Afrophobia and Populism in South Africa


Christi van der Westhuizen, Nelson Mandela University

Africa is largely absent from analyses of radical right populism, despite decades of authoritarianism, at times fuelled by populism. In the 2000s, anti-democratic populism is again a political feature in Africa, but the literature on African populism remains notably scant. How to understand postcolonial political mobilizations that sharpen racial and ethnic divisions, including through what has been termed Afrophobic politics directed at migrants from other African states? Particularly, how should the rise of populist Afrophobia in South Africa be understood? Since the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, tens of thousands of Africans have been killed, injured, intimidated, displaced and robbed because they were stigmatized as foreign migrants. Thousands have fled South Africa. On the face of it, against the background of persistently high socio-economic inequality, the clamour of a section of South Africans for greater inclusion has taken a xenophobic form, that is, their inclusion seems reliant on the violent excision of another group of socio-economically excluded people on the grounds of the latter’s ‘foreignness’. However, what complicates matters, is that the language of xenophobia is also used to ethnically and racially mark certain South Africans as different to ‘locals’. Nationality, ethnicity and race are converged through what emerges as Afrophobic othering in which a discource about migrancy is applied to both foreigners and certain South Africans to signal outsider status. The article pursues the following questions: Is this populist xenophobia/Afrophobia a creation of political elites, effectively pitching poor sections of the population against one another with an autochthonous framing of certain black people as ‘not belonging’ and hence abject? Or is it the other way around, in which mass-driven populist xenophobia/Afrophobia is a bottom-up version of burgeoning patronage-clientelist relations in which otherwise excluded poor sections of the population access resources through claims of indigeneity that political elites meet, based on an Afrophobic convergence between the led and the leader? Lastly, can populist Afrophobia be read as rightwing or even as radical right?

This paper will be presented at the following session: