A vehicle supposedly belonging to a foreigner, after a night of violence. Nonhlelozenkosi Nsingo/Demotix. All rights reserved.It has been a couple of months since the last outbreak of xenophobic attacks targeting African foreign nationals occurred in South Africa. This latest attack, like the one that occurred in May 2008, resulted in many deaths and left thousands displaced as they fled from the violent attacks. The brutality attracted a great deal of media attention, which tended to assume that only two major xenophobic attacks have occurred in South Africa so far. However, there have been numerous attacks on African foreign nationals since the 1990s, with most of the attacks concentrated in the urban areas of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
Common to all these attacks is the narrative “they steal our jobs and our women”. This narrative, however, is nothing new, and has been used numerous times in nationalist discourses against immigrants in South-North (SN) migration. Here too a misleading impression arises that these challenges were due to visible differences between foreigner nationals and the locals. But little attention has been given to South-South (SS) migration, where such narratives are also prevalent.
Any thinking about xenophobia and its impact on women’s lives also tends to focus on the extreme violence that it produces. But if the targeted ‘other’ in the South African context is African foreign nationals, the argument for visible differences between foreigners and locals as a mitigating factor does not hold much water. So it is also important to look at how other salient forms of xenophobia are experienced, and what such analysis can reveal about the actual situation of women in South Africa.
