It was easy for upper-middle-class South Africans to wring their hands over the xenophobic violence that seized townships in recent week. But now that some of those victims are being treated as internal refugees and are being settled near leafy suburbs? Not in my back yard.
The ongoing xenophobic violence in South Africa has now spread beyond Johannesburg and may well explode into a national crisis. Metrorail authorities are beefing up security in anticipation that the trains are ripe for attacks on presumed foreigners and others.
The recriminations, of course, have already begun, with many pointing fingers at Thabo Mbeki’s government. For a roundup of South African press opinion see here.
Crime is the domestic issue that evokes the most handwringing in South Africa, especially among a certain segment (read: affluent) of the white population. And crime certainly is bad, especially in the most highly populated areas. Virtually (and perhaps literally) all South Africans of every race and social class knows someone who has been victimized by crime, and while crime, and especially violent crime, looms large in the white South African mind, blacks are the most common victims of crime in the country.
And yet it oftentimes seems that fears of crime really represent a surrogate for a whole range of fears and insecurities over the issue of change and transformation in South Africa. The narrative about crime, in other words, tends to be more unyielding than crime itself.
It is thus important to note that there appears to have been a drop in violent crime rates in the Western Cape of 32%, which is a remarkable achievement. Obviously one wonders if some of the statistics have not been cooked (for my American readers who watched The Wire, the greatest show, certainly the greatest drama, in the history of television, this question looms especially large) but if these numbers are even remotely representative of actual conditions on the ground, South Africans should rejoice. Sometimes, after all, narratives change.
Chaos in Alexandra continued to escalate through the weekend, though people are doing the best they can to live their lives as normal and many claim not to have noticed the violence that has largely been driven by xenophobia. Calm prevailed on Tuesday morning, but one wonders if the tenuous peace will hold. Stranded and fearful, hundreds of foreign residents of Alexandra are squatting at the police station until either alternative accomodations emerge or some guarantee of calm prevails.
Obviously the root of the violence in the cramped Johannesburg township is the grim nature of much of urban life. The economically vulnerable need to find someone to lash out at, and foreigners make for a logical scapegoat. Xenophobia, though real, thus becomes an exciuse and a catchall justification for what poverty has brought.
With 2010 and the World Cup, and thus South Africa’s global close-up, fast approaching, the country’s tourist industry will become increasingly prominent. Moeketsi Mosola, chief executive of South African Tourism, is worried that crime is South Africa’s Achilles’ heel and that all of the work going into preparations for 2010 will be for naught if crime is not brought under control. Stories such as those coming out of Alexandra, in which foreigners have been brutally attacked, will serve only to underscore Mosola’s concerns. The fact that the foreign victims are anything but tourists probably will be lost to those living abroad who are considering a trip to South Africa but worry about crime. But more important, the events in Alex reveal the tensions within South African society, where economic insecurity and xenophobia merge with catastrophic results. It is all well and good to worry about crime because of the effect it may have on tourists, but it is even more important to address crime because of the ongoing effects it has on South Africans, and to address the underlying causes that lead to crime to begin with.
Times are certainly strange in South African politics in a post-Polokwane world. After all, where else could a non-violent, indeed, from a constitutional vantage point rather smooth, inter-party leadership transition lead to what is effectively a lame-duck political status for many of those in power across the country at the national, provincial, and local levels? Indicative of this strange set of curcumstances, Thabo Mbeki, whose handling of the Zimbabwe crisis only served to damage further an already crumbling reputation, caved in his support for the controversial Scorpions crime-fighting unit largely because of pressure from Jacob Zuma and Zuma’s supporters and that organization will soon disband unceremoniously.
Clearly Mbeki is aware of this status, as is Zuma, and to their credit, neither man is pushing too hard in the face of realities: Thabo Mbeki is still the president of South Africa; he will not be a year or so from now. Zuma knows that this gives him leverage, but so far he has been loathe to use it too obviously. It remains to be seen whether this tenuous situation can hold. And the standard caveat applies: If Zuma goes down on corruption charges, the whole dynamic of the game changes overnight. Zuma knows this. So too does Thabo Mbeki.
Current crime and fears of crime, coupled with the contentiousness of the apartheid past (and the opposition to it) seem to be encouraging a debate over the role of guns in South African society. Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya explores the questions involved in this column at the Mail & Guardian.
Here is a quick roundup of some Africa-related news stories that have caught my eye in recent days:
Despite the fact that the media lives by the age-old credo “if it bleeds it leads” with regard to crime stories, which serves to warp people’s perspectives on the nature and frequency of crime, violent crime rates are actually dropping in Gauteng.
Does the recent peace agreement in Kenya signal better days ahead? Roger Cohen of The New York Times thinks as much.
Robert Mugabe might be starting what he believes to be his “march to victory,” but increasingly members of Zanu-PF are throwing their support behind Mugabe’s intrepid challenger, Simba Makoni. I still do not see Mugabe allowing Makoni to wrest his crown away, but if somehow it happens, I envision many of even Mugabe’s most ardent supporters responding to Mugabe’s defeat in the same way that the Wicked Witch’s praetorian guard responded after Dorothy liquidated their boss: “Hail Simba!”
One trend that I have noticed in American sports is the increasing presence of African athletes making their mark on the playing fields. Many of these athletes came to the United States when they were young children, many others were born in the United States to African parents, and still others found themselves face-to-face with American college coaches whose recruiting tentacles extend wider and deeper with each pasisng year. The usual push-pull factors are at play in these immigrant cases: On the run from war or privation or political chaos, drawn to the idea of America as the land of opportunity. The New York Times has the story of one such athlete, Hasheem Thabeet, a 7′ 3″ center for the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball team who has become something of a folk hero in his native Tanzania.
Finally, what does it mean to be a citizen of a country? Is it sufficient to be born there? must one’s parents also be citizens of the country? Ireland is one of many nations dealing with these questions, and African immigrants represent the political football being kicked around.
There can be little doubt that the past year has been the most trying in Thabo Mbeki’s oft-tumultuous presidency. Tonight he gave his State of the Union address before parliament. He certainly had plenty of fodder from which to work: The electricity crisis, crime, poverty, the daunting prospect of hosting the 2010 World Cup, and simply a general sense of malaise.
Mbeki provided a positive spin, called for the nation to pull together to confront the issues facing South Africa, and praised his countrymen for their resilience in the face of recent difficulties, especially the power delivery nightmare.
The response to Mbeki’s optimism has been skepticism in many, but far from all, circles. Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, whose job it is to be critical, took her job seriously, criticizing the president for “business as usual.” The editors of The Mail & Guardian approached Mbeki’s address fatalistically as did other observers. One imagines that those critics were likely not placated by Mbeki’s address and that Mbeki’s supporters found much with which to be pleased. In other words, status quo ante is likely to prevail.
Well, that didn’t take long, did it? The African National Conference delegates who had gathered in Polokwane were barely settled back into their posh suburban homes near Cape Town and Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pietermaritzberg and all points in between when the news came across the wires. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has decided that there is enough evidence to pursue corruption charges against their new ANC president, Jacob Zuma.
So what does this mean? Well, it certainly means that the NPA has a peculiar sense of timing. Seeing how it is difficult to believe that new evidence has emerged in the last few days, or even weeks, why now? Why did this not happen weeks ago? Why not on the eve of the Polokwane meeting? Or why not until after the new year?
And the question lingering as a subtext to all of this is what role did Thabo Mbeki have, if any in all of these machinations? The historical adjective most applied to Mbeki is “Machiavellian.” Is this an example of Mbeki’s Machiavellian nature? What about Zuma? Has he accumulated enough power to have been able to manipulate the system to forestall charges until after his election as party presidency? To bring the charges early enough that he can beat them (assuming he can beat them — far from a foregone conclusion) early enough to allow him to recover for the national election that he surely sees as being in his pocket in 2009?
And what of the popular response? Among his most ardent followers the charges will almost surely appear to be a plot from the Mbeki faction and further evidence that their man is not only a hero, but also a martyr. In an odd way, these charges may well bolster Zuma’s populist bona fides even as they confirm his own Machiavellian streak among his opponents. But surely the charges will also arouse worry, maybe even shame, among some rank and file members of the still-divided ANC.
On more than one occasion I have tried to temper the importance of Polokwane by noting that with a long time to go before the 2009 elections there was lot of political football to be played. The possibility that the NPA would bring charges always ranked high among the potential tectonic shifts. Who suspected that the plates would crumple so soon after Zuma’s ascension to the party’s top post? So much for Zuma’s hoped-for new era of good feelings in ANC politics.