too black to qualify for a South African ID are plenty (Crush 1999). Undocumented immigrants have even come to be perceived as walking ATMs by some police ofcers, regarding them as easy targets to extort money. Most informants told me similar stories:Because some of them cant BANK their money. You have no ID, you dont go to bank. You only can keep it in the pocket. Walking ATMs, 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 dont bring money, Im 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! Im 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 hes a black man. You know? (Ob, Ghana 2009)

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

18

A IMS OF THE T HESIS

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 (Neocosmos 2005). 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 life at 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 which it endured the full period of unrest (Park 2009). The mobilisation of violent mobs certainly was a dangerous mix of ethnic components, nationalism, criminal opportunism and the rights to space. Previous forbidden cities have been attractive for immigrants both from abroad and from South Africas rural areas since the end of apartheid. Most inner-city residents must now renegotiate their relationship to their place of residence and fragmentary identities have become spatially rooted in ways that rights to space have become resources for ethno-racial mobilisation (Landau and Misago 2009). Hegemonic xenophobic discourses have provided parameters for identication and a discursive repertoire for the exclusion of the Other locally. The third chapter of this thesis deals with how those hegemonic divisions are conated with the fragmented identities that have dened Alexandras historical landscape and that the violence strikingly resembled previous material conicts within the township: although they were mobilised on similar insiders/outsiders cleavages, the content of who constituted as an insider and who did not, has shifted according to Alexandras socio-economic and political developments within a national context.

Aims of the ThesisAlthough extremely important, especially concerning policy recommendations, it is not the truth or the root causes of the xenophobic violence in South Africa in May


19

2008 with which this thesis is concerned. It is instead about the ways informants construct their truth(s), how their subjectivities are related to local experience of intersubjective life and what strategies they employ to deal with their truth. After all, there exists no Gods-eye view of history. The worlds made through narrations of the past are always historically situated and culturally constructed, and it is these that people act upon and riddle with meaning (Malkki 1995a). As much as this project is not concerned with a reied and essentialized truth, I stress the dialectic construction of identity. Although many social agents in Alexandra be they South African or foreign narrated essentialized versions of identity, assuming them to have natural, inborn qualities and clear-cut boundaries, my aim is not to reproduce them in the same vein. (Racial) identity has been and in many regards, still is an essentialized category, which strongly determined ones social, political, economical and spatial position within South African society. Using the category of the Black, the White, the South African, the Zimbabwean, the Zulu or the Immigrant in the same reied essence means reproducing an ideology of essentialism which so often has been harnessed to oppressive and even deadly political actions (ibid.). Nevertheless, bounded and polarized identity utterances and perceptions, become especially when violence comes into play a socio-political reality on their own, where ones social identity can make a crucial difference in ones movement in social and public space. This project seeks to interrogate the representation of refugees and/or immigrants as helpless victims whose agency is diminished by grand abstract forces of globalization, nationalism, modernity and ethnicity. My aim here is to show, rst of all, that immigrants in Alexandra are not mere passive objects on the margins of the public realm, but are instead active and creative agents within the connes of their own social space. Secondly, I hope to demonstrate that there exists no such category as the African immigrant. Rather, there are different grades of immigrant status constituted of various categories such as nationality, racial identity, (il)legality, citizenship and socio-political motivations to migrate. For reasons I will explain in the next chapter, my pool of informants was far from a representative sample of the heterogeneity that denes Alexandra. Nevertheless, as much as the narratives of my informants displayed many similarities given their shared experiences, by giving voice to deviant utterances and particularities of different subjectivities, this ethnog-

20

A IMS OF THE T HESIS

raphy is concerned with the ways in which a myriad of identities are (de)constructed by various actors and with the socio-political realities these identities have acquired in intersubjective life. My informants were highly critical and often made derogatory remarks about South African society and South Africans in particular. While reverse stereotyping the South African as bloodthirsty, ignorant, lazy and so on, they morally constructed themselves and their native society as the romanticized opposite. The story that I will tell in the following chapters is informed by these polarized ideologies. This implies a danger of simply reproducing and conrming the negative perceptions immigrants have of South Africa and its citizens being downright morally inferior or their society as having a criminal record (Tendai, Zimbabwe 2009). While this ethnography of violence and its socio-political aftermath mainly focuses on South African perpetrators of violence, many ordinary South Africans strongly condemned what happened. Although it was South Africans who perpetrated the violence, many other South Africans gave shelter, fed, and helped the victims in numerous ways. Africa is too often imagined as a space of darkness, disorder, poverty, violence and disease within Western society. While this dominant Western discourse mainly perceives 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 failed or incomplete example of something else (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008). As much as xenophobic and violent aspects of South African society are troubling, we should try to avoid the pessimism or Zimbabweanism the widespread view that South Africa seems 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 African citizens themselves. In many regards a highly fragmented society, South Africa is still a nation in progress (this being said, without assuming the term progress a normative quality). You cant expect everything to go right in South Africa just 15 years after the democratic transition, while it has been oppressed for hundreds of years before, my South African friend Harry once said to me. Post-apartheid South Africa is a better society than its predecessor. Formal equality amongst various racial, social and political cleavages have been institutionalized and opportunities have markedly improved for the formerly oppressed population.


21

While xenophobia is strongly embedded in South African society, it isnt alien to our societies. Obsessions with who belongs where and who constitutes as autochthonous constructing those who are not as allochthonous strangers those who do not belong are a worldwide trend (Geschiere 2009). One needs only look at the populism and neo-nationalism that increasingly marks European party-politics. This story should not be read as a conrmation of post-apartheid South Africa gradually but irreversibly sliding into a disorderly post-colonial nation. Rather, it should be understood in the context of a society in transition, a transition from decades of racial oppression and a transition whereby the South African citizen is still in the process of being imagined. Societies in transition, whereby enormous socio-economic inequalities need to be reversed, often generate a violent tension between marginalised people that have to struggle for their survival.

Structure of the ThesisThis chapter has been primarily concerned with a theoretical macro analysis of global conjunctures of belonging, the ambiguous gure of the Stranger, the uncertainty of difference and the convenient weapon of stigma in order to overcome this ambiguity and uncertainty of self and other, sometimes by violent means. I gave this abstract analytical exploration some more substance by zooming in on the South African national level. While analyzing the ways how the racialized gure of the Makwerekwere has been constructed in stereotypical on a South African level, it is the micro level of township-life with which the next four chapters are concerned. In chapter two, the usual ingredients of conducting eldwork will be outlined. Before I proceed to the methods of qualitative research, its related encountered problems and questions of representativeness, I will give a short introduction to my research setting, its inhabitants, my close friend Harry who has been of tremendous help with all aspects of my research and the family Maloke, who made my stay as pleasant and as comfortable as it was. Since both Westerners and South Africans often imagine Alexandra and township spaces in general as spaces solely to be dened in terms of misery, deprivation and dangerousness, I will briey touch upon how these perceptions shaped the responses on my decision to conduct my research in Alexandra. While for many (foreign) inhabitants of the township violence and

22

S TRUCTURE OF THE T HESIS

deprivation is indeed a daily reality, Alexandra is simultaneously a place of warmth, hospitality and a vibrant and buzzing nightlife epitomized by its popular trademark Its happening in Alexandra!. Before I conclude with a short historical narrative of Alexandra, my research population will be introduced briey dealing with their motivations to move to South African and their experiences within their host-society. Chapter three will reproduce the complicated dynamics of the xenophobic violence from my informants point of view. By analyzing their perceptions of the origin of the violence, the identication of its perpetrators and their motivations to conduct violence I hope to generate some insights into the complicated nature of what 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 of Alexandras material conicts and the identity-formations that have always dened its socio-political landscape, but additionally that conicting (historical) notions on belonging have complicated the already ambiguous nature of the Stranger in ways that also South Africans were told to go home. It is in chapter four that I start to analyze the various stigma attributes which are regarded by my (predominantly) foreign informants to dene foreignness that enable immigrants to reect and act upon the ways they are perceived and identied within South African society. I will show that for many immigrants their otherness was often perceived to be identied by ways of language, style, morphological features, behaviour and occupation, while it was Zuluness that was predominantly perceived to be employed as a crucial marker of difference between selves and others. Eventually I will argue that the ambiguous nature of identity markers not only creates space for creativity, but that their uncertainty to signify identity were symbolized by mistaken identities of South Africans. Not only because they were tragically perceived as foreign, but more importantly that, due to South Africans ethnoracial and linguistic heterogeneity and conicting notions of belonging, many South African ethnics are consciously constructed as not belonging by fellow nationals in ways that closely resemble the liminal position of the Stranger. Finally, chapter ve brings creative agency to the foreground. I aim to present an alternative view to the one of victims of violence as solely passive agents on the margins of society by analyzing the ways African immigrants manage their undisclosed stigma-attributes in ways that can be dened as strategies of invisibility and some-


23

times give way performances of South African identities. Ultimately these possible strategies of invisibility will show that identity labels are far from unambiguous, natural and discrete categories of classication, but that their ambiguous boundaries and associated identity markers can be socially negotiated by ways of performances and stigma-management. Many immigrants are able to actively renegotiate their stigmatized identity within their daily interactions with South Africans in Alexandras public spaces by reecting upon the ways foreignness is constructed within dominant and demotic discourse and practice within South African society.

Chapter

2

Research-parameters and contextMy decision to conduct eldwork in a space mainly imagined as Black, dangerous and violent gave way to various insights on the ways Africa in general is perceived in dominant Western discourse. Friends, relatives and strangers alike often reproduced stereotypical perceptions on Africa in response to my research plans. But, of course, the same applies for ways South Africans in this case Black Alexandrians in particular imagine the (European) White man and how this shaped my intersubjective relations of daily life in this South African township. Although many African immigrants living in Alexandra frequently experience hostile perceptions towards them in their daily interaction with South Africans, my experience while living in Alexandra was predominantly on the positive side. In order to counteract the dominant imaginations of Alexandra as solely being a dangerous space and to describe the ways Alexandrians perceptions towards me informed the course of my eldwork I will give a short description about living my life as a white man in a black community. The main focus of this chapter, however, is describing and contextualizing the setting and my informants. Before I proceed to the usual ethnographic ingredients like methods of qualitative research, eldwork difculties and questions of representativeness, I will introduce Harry my good friend and liaison and my host-family, Kgakgi and Thoko Maloke. Finally Ill proceed to the subjects this research 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 South Africa, followed by their experiences in the community of Alexandra. Finally, I will introduce a short historical narrative of Alexandra. 24

C HAPTER 2. R ESEARCH - PARAMETERS AND CONTEXT

25

Bourgeois Harry, Club Jazz and becoming streetwise in AlexMuch of my research would not have been possible were it not for Harry. He was my key informant and most of all, a man who became a very close friend. I met Harry, a dreadlocked self-declared Rastafarian, during my work as a volunteer in the Rie Range Refugee camp. We both were involved with social relief work for displaced children and were mostly busy playing soccer, distributing toys, and trying to educate them with the limited resources we had. We were basically trying to provide them with some distraction from the horrors they had endured, the current stress they had to deal with and tried to give them some structure in the chaotic daily events that dened the temporarily spaces of refuge. Soon, Harry invited me to visit his home in Alexandra. This visit immediately made me decide to conduct my eldwork research in this vibrant and dynamic space of both warmth and deprivation. Harry appeared to be a well-known and extremely popular gure. Many pedestrians shouted his nickname Rasta enthusiastically at him as we walked the many gridlocked avenues and main roads of Alex. Fire! Harry would constantly responded, while throwing his st Mandela-like in the air, a gesture reciprocated with Mo Fire!. Harry spent a lot of time on shaking complicated handshakes and chatting informally with the many that wanted to. Everyday it takes me two hours to get home, Harry told me smilingly and this surely was not an exaggeration. It appeared I had met the perfect man to start off successful research and I went back to the Netherlands with a feeling that all would be well. Upon my return to do my eldwork in December, I met Harry again at the Alexandra Health clinic. He told me he had found a nice place for me to stay. I wasnt sure what to expect of nice in an overcrowded township, inhabited by many shack-dwellers and known for its dominant impoverished living-conditions. But as soon as we entered the gate of Club Jazz, the place of residence that he had found for me, I realized that nice was a highly understated predicative. Situated in the heart of the old Alexandra, on the corner of 7th avenue and main road Selborne street1 , Club Jazz appeared to be a full-blown guest-house that would be considered1

In order to explain Alexandrians your geographical living location in the township, you would

name the street-name in combination with the nearest-by road that corners it. My geographical place

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B OURGEOIS H ARRY, C LUB J AZZ AND BECOMING STREETWISE IN A LEX

a mid-range place to spend your night in any proper tourist guide. Even residents of Alexandra, not formerly aware of the place, expressed their surprise of such a nice place being located in Alexandra. Club Jazz is situated in the midst of the old part of Alexandra. Right on 7th street, not far from the house in which Nelson Mandela briey lived. The experience of walking through its gates, right from the dusty, lively streets with its many shacks and hooting taxi-cars, is a somewhat surreal one. A big yard, surrounded with a veranda, a hatched roofed terrace, two apartments and the family-house are all segregated by its walls from the surrounding township-life. Once inside, the silence, cleanliness and white plastered buildings make you almost forget youre right inside a township. Only the pumping house-music and hooting taxis that always dene Alexandras daily rhythm in muted form remind you of where you are. In the course of my stay my relationship with the family Maloke grew towards one in which I was treated as a family member. Kgakgi referred to me as a brother, but treated me like a son, while Thoko smilingly told everyone she was my mother and took care of me as such. And I was taken care of indeed. Thoko cooked me delicious pap and chakalaka, dumplings2 and chicken-wings on a daily basis, while Kgakgi, always busy doing business, chatted with business partners, listened to jazz or just simply enjoyed a drink and his daily cigarette of daga. In the course of my research Harry introduced me to many people, customs, local food and places. He introduced me to the township-style of greeting and pretty soon I was walking around on my own, using basic tsotsitaal3 slangwords like heita hola, 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 needed to be going, so I moved around the township in little alleys and between shacks and yards like a proper local. He took me out to the many shebeens5 and clubswould be from now on 7th Selborne, meaning I lived on 7th avenue, nearby its corner with Selborne street 2 Pap is a porridge made from mielie-meal that is often combined with chakalaka a spicy vegetable dish and dumplings, cooked bread-like sliced pieces of dough 3 Tsotsitaal is a township language that is constructed out of the grammar of various languages 4 Respectively expressing: a greeting, a conrmation that all is well, an afrmation and an expression of disbelief 5 Originally illicit bars where beverages were sold without a licence. Nowadays many shebeens are legalized


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that Alexandra hosts and I found myself delving into the energetic beer- and bassinfested party-scene that would dene Alex-nights from Friday till Monday. Each night had its own hotspots. Fridays would be a day to jive6 at Mkaya on 1st street, on Saturdays you could choose between Chicks and Banjellos in Tsutsumani. On Sundays Joes Butcher provided meat, beers and pumping house-rhythms, lling the streets of 12th Roosevelt7 with a huge and energetic dancing crowd, followed by an after-party at Mielies, while Mondays Chicks again was the place to be. In each club pumping, bass vibrating local house and kwaito8 rhythms dened the nights, on which people would make their amazing and unique robotesque Pantsula9 moves, whistling and shouting to the beats while dumpies10 or proper 750ml beer-bottles would be consumed. Often, local hot-shots were joyriding with their fancy sportscars and expensive motorbikes and roared the engines to the beats, while bystanders cheered 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 popular phrase for local Alexandrians to celebrate the vibrancy of their township. It surely was. But this positive celebration of township life stands in stark contrast with the negative imaginaries township spaces receive in Western and South African society.

Africa imagined at homeDo you want to die!? A close relative of mine expressed her horror in somewhat grotesque terms of my plans to conduct my research in Alexandra. Although her statement reected mainly her sincere concern for my safety, it also testied to the 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 insecurity. Of course, South Africas crime statistics place it at the top of the worldwide crime league. This is a nation where murder, rape, hijacking and burglary have created a huge market for 24-hour armed security companies and panic-buttons,6 7

Township slang for dancing Meaning the corner of 12th avenue with Roosevelt street 8 A music genre that is combination of housemusic, African sounds, hiphop and rap that originated in township spaces 9 A township style comprising musical preference, clothing style and particular dance-moves 10 33 cl bottles of beer or cider

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A FRICA 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, where countless victims of those crimes are living with their traumas, memories and losses. Again, all this should obviously be placed in a context of apartheid, which has created one of the most unequal societies in the world and where education, prosperity and health are still unevenly distributed on racial divides. I recall one day when I was walking around with a Dutch girl in Alexandra, hoping to give her a sense of daily township life. What struck her most was that people look[ed] so happy, testifying to an image she had in mind of township places as ones of suffering. Clearly she expected those people to be unhappy, strongly informed by stereotypical images that Western society likes to reproduce. These Western perceptions of Africa that morally and ultimately draw the line between us and them, modern and traditional, civilised and uncivilised, developed and backwards seem to forget that due to colonialism and globalization the West forms a signicant part of South Africa. Sandton, a highly Westernstyle suburb of shopping malls and ofce buildings, can be seen from the slopes of Alexandra. 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; European, or even American (Mbembe and Nuttall 2008). The city is even said to be the premier African metropolis par excellence, symbolizing the African modern, strongly connected to various forms of circulation of people, capital, nance and images (ibid.). But Alexandra itself too is not only a space of poverty, but also a space where new cultures of commodication are emerging: cultures that underlie new aesthetic forms, of which cell phones, cars, and various registers of fashion are but examples (ibid.). Though not evenly developed spatially, the African modern permeates South African daily life in many ways. Township spaces are often imagined as homogeneous places of shacks and deteriorated living-conditions. The spatial reality in Alexandra is far from as simplistic as those images would lead one to believe. Old Alexandra, the center of the township, mainly consists of yards of (double story) shacks, spaza-shops11 , brick-houses and ats. Yards small plots of land, occupied by several families often shared toilet facilities, but electricity and running water is widely available. Old Alexandra not11

An informal shop, usually run from home within township spaces


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only forms the centre in terms of spatial location, but is clearly the economic and social heart of the township that lls its streets with vibrant life. Shouting and talking people, hooting taxi-cars, roaming children and street-sellers screaming their slogans to attract their customers are lling its streets during the day. While at night life is as busy, but mostly with youngsters who drink beer, gamble or dance to pumping house- and kwaito-rhythms, while the many rats that form a signicant underground part of Alexandras urban-formation constantly run away from the footsteps that approach them. And even this old part is comprised of different areas, some infamous for 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 many street-hawkers selling their goods. The area of rst until fourth avenue, is known as Beirut, and for many perceived to be a Zulu-area or KZN13 . In the midst of Beirut, on the corner of fourth and London Road, the Madela hostel looms up, a huge grim structure, which is mostly (over)populated by male migrant workers from Kwazulu Natal and therefore locally perceived to be a Zulu-enclave. During its 100 years of existence, Alexandra has grown rapidly. Right across the Jukskei river lies East-Bank, a suburban neighbourhood with fairly large luxury houses and surrounded by gardens and fenced off with walls. Obviously, this area 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 now transformed into a residential area. To the North of old Alexandra, bordering the neighbouring suburb Marlboro, is a deserted industrial area, its empty buildings rapidly populated by residents desperate for a proper roof over their head. South of Marlboro lies an area called Transit Camp, a temporary space with simple matchbox houses, which are populated by people waiting for a permanent space of residence. On the Northern banks of the Jukskei river is a highly impoverished area called Setswetla, popularly known as the graveyard. This area lacks running water and electricity and the spatial environment mainly consists of shacks made of any piece of material usable that construct a chaotic maze of winding, dirty paths. Due to the fact that Setswetla is situated in the ood-line, its shacks are regularly ooded12

At my time of residence a large shoppingmall was in the process of being constructed, as well as

a triple-storied taxi-rank 13 KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu province of South Africa

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A FRICA 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 which its houses are built of. It is inhabited by a small community of people displaced due to a dismantled building that had to make way for the new shopping mall. Next to Silvertown is Extension 7, a newly build RDP-area that many Alexandrians regard as a desired place of residence for its relative new houses and therefore the source of a lot of tensions. All these areas have their own socio-economic dynamics, grades of available facilities, spatial structures and demographic particularities, while obviously embedded and connected within the larger social and spatial township structure. Although Alex is highly imagined within South African society to be unsafe for and by Whites, I have never felt so. My only negative experience was a young and obviously drunken guy shouting at me while walking on the streets: You are fucking with our temptation! You are FUCKING with our temptation! This is Alexandra you!. Luckily his temptation wasnt put into any action. But while my experience has notably been on the safer side, for many Alexandrians this has not been the case. They often live in a world where violence and/or the threat of violence is always present (Ashforth 1998). Due to the townships high crime-rates and senses of insecurity of its inhabitants, Alexandra has become in many ways a very sociallycontrolled community. This is illustrated by reassertions of local control in the form of vigilantism to more brutal forms of corporal punishment popularly known as peoples justice or mob justice whereby the community takes matters into their own hands by beating up or even killing perceived criminals. These forms of communal justice have especially in township-spaces exposed the limits of the South Africas capacity to secure justice for all and the limited reach of the new values of human rights and non-violence (Buur and Jensen 2004). For many Alexandrians, mob-justice and vigilantism is considered as a morally rightful and necessary aspect of township life, riddled as it is with crime and danger. The xenophobic violence of May 2008 can be seen as a dramatic form of the community taking the law into their own hands: by using violent means to take control of the township, the native people of Alexandra both asserted their townships autonomy and demonstrated that their willing partnership with the government had ended with their patience (Park 2009). But instead of the government, African immigrants were on the receiving end

C HAPTER 2. R ESEARCH - PARAMETERS AND CONTEXT of the violence.

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Greener pastures, bleaker futuresWhile there are no ofcial statistics, roughly 15% (approximately 60 000) of Alexandras residents are estimated to be of foreign origin (Alexandra Renewal Project 2008). 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 have returned to Alexandra (ibid.). Countries of origin vary from Nigeria, Malawi, the DRC, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Mozambique amongst others. Citizens of the latter two countries form the majority of Alexandras migrant population. The majority of these in turn were of male Zimbabwean nationality due to their demographic overrepresentation and the inability of many Mozambicans to speak the English language. The migration stories they tell are thus often informed by the economic situation of their country of origin and can by no means be generalized to all migrants living in Alexandra. That being said, the experiences of many immigrants of various origins in South Africa remains strikingly similar as many studies have shown (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 to be not an easy task. A major difculty was inherently implicated in my research question. As people tried to deconstruct their foreignness and forged an identity that would relatively free them from the fear of being a target of violence, how could I nd them? How should I approach them? And, more importantly, how would they react? My chosen strategy could determine whether potential informants were willing to provide me with sensitive information, since disclosing ones foreignness would put them in a more vulnerable position. One anecdote exemplifying this dilemma, was when I blatantly and irresponsibly approached a street-vendor and asked him if he knew foreign immigrants I could speak with. I know some Zimbabweans selling further down the road, he replied, just walk with me. Once we were out of reach of his customers he told me he was a Zimbabwean himself, but didnt want his customers to know that and was happy to talk to me. This was my rst encounter with an example of the strategies I was looking for, but also made

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G REENER PASTURES , BLEAKER FUTURES

me realize I would have to be much more careful with my strategies of approaching possible informants, bot

constructing otherness, strategies of sameness

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