essays on xenophobia

5 Essays About Xenophobia

The word “xenophobia” has ties to the Greek words “xenos,” which means “stranger or “guest,” and “phobos,” which means “fear” or “flight.” It makes sense that today we define “xenophobia” as a fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners. Xenophobia has always existed, but the world has experienced a surge in recent years. The essays described in this article provide examples of xenophobia, its ties to anti-immigration and nationalism, and how diseases like COVID-19 trigger prejudice.

“These charts show migrants aren’t South Africa’s biggest problem”

Abdi Latif Dahir | Quartz Africa

Between March 29-April 2 in 2019, violence broke out in a South African municipality. Foreign nationals were targeted. Even though people were killed and businesses looted and destroyed, the police didn’t make any arrests. This represents a pattern of violence against foreigners who are mostly migrants from other places in Africa. Reporter Abdi Latif Dahir explains that these recent attacks are based on a belief that migrants cause South Africa’s economic and social problems. In this article from Quartz Africa, he outlines what people are blaming migrants for. As an example, while politicians claim that migrants are burdening the country, the data shows that migrants make up a very small percentage of the country.

Abdi Latif Dahir reports for Quartz Africa and speaks multiple languages. He also holds a master’s of arts degree in political journalism from Columbia University.

“Opinion: A rise in nationalism could hurt minorities”

Raveena Chaudhari | The Red and Black

Nationalism is on the rise in many countries around the world, including the US. The election of Donald Trump signaled a resurgence in nationalism, including white nationalism. In her essay, Raveena Chaudhari explains that far-right politics have been gaining steam in Western Europe since the 1980s. The US is just following the trend. She also uses the terms “patriotism,” which is an important part of the American identity, and “nativism,” which is closely linked to a fear of immigrants and diversity. Xenophobia easily emerges from these ideas. Minorities feel the consequences of a rise in nationalism most keenly. Raveena Chaudhari is a junior accounting major and staff writer for The Red and Black, a nonprofit corporation that circulates the largest college newspaper in Georgia. For 87 years, it operated under the University of Georgia but is now independent of the college.

“The Deep Roots of Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Policies”

Daniel Denvir | Jacobin

In this essay, author Daniel Denvir digs into the background of President Trump’s anti-immigration policies. At the time of this piece’s writing, the Supreme Court had allowed the administration to exclude certain groups from entering the United States. The travel ban has been labeled the “Muslim ban.” Where did these anti-immigrant views come from? They aren’t original to Donald Trump. Denvir outlines the history of racist and xenophobic policies that paint immigrants as a threat to America. Knowing that these views are ingrained in American society is important if we want change.

Daniel Denvir is the host of “The Dig” on Jacobin Radio and the author of All-American Nativism, a critique of nativists and moderate Democrats.

“Nationalism isn’t xenophobia, but it’s just as bad”

Jeffrey Friedman | Niskanen Center

If you’re unsure what the difference is between nationalism and xenophobia, this essay can help clarify things. Written in 2017, this piece starts by examining surveys and studies measuring how xenophobic Trump supporters are. They also explore the reasons why people oppose illegal/legal immigration. The core of the essay, though, takes a look at nationalism vs. xenophobia. While different, Friedman argues that they are both irrational. The distinction is important as it reveals common ground between Trump supporters and Trump opponents. What does this mean?

Jeffrey Friedman is a visiting scholar in the Charles and Louise Tarver Department of Political Science at the University of California. He’s also an editor and author.

Xenophobia ‘Is A Pre-Existing Condition.’ How Harmful Stereotypes and Racism are Spreading Around the Coronavirus

Jasmine Aguilera | Time

As COVID-19 spreads throughout the world, there’s been a surge in racism against people of Asian descent. In her essay, Jasmine Aguilera relates examples of this discrimination, as well as responses as people take to social media to combat xenophobia. Reacting with racism to a disease is not a new phenomenon. It’s happened in the past with SARS, Ebola, and H1N1. Society always looks for a scapegoat and minorities usually suffer. This has an impact on a population’s health, livelihood, and safety.

Jasmine Aguilera is a contributor to Time Magazine. She has written several articles about COVID-19 for the publication.

15 Political Issues We Must Address

15 Trusted Charities Fighting for LGBTQ+ Rights

16 Inspiring Civil Rights Leaders You Should Know

15 Trusted Charities Fighting for Housing Rights

15 Examples of Gender Inequality in Everyday Life

11 Approaches to Alleviate World Hunger

15 Facts About Malala Yousafzai

12 Ways Poverty Affects Society

15 Great Charities to Donate to in 2024

15 Quotes Exposing Injustice in Society

14 Trusted Charities Helping Civilians in Palestine

The Great Migration: History, Causes and Facts

About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Get the latest news and stories from Tufts delivered right to your inbox.

The Long History of Xenophobia in America

From colonial times to today, the demonization of outsiders has existed alongside the idea of the U.S. as a nation built by immigrants

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants—and seemingly also always a nation suffused with xenophobia, a fear or hatred of those same immigrants.

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin worried that large numbers of “swarthy” foreigners, speaking their own language among themselves, would swamp the colonies and their British subjects. The dangerous outsiders? They were Germans.

Erika Lee, J91, tells that story, among many others, in her award-winning book America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States , published last year. Regents Professor and the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, Lee says it’s important to know this complex history to be able to overcome it.

“Xenophobia doesn’t just reveal itself through a bigoted relative who is saying stuff about ‘the Mexicans’ at Thanksgiving dinner,” says Lee. “Xenophobia is a form of racism that has been embedded in our laws.”

One way to overcome the alienation that xenophobia brings is to combat the negative stereotypes about immigrants and refugees, and help see them as fellow human beings just like us, Lee says. She leads an effort to do just that, with the Immigrant Stories digital storytelling project. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project’s 350 digital stories profile immigrants as “real people, not stereotypes,” she says.

Xenophobia in America

Video by: Jenna Schad

When Lee was at Tufts as an undergraduate, she focused on history, and created her own major in ethnic studies, with advisor Reed Ueda, a professor of history. She also taught a course on the Civil Rights Movement in the Experimental College , “which made me realize how much I love teaching,” she says. “I’m forever grateful for that education.”

With a parade of anti-immigrant measures coming out of Washington, it’s more important than ever to understand what lies behind the xenophobia in this country, Lee says. Tufts Now spoke with her to learn more about that history—and what can be done to overcome it.

Tufts Now : The United States has a very long history of xenophobia, as you document in your book. And yet most Americans don’t know about it. Why is that?

Erika Lee : This is one of the most important questions to ask, because it speaks to why and how xenophobia can persist and endure. We don’t recognize what a strong and pervasive force it has been—or we discount it or willingly ignore it.

But I think it also speaks to a much larger question about history, memory, and the uses of history in crafting our understanding of ourselves.

One of the most important things about xenophobia is that it’s a shapeshifting, wily thing, just like racism. You think it’s gone away, and it comes back. It evolves so that even though one immigrant group finally gains acceptance, it can easily be applied to another.

And sometimes the group that just made it can be very active in leading the charge against the others. It’s unfortunately one of the ways in which racism and our racial hierarchy are at work in the United States.

Are some classes of Americans more xenophobic than others?

I would say that xenophobia flourishes in every community and in every class. One of the great examples of this is Chinese immigration and exclusion. In the book, I focus on the campaigns to drive Chinese people out of Seattle in the late 1800s. There was mob violence that was led by those whom we have been accustomed to identify as working-class whites.

And then there were the more “polite” campaigns, the ones that were led by judges, lawyers, professionals who basically told the agitators, “We agree with you. The Chinese must go, but do we need to resort to lawlessness? How about we organize a campaign of intimidation? Let’s blacklist the housewives—the employers who hire Chinese people, and publish their names in the newspaper. And let’s make it so just horrific to live in Seattle if you’re Chinese that they will self deport.”

Before studying this history, I don’t think I completely understood the depth of that cross-class racism, and the ways in which it can manifest itself differently.

Is the same true about racism in more recent times?

Yes! There are lots of examples of liberal and progressive xenophobia and racism. When I was researching the history behind 1965 Immigration Act—a law that was praised for formally ending discrimination in immigration law and reopening up the country to immigrants—I was struck by how lawmakers could still restrict immigration from the Western hemisphere in what was essentially a Civil Rights law. They described the U.S. being ‘overrun by black and brown immigrants’ at the same time that they insisted on the need to end discrimination.

It seems that this fear of being displaced pushes some lawmakers and others to double down against certain immigrants, especially those from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Immigration is treated as a zero-sum game; new immigration is a threat to us already here. We can’t both gain at the same time. Your gain is my loss.

You write in the book that xenophobia is a form of racism. How does that work—and has it changed over time?

Racism identifies certain groups as good and superior to others. In the early 20th century, it was considered a matter of biology. Today, we often talk about it as being a matter of “culture.” There are “good immigrants” and there are “bad immigrants” who are a threat to “us.” The dividing line between “good” and “bad” has been marked by religion, national origin, class, gender, and sexual orientation. But especially race.

This relationship between xenophobia is a legacy of the racism that justified slavery and settler colonialism. In fact, early immigrants were always judged in relationship to their place on that spectrum of whiteness and blackness.

For example, Germans were first labeled “swarthy,” a term that was meant to signify blackness and to imply that German immigration was undesirable. But we never restricted their immigration or their ability to become naturalized citizens.

Cartoons of Irish Catholics from the 19th century make them look very similar to apes. This was effective in marking the Irish as a threat, because African Americans were already drawn in similar stereotypical and dehumanizing ways. But again, we never restricted Irish immigration or prohibited them from becoming naturalized citizens.

But then the Chinese came, and here we can see the difference that race makes. The Chinese were automatically seen as more like Native Americans and African Americans than European immigrants. The Chinese were excluded and barred from becoming naturalized citizens.

Xenophobia has influenced government policy from the time of Benjamin Franklin right up to the present. Do you think it is worse now?

It is, but one of the things that I try to emphasize is that you could not have Donald Trump and his policies without Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. You couldn’t have so many Americans shouting “build the wall” without the 2006 Fence Act that George W. Bush signed into law, and that Barack Obama helped to implement, or without Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, which was put in place by Bill Clinton.

What is worse today is the explicit, unabashed, unapologetic, vitriolic language. That is a centerpiece of President Trump’s campaign, first in 2015 when he said Mexicans are rapists and criminals, to today where he’s doubling down on xenophobia ahead of the 2020 elections. He was just here in Minnesota and one of his favorite targets is Ilhan Omar, a Muslim Black woman—a U.S. citizen and a Democratic Congresswoman who he told to ‘go back’ to where she had come from last year.

Previous presidents’ policies certainly had been xenophobic, but they also gave lip service to the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants, that diversity is a strength. You don’t get any of that with this president, and it makes a difference.

So this administration is more xenophobic than average?

The immigration policies that have been put into effect during this administration have been so numerous, so broad in their scope, and so cruel that they are unparalleled in any other period or other administration.

They have impacted every category of immigrant—from refugees, asylum seekers, illegal, and legal immigrants. And because they have been put in place by executive order, there has been no debate, no calling of witnesses, no rebuttal, no ability for experts, advocates, or lawmakers on either side to be able to contest the justification of the laws.

And that was before COVID-19. I’ve just finished compiling and analyzing the 63 different immigration-related executive actions that have been put in place since January 30, 2020. Sixty-three! They have effectively ended immigration in all forms under the guise of public health concerns even though the infection rates are much, much higher within our country than in any other. We have already identified this era as the most restrictive immigration era in U.S. history.

Has this very obvious xenophobia throughout U.S. history deterred immigrants?

Absolutely. It’s deterred people, and it has encouraged—even forced—people to return home. One of the other aspects of immigration history that we never focus enough attention on is how 30 percent of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and especially amongst certain groups like Italians in the early 20th century, actually returned home. There could be many reasons for that—jobs that didn’t work out, failed marriages—but a lot of it was that they just didn’t feel welcome here.

Have you seen that personally?

One of the saddest things I’ve seen in the past few years is an internalization of xenophobia. I have volunteered in my kids’ public high school, helping mostly refugee students write their college essays. Here in Minneapolis, they are largely from Somalia.

In 2017, some of my students had been in this country for only four years. They learned English and were working two part-time jobs in addition to going to school. They had compelling personal stories, but when I read their essays, I noticed that they did not mention anything about being refugees.

I’d ask them, “Is there a reason why you don’t want to put that part of your story in your college essay? I think it is phenomenal.” They said, “I don’t want to because ‘refugee’ is a bad word, isn’t it? They won’t want me. Right?” And my heart just sank.

So yes, xenophobia absolutely has an impact. There’s the violence of xenophobia. Families being split apart, etc. But even if you’re not at risk of that, it can manifest itself in deeply personal ways.

While there are vocal anti-immigrant groups, who is advocating now for immigrants?

One of the things that has changed in recent years is that people are leading spontaneous and mass protests against many anti-immigrant measures. I’m sure you remember January 27th, 2017, the Friday that the Muslim ban was announced by the Trump administration.

It was late in the afternoon. By that evening, there were lawyers, advocates, and crowds of people at many of the international airports in the United States with “you are welcome here” signs.

This kind of mass protest didn’t happen before when we passed the Exclusion Act, when we deported Mexican and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, when we interned Japanese Americans during World War II. These challenges and protests today are so fundamental and so important. They give me hope.

And of course, with the elections coming up, we have the chance to vote xenophobic politicians out of office.

And how can the view of immigrants be more positive, especially among those who fear the effects of immigration?

I think about this on a daily basis. I really want to try to change the narrative about immigration, to combat the threat narrative.

I direct the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. It started 55 years ago as an immigrant archive. Its founders believed that it was necessary to document the experiences and life histories of what was then called the “new immigration” from southern, central, and eastern Europe. One goal was “to recover the full-bodied humanity of immigrants” through oral histories, research, and archive-building.

We are still working hard to achieve this mission in a new era of global migration. In 2012, I wanted to do the same for this new generation of immigrants and refugees, and especially the young people who were in my classrooms.

So my colleagues and I started the Immigrant Stories digital storytelling project, and it grew nationally and internationally. It’s a digital storytelling website that allows anyone anywhere to create, preserve, and share their story for free with video, audio, and text. There are now over 350 stories in the collection representing 55-plus ethnic groups.

I really believe in the power of storytelling to change the ways in which people think about immigration and to challenge xenophobia and racism. They help us see immigrants and refugees as real people, not stereotypes. And they remind us what unites us, rather than divides us.

Video: Erika Lee delivers the Commencement 2022 address.

Historian Erika Lee to Deliver Commencement Address for Class of 2022

Image from a March 27, 2021 rally in New York

Confronting the Legacy of Anti-Asian Racism in America

smiling woman in white shirt against greenery in the sunshine

Cheyanne Atole’s Poetry of Identity

Bipolar Disorder
Therapy Center
When To See a Therapist
Types of Therapy
Best Online Therapy
Best Couples Therapy
Best Family Therapy
Managing Stress
Sleep and Dreaming
Understanding Emotions
Self-Improvement
Healthy Relationships
Student Resources
Personality Types
Guided Meditations
Verywell Mind Insights
2024 Verywell Mind 25
Mental Health in the Classroom
Editorial Process
Meet Our Review Board
Crisis Support

Xenophobia: The Fear of Strangers

Adah Chung is a fact checker, writer, researcher, and occupational therapist.

PBNJ Productions/Blend/Getty

Fighting Xenophobia

What Is the Opposite of Xenophobic?

Xenophobia, or fear of strangers, is a broad term that may be applied to any fear of someone different from an individual. Hostility towards outsiders is often a reaction to fear. It typically involves the belief that there is a conflict between an individual's ingroup and an outgroup.

Xenophobia often overlaps with forms of prejudice , including racism and homophobia , but there are important distinctions. Where racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination are based on specific characteristics, xenophobia is usually rooted in the perception that members of the outgroup are foreign to the ingroup community.

Whether xenophobia qualifies as a legitimate mental disorder is a subject of ongoing debate.

Xenophobia is also associated with large-scale acts of destruction and violence against groups of people.

Signs of Xenophobia

How can you tell if someone is xenophobic? While xenophobia can be expressed in different ways, typical signs include:

Feeling uncomfortable around people who fall into a different group
Going to great lengths to avoid particular areas
Refusing to be friends with people solely due to their skin color, mode of dress, or other external factors
Difficulty taking a supervisor seriously or connecting with a teammate who does not fall into the same racial, cultural, or religious group

While it may represent a true fear, most xenophobic people do not have a true phobia. Instead, the term is most often used to describe people who discriminate against foreigners and immigrants.

People who express xenophobia typically believe that their culture or nation is superior, want to keep immigrants out of their community, and may even engage in actions that are detrimental to those who are perceived as outsiders.

Is Xenophobia a Mental Disorder?

Xenophobia is not recognized as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested that extreme racism and prejudice should be recognized as a mental health problem.

Some have argued, for example, that extreme forms of prejudice should be considered a subtype of delusional disorder . It is important to note that those who support this viewpoint also argue that prejudice only becomes pathological when it creates a significant disruption in a person's ability to function in daily life.

Other professionals argue that categorizing xenophobia or racism as a mental illness would be medicalizing a social problem.

Types of Xenophobia

There are two primary types of xenophobia:

Cultural xenophobia : This type involves rejecting objects, traditions, or symbols that are associated with another group or nationality. This can include language, clothing, music, and other traditions associated with the culture.
Immigrant xenophobia : This type involves rejecting people who the xenophobic individual does not believe belongs in the ingroup society. This can involve rejecting people of different religions or nationalities and can lead to persecution, hostility, violence, and even genocide.

The desire to belong to a group is pervasive—and strong identification with a particular group can even be healthy. However, it may also lead to suspicion of those who are perceived to not belong.

It is natural and possibly instinctive to want to protect the interests of the group by eliminating threats to those interests. Unfortunately, this natural protectiveness often causes members of a group to shun or even attack those who are perceived as different, even if they actually pose no legitimate threat at all.

Xenophobia vs. Racism

Xenophobia and racism are similar in that they both involve prejudice and discrimination, but there are important differences to consider. Where xenophobia is the fear of anyone who is considered a foreigner, racism is specifically directed toward people based on their race or ethnicity. People can be both xenophobic and racist.

Examples of Xenophobia

Unfortunately, xenophobia is all too common. It can range from covert acts of discrimination or subtle comments to overt acts of prejudice or even violence . Some examples of xenophobia include:

Immigration policies : Xenophobia can influence how nations deal with immigration. This may include hostility and outright discrimination against immigrants. Specific groups of people may be the target of bans designed to keep them from moving to certain locations.
Displacement : In the U.S., the forcible removal of Indigenous people from their land is an example of xenophobia. The use of residential schools in the U.S. and Canada was also rooted in xenophobic attitudes and was designed to force the cultural assimilation of Native American people.
Violence : For example, attacks on people of Asian descent have increased in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Causes of Xenophobia

There are a number of different factors believed to contribute to xenophobia:

Social and economic insecurity : People often look for someone to blame in times of economic hardship or social upheaval. Immigrants and minorities are often scapegoated as the cause of society's ills.
Lack of contact : People with little or no contact with people from other cultures or backgrounds are more likely to be fearful or mistrustful of them.
Media portrayals : The way immigrants and minorities are portrayed in the media can also influence people's attitudes towards them. If they are only shown in a negative light, it can reinforce people's prejudices.
Fear of strangers : In general, people are more likely to be afraid of unfamiliar things. This can apply to both physical appearance and cultural differences.

Impact of Xenophobia

Xenophobia doesn't just affect people at the individual level. It affects entire societies, including cultural attitudes, economics, politics, and history. Examples of xenophobia in the United States include acts of discrimination and violence against Latinx, Mexican, and Middle Eastern immigrants.

Xenophobia has been linked to:

Hostility towards people of different backgrounds
Decreased social and economic opportunity for outgroups
Implicit bias toward members of outgroups
Isolationism
Discrimination
Hate crimes
Political positions
War and genocide
Controversial domestic and foreign policies

Certainly, not everyone who is xenophobic starts wars or commits hate crimes. But even veiled xenophobia can have insidious effects on both individuals and society. These attitudes can make it more difficult for people in certain groups to live within a society and affect all aspects of life including housing access , employment opportunities, and healthcare access.

The twisting of a positive trait (group harmony and protection from threats) into a negative (imagining threats where none exist) has led to any number of hate crimes, persecutions, wars, and general mistrust.

Xenophobia has a great potential to cause damage to others, rather than affecting only those who hold these attitudes.

How to Combat Xenophobia

If you struggle with feelings of xenophobia, there are things that you can do to overcome these attitudes.

Broaden your experience. Many people who display xenophobia have lived relatively sheltered lives with little exposure to those who are different from them. Traveling to different parts of the world, or even spending time in a nearby city, might go a long way toward helping you face your fears.
Fight your fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful fears of all. If you have not been exposed to other races, cultures, and religions, gaining more experience may be helpful in conquering your xenophobia.
Pay attention. Notice when xenophobic thoughts happen. Make a conscious effort to replace these thoughts with more realistic ones.

If your or a loved one's xenophobia is more pervasive, recurring despite exposure to a wide variety of cultures, then professional treatment might be in order. Choose a therapist who is open-minded and interested in working with you for a long period of time.

Xenophobia is often deeply rooted in a combination of upbringing, religious teachings, and previous experiences. Successfully combating xenophobia generally means confronting numerous aspects of the personality and learning new ways of experiencing the world.

While xenophobia describes a fear of strangers, foreigners, or immigrants, xenophilia, or the act of being xenophilic, describes an appreciation and attraction to foreign people or customs.

History of Xenophobia

Xenophobia has played a role in shaping human history for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Romans used their beliefs that their cultures were superior to justify the enslavement of others. Many nations throughout the world have a history of xenophobic attitudes toward foreigners and immigrants.

The term xenophobia originates from the Greek word xenos meaning "stranger" and phobos meaning "fear.

Xenophobia has also led to acts of discrimination, violence, and genocide throughout the world, including:

The World War II Holocaust
The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II
The Rwandan genocide
The Holodomor genocide in Ukraine
The Cambodian genocide

Recent examples in the United States include discrimination toward people of Middle Eastern descent (often referred to as "Islamophobia") and xenophobic attitudes towards Mexican and Latinx immigrants. The COVID-19 pandemic also led to reports of xenophobia directed toward people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent in countries throughout the world.

Suleman S, Garber K, Rutkow L. Xenophobia as a determinant of health: An integrative review . J Public Health Policy . 2018;39(4):407-423. doi:10.1057/s41271-018-0140-1

Choane M, Shulika LS, Mthombeni M. An analysis of the causes, effects and ramifications of xenophobia in South Africa . Insight Afr . 2011;3(2):12-142.

Poussaint AF. Is extreme racism a mental illness? Yes: It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders . West J Med . 2002;176(1):4. doi:10.1136/ewjm.176.1.4

Bell C. Racism: A mental illness? . Psychiatr Serv . 2004;55(12):1343. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.55.12.1343

Baumeister RF, Leary MR. The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation . Psychol Bull . 1995;117(3):497-529.

National Cancer Institute. Let's talk about xenophobia and anti-Asian hate crimes .

Klein JR. Xenophobia and crime . In: Miller JM, ed. The Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing; 2014. doi:10.1002/9781118517390.wbetc094

Merriam-Webster. ' Xenophobia' vs. 'racism .'

Romero LA, Zarrugh A. Islamophobia and the making of Latinos/as into terrorist threats . Ethnic Racial Stud . 2018;12:2235-2254. doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1349919

American Medical Association. AMA warns against racism, xenophobia amid COVID-19 .

By Lisa Fritscher Lisa Fritscher is a freelance writer and editor with a deep interest in phobias and other mental health topics.

Xenophobia in Historical Perspective: Causation, Consequences, and Conquest

First Online: 15 December 2021

Cite this chapter

Thandeka Newlady Shoyisa 3 &
Kehinde Damilola Ilesanmi 4

274 Accesses

1 Citations

Xenophobia is a Greek word where “Xeno” means strange or foreign and “phobia” means fear or hatred for something different, strange, or foreign. This word is commonly known and used when explaining the prejudice against a particular cultural group or foreign nationals based on their nationality. Accordingly, xenophobia means the fear of a guest or stranger, though, in recent times, it typically depicts the hatred of strangers. According to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), xenophobia is “the deep dislike of non-nationals by nationals of a recipient state”. Xenophobia can be manifested in different forms; it can be “cultural” (based on the difference in culture) or “societal” (when a certain group of people is not considered a part of society). The two types of xenophobia are cultural and societal. Cultural xenophobia includes discrimination of a certain different cultural group. This may be based on the difference in language, clothing, traditions, and even music associated with that cultural group. On the other hand, societal xenophobia is targeted mostly at immigrants who are not considered as part of society. This is due to differences in religion, nationality, and general cultural background.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Available as PDF
Read on any device
Instant download
Own it forever
Available as EPUB and PDF
Compact, lightweight edition
Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
Free shipping worldwide - see info
Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Qukula, Qama. “Xenophobia: How South Africa got here”. 702 , 16 April 2015.

Mlambo, Daniel N. “A South African perspective on immigrants and Xenophobia in post-1994 South Africa.” African Renaissance (1744-2532) 16, no. 4 (2019).

McNeil, Taylor. “The Long History of Xenophobia in America”. TuftsNow , September 24, 2020.

LeRoux, M. “Somali Refugees in Post-Apartheid South Africa”. Mail and Guardian , Online, 17 September, 2006.

Harris, B. “Xenophobia: A New Pathology for a new South Africa”. In Hook, D, & Eagle, G. (eds) Psychopathology and Social Prejudice , (2002), 169–184.

Bala, N. and Tewari, DD. “The xenophobic attacks in South Africa: reflections and possible strategies to ward them off”. Presented at the 4th SAAPAM Limpopo Chapter Annual Conference , 28-30 October, 2015.

Steenkamp, Christina. “Xenophobia in South Africa: What does it say about trust?” The Round Table 98, no. 403 (2009): 439.

Morris, Alan. “Our fellow Africans make our lives hell’: the lives of Congolese and Nigerians living in Johannesburg.” Ethnic and Racial studies 21, no. 6 (1998): 1118.

Hopstock, Nina, and Nicola de Jager. “Locals only: understanding xenophobia in South Africa.” Strategic Review for Southern Africa 33, no. 1 (2011): 120.

Mattes, R., Taylor, D., McDonald, D., Poore, A. and Richmond, W. “Still waiting for the barbarians: South Africa Attitudes to Immigrants and Immigrations”. SAMP Migration Policy Series No. 14, 1999.

Southern Africa Migration Project (SAMP). “The Perfect storm: the realities of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa”, Migration Policy Series , 50,2008.

South Africa History Online: “Xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa”. South Africa History Online 2020.

Zvomuya, P. “Mozambicans Punished for South Africa’s Sins”. Mail and Guardian , 15 September 2013.

Handmaker, Jeff and Parsley. “Migration, refugees, and racism in South Africa.” (2001). Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 44.

The Independent. “South Africa Faces Human Rights Backlash over Crime Crackdown”, The Independent 1 April, 2000.

International Organization for Migration (IOM). “Towards Tolerance, Law, and Dignity: Addressing Violence against Foreign Nationals in South Africa”. International Organization for Migration (IOM) 2009.

Monson, T, Arian, R. Media Memory: A Critical Reconstruction of the May 2008 Violence. In L.B landau (ed). Exorcising the Demons within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa . Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 26, 2011.

Landau, Loren B. “Loving the alien? Citizenship, law, and the future in South Africa’s demonic society.” African Affairs 109, no. 435 (2011): 213–230.

Fuller, R. “Xenophobia, Crime and Security in SA, Windhoek, South Africa: New Era”. All Africa, May 2008.

Patel, Khadija. “What caused the xenophobic attacks in South Africa?” Aljazeera , 6 April 2016.

Mavhinga, Dewa. “Xenophobic Violence Erupts in South Africa: Local Group’s March Against Immigrants in Pretoria Today Turned Violent”. Human Right Watch, February 4, 2017.

United Nations. “Address on Xenophibia, at the World Racism Conference Durban”. United Nations , 2011.

Everatt, David. “Xenophobia, state and society in South Africa, 2008–2010.” Politikon 38, no. 1 (2011).

Crush, Jonathan, and Sujata Ramachandran. “Xenophobia, international migration and development.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11, no. 2 (2010): 209–228.

Claassen, Christopher. “Explaining South African xenophobia.” Available at SSRN 2974065 (2017).

Chibuzor, Ogbonnaya, Benjamin Okorie Ajah, Madueke Onyedikachi, and Queen Chukwuma. “Xenophobia and Nigeria–South Africa Relations.” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) 22, no. 10 (2017): 61–69.

Trading economic. South Africa Import. Trading economics, October 30, 2020.

African News Agency. “Mbeki taken to task over xenophobia denials” IOL , March 10, 2017.

Bibliography

African News Agency. “Mbeki taken to task over xenophobia denials” IOL , March 10, 2017. https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/mbeki-taken-to-task-over-xenophobia-denials-8121365

Google Scholar

Chibuzor, Ogbonnaya, Benjamin Okorie Ajah, Madueke Onyedikachi, and Queen Chukwuma. "Xenophobia and Nigeria–South Africa Relations." IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) 22, no. 10 (2017): 61–69.

Claassen, Christopher, “Explaining South African Xenophobia” Available at SSRN : (May 2017). https://ssrn.com/abstract=2974065 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2974065

Crush, J, Peberdy S and Williams V. International Migration and Good Governance in the Southern African Region, Southern Africa Migration Project, Migration Policy Brief No. 17. (2006).

Crush, Jonathan, and Sujata Ramachandran. "Xenophobia, international migration and development." Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 11, no. 2 (2010): 209–228.

Article Google Scholar

Everatt, David. "Xenophobia, state and society in South Africa, 2008–2010." Politikon 38, no. 1 (2011): 7–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2011.548662 .

Harris, B. “Xenophobia: A New Pathology for a new South Africa” In Hook, D, & Eagle, G. (eds) Psychopathology and Social Prejudice, (2002) pp. 169–184, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.

Fuller, R. “Xenophobia, Crime and Security in SA, Windhoek, South Africa: New Era”. All Africa , May 2008. http://allafrica.com/stories/prinatble/200809050763 .

Handmaker, J., & Parsley, J. (2001). Migration, Refugees, and Racism in South Africa. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees , 20(1), 40–51. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.21246

Hopstock, Nina, and Nicola de Jager. "Locals only: understanding xenophobia in South Africa." Strategic Review for Southern Africa 33 , no. 1 (2011): 120

Human Sciences Research Council (HRSC). “Citizenship Law and the Future in South Africa: Perceptions from South African Communities”. Democracy and Governance Program , 2008 HSRC, South Africa.

Landau, Loren B. "Loving the alien? Citizenship, law, and the future in South Africa’s demonic society." African Affairs 109, no. 435 (2010): 213–230.

LeRoux, M. “Somali Refugees in Post-Apartheid South Africa”. Mail and Guardian , Online, 17 September, 2006. http:// www.mg.co.za/article/ 2006-09-17/Somali Refugees/fear/deadly.

Mavhinga, Dewa. “Xenophobic Violence Erupts in South Africa: Local Group’s March Against Immigrants in Pretoria Today Turned Violent”. HRW News , February 14, 2017. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/24/xenophobic-violence-erupts-south-africa

Mbeki, T. “Address of the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at the National Tribute in remembrance of the Victims of Attacks on foreigner nationals, Tshwane”, Press statement issued by the presidency , Pretoria 3 July 2008.

McNeil, Taylor. “The Long History of Xenophobia in America” TuftsNow , September 24, 2020. Retrieved from https://now.tufts.edu/articles/long-history-xenophobia-america .

Mlambo, Daniel N. "A South African perspective on immigrants and Xenophobia in post-1994 South Africa." African Renaissance (1744–2532) 16, no. 4 (2019).

Morris, Alan. "‘Our fellow Africans make our lives hell’: the lives of Congolese and Nigerians living in Johannesburg." Ethnic and Racial studies 21, no. 6 (1998): 1116–1136.

Monson, T, Arian, R. Media Memory: A Critical Reconstruction of the May 2008 Violence. In L. B. Landau (ed). Exorcising the Demons within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 26–35, 2011.

Parsley, Jenny, and David Everatt. "South African civil society and xenophobia: Strategy & tactics." The Atlantic Philanthropies , New York (2010).

Patel, Khadija. “What caused the xenophobic attacks in South Africa?” Aljazeera , 6 April 2016. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/4/6/what-caused-the-xenophobic-attacks-in-south-africa

Qukula, Qama. “Xenophobia: How South Africa got here”. 702 , 16 April 2015. Retrieved from http://www.702.co.za/articles/2500/xenophobia-how-south-africa-got-here .

South Africa History Online: “Xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa”. South Africa History Online 2020 . https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/xenophobic-violence-democratic-south-africa

Southern Africa Migration Project (SAMP). “The Perfect storm: the realities of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa”, Migration Policy Series , 50 2008 (Cape Town, South Africa: Idasa)

Steenkamp, Christina. "Xenophobia in South Africa: What does it say about trust?" The Round Table 98 , no. 403 (2009): 439–447.

The Independent. “South Africa Faces Human Rights Backlash over Crime Crackdown”, The Independent 1 April, 2000. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/south-africa-faces-human-rights-backlash-over-crime-crackdown-5371679.html

Tradingeconomic.com. South Africa Import. Tradingeconomics , October 30, 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/imports .

United Nations. “Address on Xenophibia, at the World Racism Conference Durban”. United Nations , 2011. Accessed: https:// www.Unorg-2001-against-racism-and-xenophobia.org .

Zvomuya, P. “Mozambicans Punished for South Africa’s Sins”. Mail and Guardian , 15 September 2013, Accessed at: https:// www.mailandguardian.co.za/sept15/2013 .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Thandeka Newlady Shoyisa

Department of Economics, University of Zululand, KwaDlangezwa, South Africa

Kehinde Damilola Ilesanmi

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

History and Political Science, Alabama State University, Montgomery, AL, USA

Sabella Ogbobode Abidde

Centre for Africa-China Studies, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, South Africa

Emmanuel Kasonde Matambo

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Shoyisa, T.N., Ilesanmi, K.D. (2021). Xenophobia in Historical Perspective: Causation, Consequences, and Conquest. In: Abidde, S.O., Matambo, E.K. (eds) Xenophobia, Nativism and Pan-Africanism in 21st Century Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82056-5_12

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82056-5_12

Published : 15 December 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-82055-8

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-82056-5

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Find a journal
Track your research

Xenophobia – The Fear of Foreigners Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Illustrations of xenophobia.

Someone somewhere is afraid of wolves while another one is afraid of spiders. There are people who are afraid of water, plants, light, bad smell and even other people. People live in constant fear of diverse things, actions and even emotions. Some of these fears are normal while others are quite abnormal. Why do people develop fears? People develop fears because as they interact with various things in the universe, they tend to develop some psychological detachments that may end up producing a certain kind of antipathy towards some objects (Bourne 9). This kind of fear generates hatred towards the specific object and any encounter with the said object will elicit irrational behaviors from the subject.

Fear is also called phobia and one of the most common phobias is called Xenophobia. Xenophobia is associated with foreigners. It is also associated with guests and even strangers. The feeling of high levels of antipathy or fear towards foreigners is called xenophobia (Wolpe 111). This fear is usually irrational and is associated with some emotional problems though sometimes it can be exhibited by people who are emotionally sound. People with post-traumatic stress disorder are likely to exhibit this irrational fear. In most cases, this fear is connected with past associations with members of the grouping that the foreigner or the stranger comes from.

For example, there was a white woman in the UK who was brutally attacked by two black men. They left her with a deformed wrist. After the incident, whenever she came across any black person, she would develop panic attacks and run away from the people (Kessler 12). This fear is irrational because it tends to associate people of a certain group with a past action. This reaction of the woman is xenophobic because it highlights fear and hatred of people of another race emanating. Xenophobia is not just a fear of persons whom the subject considers foreigners or strangers. It also entails any aversion to the cultures, the norms, values, belief systems and the practices of the strangers or the foreigners in question.

This means that it is a very wide concept that entails things like origin, linguistic conventions, ways of life, habits and even religious dispositions (Latimer 45). Xenophobia is not racism, but racism is a subset of xenophobia. This is because not all people of a different race are foreigners but someone may hate a foreigner just because of his or her racial background. Xenophobia in most cases has to do with nationalities though in some cases, the issue of race creeps in.

There are cases where xenophobia and racism are used to refer to the same thing especially in Eastern Europe where there are very few natives from other races. In this case, every person of another race is considered to be a foreigner and the fear and hate directed to that person is actually based on racial grounds. However, Xenophobia transcends race and culture because this irrational fear can be extended to people on very many other grounds.

Xenophobia is a concept of fear that has two vital components. The first component is a sub-set of a population that is usually not part of a larger society. This subset represents the immigrants. The immigrants may be recent immigrants or past immigrants that have already been integrated into that society. Xenophobia emanating from this component is very dangerous because it can degenerate into violence or even genocide. There have been cases of mass expulsion of immigrants and foreigners due to this fear of foreigners in some parts of the world recently. The best example of xenophobic reactions was witnessed in South Africa, where foreigners were expunged from major cities by the locals.

The reason behind these xenophobic attacks in South Africa was that the immigrants had taken over the jobs that were meant for the natives and these foreigners were also creating competition for business and economic activities.

The success of the immigrant populations in South Africa intimidated the locals and they feared that the foreigners were going to eclipse them economically. The xenophobic tensions lasted for the better part of the year 2000 leading to hundreds of deaths and massive displacements of immigrants from other parts of Africa (Audie 23). The main targets were Zimbabweans who had run away from the economic crisis that had hit their country then. Other targets of the xenophobic attacks included Somalis, Kenyans and Zambians who were excelling economically in South Africa.

The second component of xenophobia entails the fear of cultures and the main target of this form of xenophobia is some behaviors and practices that are considered to be strange. Every culture has some influences from the outside. There are some cultures that are considered impure because they do not conform to the native cultures and the owners of these cultures can be victims of xenophobia. This is one problem that faces Indians.

Their cultures and practices are usually considered strange in many parts of the world and they have increasingly become victims of xenophobia especially in Europe. However, this type of xenophobia is mild and in most cases, it does not elicit aggression.

The fear of foreigners from a racist perspective is another common form in the world. The form of racism that the Anglo Americans suffer in the United States of America is not xenophobic. There is no fear in this racism. However, the form of racism that is extended to the Latinos in the United States of America is xenophobic. The Latinos are feared and loathed by the natives in the US and they are usually regarded as criminals. This xenophobia emanated from the concept of illegal immigration. Most of the Latinos that are in the United States of America are illegal immigrants mostly from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and many other Central and South American countries.

Illegal immigration is considered a crime in the US and anyone who gets to the country without the required immigration paperwork is considered to be a criminal. This means that the Latinos, because of the fact that most of them are illegal immigrants, are viewed as criminals by the natives of the United States of America. This has presented a big problem to the Latino population in the United States of America because the natives have developed an irrational fear of the Latinos and in case of an incident of crime, the Latinos are usually implicated.

This fear of the Latinos has generated hate that has seen a lot of negative stereotypes emerge about the Latinos in the US. Apart from the criminal stereotype, Latinos are also considered to be very unintelligent and this stereotype emanates from the fact that most criminals are people who never made it to school. This means that the people of the United States of America believe that Latinos are not intelligent because they are criminals.

Is xenophobia justified, especially in the 21 st century? This is the time that the world should be celebrating cultural diversity but lurking in the shadow is this black menace called xenophobia. The future of the world lies in the acceptance of diversity that is there in the universe and showing utmost tolerance to other people, their practices and belief systems. The world we are living in is different from the world that was there a century ago. In the past, people used to live under geographical confines and it was hard to come across foreigners or people whose values and practices were not in tandem with those of the locality.

However, the world has changed and in this era of globalization, movement from one point of the world to another is very common. This means that the chances of having an encounter with a foreigner are very high. The world has reached a point where it is inevitable to live without foreigners which means that if there is to be peaceful co-existence in the world, then the tolerance of other foreigners and their entire cultural systems must be practiced. There are some forms of fear of foreigners that are justifiable because of the psychological connections that are there but there are some that can be fought (Crozier 67).

This is because some instances of xenophobia emanate from attitudes that are formed against people of certain origins. This means that if these attitudes are quashed, these forms of xenophobia can be eradicated. For example, the fear of foreigners especially people from specific African countries by South Africans was a result of the formation of attitudes towards those people. Instead of appreciating that these people are working hard to uplift the economy of their country, they develop fears that the increasing numbers of African immigrants in South Africa are threatening economic and business opportunities.

The fear of the Latinos in the United States of America is also based on a false belief that all Latinos are criminals because they entered the country in a manner that is considered criminal. Xenophobia is very harmful to a society or a country. It can easily lead to violent reactions or even genocide. This is because intensive fear generates hate which leads to anti-social practices against the targeted population (Audie 23). The genocidal killings that took place in Europe during the Third Reich were partly because of the irrational fear of the Jews and their geographic expansion which led to a war against them that saw their near extermination by the Nazi regime.

The fear of foreigners is something that is supposed to be unheard of in the 21 st century yet cases of xenophobia are increasingly being reported. In the UK and the US, xenophobia or the fear of foreigners has taken a religious twist and it has become Islamophobia. Their fear of Muslims nationalities has heightened and this has led to the development of a climate that is unconducive for the Muslims in the two countries.

Muslims have become targets of antisocial behaviors including exclusion and even bullying. In the UK, this fear was aggravated by the London bombings in the middle of the last decade while in the United States of America, this xenophobia widened after the catastrophic terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001. In the two countries, a person from an Islamic background is always viewed as a potential terrorist. The fear of the Muslims in the two countries is evidenced by the specialized checks that the Muslims undergo at the airports before they can be allowed into the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

This action by the two countries has elicited the same kind of response towards American citizens living in Islamic countries. Americans living in Islamic countries have been victims of xenophobic attacks. To start with, the Americans are usually considered to be spies sent on a mission to track terrorists meaning that the nationals in the Islamic countries especially in the Middle East live in fear of the Americans who live in their countries. Secondly, the tensions between the Islamic countries and the United States of America have generated hatred towards the Americans living in those countries and this has heightened xenophobia that is directed towards them.

In conclusion, human beings will continue to live in fear of different things depending on the nature of interactions between them and those things but the worst form of fear is the fear of the other human beings. This is because this is the fear that can have the most dangerous consequences.

Apart from the emotional trauma arising from the aftermath of the actions that are triggered by this fear, xenophobia has led to the wiping off of millions of people from the face of the earth during various instances of genocides. In the 21 st century when the world is said to be a global village, the levels of hatred and intolerance that are brought by xenophobia can be very dangerous especially towards the dream of integration of cultures that is expected to unite the people of the world.

Audie, Katherine. “International Relations and Migration in Southern Africa”. Institute for Security Studies: African Security Review Vol 6 no 3, 1997.

Bourne, Edmund. The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook. New Jersey: New Harbinger Publications. 2005.

Kessler, Edward. Prevalence, Severity, and Comorbidity of 12-Month DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication , 2005, Archive of General Psychiatry, Volume 20.

Crozier, Ray. International Handbook of Social Anxiety: Concepts, Research, and Interventions Relating to the Self and Shyness . New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2000.

Latimer, Paul. Phobia and psychology: NY: Sage. 2009.

Wolpe, Joseph. Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Washington: Stanford University Press.

Islamophobia Is on the Rise in Germany
Business and Intercultural Communication
Nativism Sentiments in the 19th Century
Legalizing Abortion in the USA: Pros and Cons
Framing Class: Reading Comprehension
Girls in Gangs: Reasons that Make Girls Join the Gang
Divorce Rate in the United States
Child Pornography and Its Regulation
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, December 21). Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners. https://ivypanda.com/essays/xenophobia-the-fear-of-foreigners/

"Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners." IvyPanda , 21 Dec. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/xenophobia-the-fear-of-foreigners/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners'. 21 December.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners." December 21, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/xenophobia-the-fear-of-foreigners/.

1. IvyPanda . "Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners." December 21, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/xenophobia-the-fear-of-foreigners/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Xenophobia - The Fear of Foreigners." December 21, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/xenophobia-the-fear-of-foreigners/.

Essay on Xenophobia

Students are often asked to write an essay on Xenophobia in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Xenophobia

Understanding xenophobia.

Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners. It’s a complex issue that can lead to discrimination, violence, and social conflict.

Causes of Xenophobia

Xenophobia can stem from various factors like cultural differences, economic competition, or historical conflicts. It’s often fueled by stereotypes and misinformation.

Impacts of Xenophobia

Xenophobia can harm individuals and communities, leading to social division and conflict. It can also hinder cultural diversity and mutual understanding.

Addressing Xenophobia

To combat xenophobia, it’s important to promote tolerance, diversity, and understanding. Education and open dialogue can play a key role in this process.

250 Words Essay on Xenophobia

Defining xenophobia.

Xenophobia, derived from the Greek words ‘xenos’ (strange) and ‘phobos’ (fear), is the irrational or unreasoned fear of that which is perceived as different or foreign. It is a social phenomenon that manifests in numerous ways, primarily through attitudes of prejudice and discrimination.

The Roots of Xenophobia

Xenophobia is deeply rooted in human psychology and societal structures. It can be traced back to our evolutionary past, where in-group favouritism and out-group hostility were survival mechanisms. In modern times, xenophobia often arises from economic, political, and social insecurities, creating scapegoats for complex issues.

Xenophobia’s Impact on Society

Xenophobia’s impact is far-reaching and detrimental. It fosters social division, fuels hate crimes, and hinders cultural exchange and mutual understanding. Additionally, it can lead to policies that are discriminatory and violate human rights.

Combating Xenophobia

Addressing xenophobia requires a multi-faceted approach. Education plays a crucial role in challenging stereotypes and fostering understanding. Policies promoting diversity and inclusivity can also help. Moreover, media has a responsibility to portray diverse groups accurately and sensitively.

In an increasingly globalized world, xenophobia is a hurdle to unity and progress. As we strive for a more inclusive and understanding society, it is paramount to confront and challenge xenophobic attitudes wherever they appear.

500 Words Essay on Xenophobia

Introduction, historical context and causes.

Xenophobia is not a new phenomenon. It has been prevalent throughout history, often exacerbated during times of economic hardship, political instability, or when a society feels its identity is under threat. The causes of xenophobia are multifaceted, often rooted in ignorance, misinformation, and fear. It can stem from a perceived threat to a community’s economic status, cultural identity, or social cohesion.

The impacts of xenophobia are far-reaching and destructive, affecting individuals and communities on multiple levels. At an individual level, victims of xenophobia can experience psychological trauma, social isolation, and economic disadvantage. On a societal level, xenophobia can lead to social division, conflict, and can undermine social cohesion. It can also negatively impact a nation’s reputation and relationships with other countries.

Xenophobia and Globalization

Addressing xenophobia requires a multifaceted approach. Education plays a crucial role in combating ignorance and misinformation that often fuels xenophobia. Schools and universities should promote cultural understanding and tolerance, encouraging students to challenge their biases and stereotypes. Governments have a responsibility to enact and enforce laws that protect individuals from hate crimes and discrimination. The media also plays a critical role in shaping public opinion and should strive to present balanced and accurate depictions of different cultures and communities.

Xenophobia is a complex and pervasive issue with significant implications for individuals and societies. It is a product of fear and ignorance, often exacerbated by economic hardship and political instability. However, through education, legislation, and responsible media representation, it is possible to challenge xenophobia and promote a more inclusive and tolerant society. In the age of globalization, it is more important than ever to address xenophobia and strive for a world where diversity is celebrated rather than feared.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Happy studying!

Xenophobia, politics, and religion as we approach the 2024 elections in South Africa

Introduction

This essay explores the linkages between xenophobia, politics and religion, in the run-up to the general elections in South Africa. Despite this year’s general elections coinciding with South Africa’s 30-year anniversary of democracy and freedom, there is very little to celebrate: while there have been gains in the promotion of human rights and democracy since the end of the Apartheid era, such gains have been overshadowed by the critical energy crisis, high profile cases of corruption, high unemployment, increased inequalities, and incidences of xenophobia. Xenophobia is defined as the “dislike, hatred, or fear of outsiders. This can manifest as hostility toward immigrants, but it can also manifest as hatred toward members of another tribe, culture, or religion.” 1 In the South African context, xenophobia has mainly manifested itself in a unique way: local black South Africans have been channeling their dislike or anger towards Black immigrants from other African countries, a phenomenon referred to as Afrophobia. In recent years, there has also been the formation of militia groups such as Operation Dudula, which has been responsible for mobilizing local citizens against foreigners by terrorizing neighborhoods with large concentrations of immigrants living within communities. Additionally, Operation Dudula also confronts companies and businesses suspected of employing foreigners and/or illegal immigrants, at the expense of local citizens. Operation Dudula was recently registered as a political party. 2 This anti-immigrant organization has been accused of engaging in physical violence, hate speech, and calling on the government to close borders and “clean up” big cities, such as Johannesburg and Pretoria—where foreigners are allegedly illegally occupying and hijacking dilapidated building within the city centers.

In most cases, foreigners living in abandoned buildings have been accused of engaging in illicit activities, such as selling drugs and contraband goods, as well as engaging in violent crimes. These allegations were fueled when, months ago, more than 70 people occupying an old building in Johannesburg (most of whom were people from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Mozambique) died after the building caught fire. 3 Recently, these xenophobic perspectives have shifted slightly from primarily focusing on African immigrants from neighboring countries to include Indians and Pakistanis—particularly those owning Spaza shops—by accusing them of selling poor-quality, expired or contraband goods.

According to the 2022 census, the number of known economic and political immigrants in South Africa is estimated to be around 3.95 million. 4 However, the real number of foreigners living in South Africa may exceed 3.95 million because of the existence of a large number of undocumented immigrants. Most of these foreigners, particularly those deemed illegal immigrants, live below the poverty line, engaging in informal jobs as a means of survival. Most of the foreigners regarded as “illegals” are blamed by local South Africans for taking jobs from them. However, such claims cannot be easily verified. Foreigners with work permits are not allowed to occupy a position when there is a local citizen who is qualified for the job. When compared to the overall population of 53 million people in South Africa, the allegation that foreigners—topping 3.95 million in total—are taking away jobs from local citizens cannot be substantiated. Some scholars have regarded this influx of immigrants from the neighboring countries as forced immigration, 5 because of the political turmoil and collapsed economies in their countries. It can be argued that the upcoming elections in South Africa are of critical importance to the country’s ability to play a pivotal role in enhancing democracy, economic growth, peace, and security in the neigbouring countries.

The South African context of xenophobia

There has been much speculation about the causes of xenophobia in South Africa. Some scholars, such as Harris, regard it as a mindset that was engendered by the Apartheid era. 6 The oppression of the Black people in South Africa during the years of Apartheid rule is regarded as being responsible for a closed mindset, including prevailing suspicion and lack of trust of foreigners. 7 Other scholars have regarded the mushrooming of xenophobic tendencies in post-Apartheid South Africa as a political tactic aimed at diverting the attention of local people from the real issues that are affecting them, such as growing inequality, unemployment rates, high levels of corruption, and poor service delivery in the country. From a religious perspective, xenophobia is regarded as having emanated from a heretical theology, a replica of a reformed apartheid theory that instilled an element of superiority and entitlement among Black and white South Africans.

The different perspectives on what could be the cause of xenophobia clearly indicate the intertwining of different social, political, and religious issues still affecting the country despite the end of the Apartheid era. The different facets describing the cause of xenophobia in South Africa also indicate that the country is divided along social, political, and religious lines despite extensive effort to bring reconciliation in the post-Apartheid era. Churches have been unable to deal with the problem by promoting inclusivity. This indicates the existence of an inherent problem that needs serious attention. The energy crisis in the country and the high levels of unemployment and poverty has exacerbated the divisions by creating an environment brimming with crime, violence, and xenophobia. The need to deal with the different forms of divisions ravaging the country is high. The search for solutions must go beyond simply uniting different races and establish the initiation and promotion of ethnic and racial cohesion, immigrant integration, and social and economic justice for all.

Effects of xenophobia on regional security—and what can be done to deal with the problem

The problem of xenophobia is not only a South African problem. Xenophobia can spill into other neighboring countries, given the influence that South Africa has over the region. However, the lack of capacity to deal with the underlying issues fueling xenophobia indicates that the problem is likely to continue for years to come. As the 2024 elections on May 29 approaches, we are already seeing xenophobic trends, as politicians are already raising the alarm on issues pertaining to open borders and expired contraband goods sold by Asian immigrants, Ethiopians, and Somalis. Such politicians are also calling for the change of visa and residency conditions to expel illegal immigrants and refugees. The cases in point include ActionSA and Patriotic Alliance, which have been using their campaign streams to incite local South Africans against foreigners; ActionSA, in particular, “was able to score points with xenophobic sloganeering during the 2022 municipal elections.” 8 Although the ruling party appears to portray a non-xenophobic face as it prepares for its toughest elections in history, the chances of joining the xenophobic campaign trail are high since there are so many xenophobic forces within its ranks, some of its top leadership even having been responsible for uttering statements that have fueled attacks on foreigners in the past. 9 The coming on the electoral scene of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK), which has already been labeled ethnocentric, and the quest of the Economic Freedom Front (which is openly xenophobic) to secure votes, might create a volatile and tense atmosphere. Although the influx of African and Asian immigrants is a serious problem in South Africa, there is a need to deal with the problem in a proper and organized manner. The tendency of politicians to exploit immigration issues to inspire violence and xenophobia, in order to gain political mileage and win public favor by taking advantage of a partly broken society that has not completely healed from the legacy of Apartheid. This is a sign that the political leaders are selfish and unethical in their bid to win votes.

According to the report of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an independent organisation which is based in Pretoria, the South African immigration situation is not unique to the world. “The xenophobic rhetoric” by anti-migrant groups, politicians, and public officials, claiming the country is overrun by immigrants, is not true. This rhetoric has only succeeded in creating an atmosphere of resentment towards migrants. 10 The step taken by President Ramaphosa to establish the “National Action Plan” in 2019, for the purpose of combating racism and xenophobia’ and condemning anti-migrant protests and vigilante groups for attacking and harassing foreigners, has played a great role in calming the situation. But experts say that the government needs to do more in order to solve the problem. 11

Xenophobia is a growing problem in South Africa and, with the coming of elections it poses a serious security challenge to citizens and immigrants alike. The solution to the problem does not lie in denying the existence of growing intolerance of African and Asian immigrants in the country. It is only by accepting that this problem exists that genuine steps can be taken toward resolving it. The solution lies in promoting inclusivity, equality, unity in diversity, and social and economic justice for all. There is also a need for all sectors of society to be involved in dealing with the problem. Politicians must desist or refrain from making statements that violate the rights of the vulnerable in society, sowing seeds of division, racism, and xenophobia. People in positions of power have an obligation to create an environment that promotes peace, security, equality, and respect for the rights of all people, enacting laws that protect immigrants. Therefore, election campaigns should be based on the rule of law by focusing on eradicating corruption, creating employment, bringing development, and building a stable economy through foreign investment rather than being used to fuel discord in the country.

Villines, Z. “Xenophobia: Meaning, signs, examples, and more.” August 5, 2022. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com (Accessed October 25, 2023)
Allison, S. “South African anti-migrant ‘vigilantes’ register as party for next year’s polls.” September 26, 2023. http://www.theguardian.com (Accessed October 30, 2023).
Bezuidenhout, C. “Another building fire breaks out in Joburg CBD.” September 23, 2023. https://www.news24.com (Accessed October 10, 2023).
Gordon, S. “Xenophobia is on the rise in South Africa: scholars weigh in on the migrant question.” April 14, 2022. https://theconversation.com/xenophobia (Accessed October 30, 2023)
Concern worldwide. “Six causes of forced migration.” Concern worldwide US . June 29, 2019. http://concernusa.org/news/forced-migration-causes (Accessed November 01, 2023).
Harris, B. “A Foreign Experience: Violence, Crime and Xenophobia during South Africa’s Transition.” Violence and Transition Series 5 (2001): 70
Kaziboni, A. (2022). Apartheid Racism and Post-apartheid Xenophobia: Bridging the Gap. In: Rugunanan, P., Xulu-Gama, N. (eds) Migration in South Africa. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92114-9_14
Schwikowski, M. 2023. South Africa faces growing xenophobia problem. November 4, 2023. http://www.dw.com/en/south-africa-faces-growing-xenophobia-problem/a-67305882 (Accessed on January 04, 2024)
Guilengue, F. Xenophobia and Social Cohesion in South Africa. September 9, 2023. http://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/51059/xenophobia-and-social-cohesion-in-south-africa (Accessed January 04, 2023)
Charlie, A & Ford, T. Inside South Africa’s Operation Dudula: ‘Why we hate foreigners.’ September 18, 2023.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66808346.amp (Accessed January 04, 2024)
Saudi Gazette. Why South African vigilante group hates foreigners. September 18, 2023. https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/635914 (Accessed January 04, 2023).

Bambo Miti has a Bachelor of Theology Honours degree and Master of Theology degree in systematic theology (MTh) from the University of South Africa. He is currently a PhD candidate in systematic theology at the same university. He is also an intern at the Protestant Theological Faculty, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, under the Coimbra Group Scholarship. He has presented papers at notable international conferences. His research interests straddle along African theology, African Pentecostalism, ecumenism, reconciliation, and migration. His doctoral research focuses on the role of faith traditions (African Pentecostalism) in dealing with the problem of violence and xenophobia... Read more

By Khadija Patel and Azad Essa

photography by Ihsaan Haffejee

Running small convenience stores in the townships is a dangerous business for foreigners.

Often serving their customers through locked gates, they are accused of spreading disease, stealing jobs and sponging off basic government services like electricity, running water and healthcare.

But as violence against them continues, the South African government insists that criminality is behind it, not xenophobia.

No place like home

Xenophobia in South Africa

THE FOREIGNERS

THE ACTIVISTS

foreigners

Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 1

In a haze of violence in late January, an angry mob approached a convenience store belonging to Abdikadir Ibrahim Danicha. They pried open its iron gates and looted everything inside. Even the large display refrigerators were carried away.

Danicha's life was upended.

"South African people don’t like us," Danicha, a 29-year-old Somali national, told Al Jazeera, while sitting on his bed in a small room he shared with three others in Mayfair, a suburb popular with foreign nationals in Johannesburg.

The violent outburst that led to the looting of

Danicha’s store began in Snake Park, in the

western reaches of Soweto, when 14-year-old

Siphiwe Mahori was allegedly killed by another Somali shop owner, Alodixashi Sheik Yusuf.

Mahori, a South African, was allegedly a part of a group of people who attempted to rob Yusuf’s store on January 19. His death sparked a week of mob justice, which appeared to be inflamed by xenophobia.

Scores of people were injured and hundreds of stores were looted. As the violence spread to nearby Kagiso, a South African baby was trampled to death.

For the foreign nationals affected by the violence, the actions of the mob were inexplicable.

"I don’t even have clothes … I lost all my things," said Masrat Eliso an Ethiopian national, four days after his shop in Protea Glen, a suburb of Soweto, was looted.

Mofolo Central, Soweto

I don't have money.

I don't have anything

and I'm scared for my life"

MASRAT ELISO

Calm was eventually restored and most foreign-owned stores reopened. Shelves were restocked and customers returned, poking their arms through the closed metal gates of the stores to buy a loaf of bread. Groupsof children clamoured to buy lollipops, while tired looking men eyed the fridges for energy drinks.

It appeared to be business as usual, but to the foreign nationals who returned to their stores in Soweto, there was a shared fear that they may soon be the subject of another attack.

Danicha returned to his shop in Mofolo, another suburb of Soweto, three weeks after the violence subsided.

"I don’t feel safe," he said in early March, outside his partially restocked shop.

He is one of a few hundred thousand Somali refugees in South Africa who have found some measure of success in operating small stores in townships around the country. He is also one among thousands of foreign nationals here who report multiple incidents of persecution.

But Danicha's life in South Africa has been filled with hardship. And the scars, which run across the entire left side of his body, act as a stark reminder.

In June 2014, he and a friend were running a small store in the Johannesburg suburb of Denver, selling groceries and basic cosmetics when their store was set upon by an angry mob.

"The first day, a group of people came to the shop. They wanted to loot us. We closed the doors but then they started stoning us," he said. "Then, on the second day, they just came and threw a petrol bomb at the shop.

I was inside the shop."

Danicha was one of four people who sustained severe burns in Denver on that day.

I came to South Africa in 2012 and I thought life would be easy . "

ABDIKADIR IBRAHIM DANICHA

Abdikadir Ibrahim Danicha

"Everywhere, everywhere I am burned," he said. "I was in hospital for three months."

After being treated at the Charlotte Maxeke public hospital, Danicha was then forced to rely on the Somali community in Johannesburg for assistance.

“A brother of mine helped me out by giving me a share in a shop in Soweto.”

Two months later, another mob attacked his store.

"Unless I have the capital to start another shop, I don’t know what I can do."

Estimates suggest that more than 50,000 Somalis have fled to South Africa since their home country erupted into civil war in 1991.

Many of them have settled in townships across the country, operating small businesses among the poorest South Africans.

While the store in Mofolo has reopened, and Danicha helps his co-owners periodically, he has not been able to contribute to the capital needed to get the store sufficiently restocked.

It is very difficult

to start again

and again"

IBRAHIM DANICHA

From Soweto and Kagiso the violence in January spread to Sebokeng in the Vaal delta, Eden Park in Ekurhuleni and Alexandra, in northern Johannesburg.

As researchers begin to unpack the stories of yet another bout of violence against foreign nationals in urban South Africa, many of the victims are beginning to feel that the pain caused was not just the loss of goods, earnings and trading days.

“We came to South Africa because we needed to save our lives,” Mohamed Rashad, an Ethiopian national from the Oromo community says. He runs a store in Snake Park and is angered by the lack of justice in cases involving foreign nationals.

“The law is forgetting us so soon we will also forget the law,” he warned.

Back at the store in Mofolo, Danicha watches as his

co-owners serve customers through a gate. He is not

sure what the future holds for him.

“At first I had a plan but the plan has been destroyed two times now,” he said.

With Somalia still reeling from conflict, he has nowhere

else to go.

Despite the ongoing violence, South Africa

Ismail Adam Hassen

Muhammed Hukun Galle Hassan

I came from Somalia in 2009. And the South African government is good, they let us work for ourselves. I say the government thank you very much and I was working myself and I was looking my food and to trade.

Some people come to South Africa by plane. Others come with taxis and busses. But I took a very long route to South Africa. I came to South Africa in 2010 and it took me three months to get here.

READ THE REST OF MUHAMMED'S STORY

This is how I started, I worked and got together some money, and I put this money together with other people. Then I acted like a supervisor.

I would go to a place and see the owner of the property where I think we can make a shop and I say can you give us the lease I’m going to work in the building here. Then when we make money I don’t take it all, we are sharing. So if it is, 18, 19, 20 thousand rands ($2,000)

profits, it is shared between five people. That is how we work. When we make this money here we working hard.

In Somalia there is no peace there. When I ran away from there, I was not the only guy. And I run because from Somalia there was no government and I came here where I can stay and make a life in peace.

I got the family there but I don’t have the choice to go back. That time if I stayed in my country there was no law and order, I was scared. That one time they shoot me inside the leg, they come here they help us that time my father passed away. This is the problem in

I want to ask government to look after our safety. We are businessmen.

We are not attacking anybody by coming here. I really really like the government in South Africa because they allow us to stay here but we need safety. They must do something about these people who are attacking our business and take everything. I think other people are

My shop was closed for 10 days after the attack.

After my shop was looted, we came back, and we fixed it. We bought a new fridge, we made a new gate and we put new shelves. So now people think we have a lot of money here, we don’t have the money because

they took everything. Because we also have to buy food, we have families to feed. But even when I came back, I was told I could not open my shop.

I went to the police station and complained and told them that some people have given me this paper that says I must close my shop or they will kill me.

They give this letter to all the shops. They told us not to open, to go back to where we come from. They asked me why I am coming here. I said I live here. They said close your business, go back to where you come from. They are fighting us.

We called in the police. The police did not care. They did not listen, they did nothing. They said, “Voetsek!”

We are not feeling safe right now. It’s the police who are supposed to look after our safety but they say they don’t care.

They listen to other people only. If someone attacks us they don’t care.

But we are feeling scared still. We don’t know what we can do, where we can go, but we stay. We will see if we die or what.

It’s happening because: We don’t know, they say we don’t want any foreigners coming here.

I did not have the problem before and I have the the shop for 5 years.

The people here around my shop know me. They know who I am. We are friends, they know us, we are staying here for a long time. they all know the area and you can speak we are business people. We are the good people because we are living nicely. You can see, there is the good people and the bad people, they are taking our customer away, how you see this people.

There have been crooks who come and steal. We saw like that before. But not like this, where they come and break the shops and taking everything that wasn’t sold.

Despite promises of help, the situation on the ground is disastrous and rebuilding almost non-existent.

With help hardly getting through, and so many in need, building materials are scarce and flats for rent even scarcer - and expensive too.

READ THE REST OF ISMAIL'S STORY

From Juba province in Somalia, I went to Mombasa in Kenya. I spent some time in Mombasa. But things in Mombasa are not good for Somali people.

And one day the police came and they were arresting all the Somalis but they left me because I was very, very thin then. So I heard them say, “Leave him, he’s too small.” And then from Kenya I went to Tanzania.

Then I went Malawi. From there I went to Mozambique. And from Mozambique, I went to Zimbabwe and then I came to South Africa.

My family is all dead. I am the only one left.

My shop is open again. With the little goods I saved from the looting I started again but the shop is still not 100%. We are trying. I am trying to get credit from the Somali-owned cash n carry to buy more goods. I don’t feel safe, but what can we do? It’s life.

On the day that my shop was looted, I was sleeping. Snake Park, where all the trouble started, is not far from my shop. So these boys, many boys, came to our shop. I was sleeping. And my “brother” saw these boys coming to the shop. He woke me. These guys took our money, our clothes, everything.

We ran away through the back entrance. They took everything. And then the police came past there. And the police looked at these boys taking the things from our shop and they did nothing. I saw the police giving bread to a mama.

I asked the police why they are giving our stock like this. And they told me to keep quiet or they will give more. Other police I saw coming into the shop and they took airtime, Grandpas (headache tablets) and other things. If I had a camera at that time I could take

the photos of the police. It was almost five cars of the police.

The police were asking us for our guns, saying, “Where is your gun?” But we don’t have a gun.

I remember, when when we were leaving, the police told us, to give them a “cold drink” if we want them to help us. When I told the police that we don’t have money, we are suffering, the police said, “You are living here in our place and you are foreigners.”

So we gave the police R200 ($20). So then the police helped us, and I saved a little goods but most of it was already damaged. I did not even have clothes. I came to Mayfair with just my little stock.

South African people don’t like us. The government allow us to stay but the people don’t like us.

They call us names. And I believe this looting and things will happen again at any time. We don’t have power to stop this. Only the government has power. We don’t do anything criminal. We are serving the community. We keep our shops open till late so that people who come home late after work can come to our shop and buy things. It’s only government that can stop this trouble.

Salat Abdullahi

We can be attacked anytime here in the shop.

It is like an ambush attack. We are not safe here.

We can’t even say that we will sleep peacefully tonight because we don’t know what we will face tomorrow.

I am in South Africa as an asylum seeker.

You see, in my country, Bangladesh, there are political problems. We are suffering. So we’ve come here honestly. We’re not robbing anybody. We are not doing any crime. We just come here to do business. And we hope to help South African people also.

READ THE REST OF SALAT'S STORY

The South African government is not bad. But the people… they really don’t like us. Even when they come to the shop, we are giving them big discounts because we sell everything very cheap. But they are abusing us.

Even the police when they come to help you they first take money from you.

There is nobody that helped us to get so far in South Africa.

We did by ourselves. I am here for almost two years but I can’t leave South Africa.

We have problems in South Africa but it is still better than Somalia.

I am from Kismayo. If my country has peace I want to go back to my country. It is my country. I love my country.

Family? (His face creases with deep emotion) I don’t think I have any family any more.

They have all passed away. You see, the problem in Somalia is if you want to be safe you have to join Al Shabaab, or else they will kill you. And I can’t join Al Shabaab. They kill innocent people. I’ve seen this.

There is no law.

What we need is more security from government. We just want to be safe.

READ THE REST OF NASSER'S STORY

As a Bangladeshi in Soweto, I don’t know of any Bangladeshi who has made problems in Soweto. We have never fought with anybody and we have never shot anybody. From our side, nobody can complain about us.

This shop wasn’t affected by looting. The shop across the road was looted but we managed to close our shop before the looters got here.

Right now it’s okay but I have three, four other shops in other places in Soweto that were looted. So now I’ve joined a group called Township Business Development South Africa (TBDSA), who have been speaking to

government in Pretoria so now we are hoping to fix the problems with the local people here.

We do not want to complain about anybody. We just want to open our shops and do business. I’ve never been affected by violence in my businesses like this before. I’ve been robbed a few times. Just the other day my uncle was robbed of R20,000 ($2,000) on his way out of Soweto.

We stay here, we have to have a good relationship with the people who come to our shops.

But we need more protection from the police. I’ve been in South Africa for seven years.

If, in future, government says we have to pay taxes, I will pay tax but government must give us safety. My business has been registered already.

I’ve never had a bad experience with the South African police. The Diepkloof police have been honest with us, they don’t take money and things from us.

I don’t hire South Africans in my business because they steal, or others work for a day and ask for goods from the shop, saying they don’t have food at home and then I don’t see them again.

When we have hired South African people they do wrong things with us. If government says I have to hire South Africans then I will, but I don’t think it will work. But I won’t complain. I think I could hire two South Africans.

I will never shoot a tsotsi (thief) stealing from my shop. Look, say a tsotsi steals a can of Red Bull from my shop. That Red Bull costs R18. I must shoot him for R18? No, nobody’s life is worth that.

Ebrahim Khalil-Hassen,

Public Policy Analyst in Johannesburg

Al Jazeera:

Is it hard to do business in South Africa?

READ HASSEN'S RESPONSE

I wouldn’t say there are many obstacles starting up an informal business, particularly if you’re just going be trading. You are buying stuff and then selling it; there are no real obstacles. You just wonder why more people don’t do it.

The ease of starting up a business in a township depends largely on how legal you want your business to be. There actually is not much that needs to get sorted out. My understanding is that, procedures

like securing premises, particularly in townships, are not at all difficult. I think the key thing there is that the businesses are not all in busy areas, they’re all over. Some businesses are even run from people’s homes.

The success of foreign owned stores in the townships is owed to the business models that a lot of the foreigners bring through to their businesses. Collective buying is one trick. But if you look at the innovation that has been used in a lot of these foreign owned

businesses, it’s the small things but make a huge difference in terms of running a successful business. So you don’t sell half a kilo of salt, you sell one hundred grams of salt, in poorer communities that’s particularly the case - single serving.

The other issue is around credit, most foreign owned businesses do provide credit and they don’t charge interest, so that assists low earning households.

Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 2

In May 2008, 62 people were killed in a wave of xenophobic attacks across townships.

Foreign nationals, mostly migrants from Somalia and Ethiopia, were dragged through the streets of Alexandra, barely a few kilometers from Johannesburg’s plush Sandton suburb, and “necklaced” - a throwback to the summary execution tactic used in the Apartheid days.

A rubber tyre, filled with petrol, is forced around a victim's chest and arms, and set alight.

In an instant, the story of South Africa’s much-touted rainbow nation of black, white and brown people happily living together, fizzled away in an outburst of vengeance.

Tens of thousands of people were displaced, forced to seek refuge in churches, mosques and even police stations. In the end, it took military intervention to quell the violence.

South Africa is a nation of multiple ethnicities, languages and nationalities. From the Zulu and Xhosa, to the Dutch and the British. Somali and Tutsi to Indian Tamil and Gujarati, Chinese and Zimbabwean.

However divided, unequal, and structurally flawed, South Africa is home to a very diverse population of people. A country with deep pockets, it remains attractive as a home for migrants, some of them seeking greener economic pastures, others safety and security.

The economy relies heavily on migrants, be it to make up for a massive skills shortage or as cheap labour in farms and mines.

Despite the violence meted out to foreign nationals, tens of thousands continue to seek asylum there, as many as 60,000 to 80,000 per year.

According to the UNHCR , there were almost 310,000 refugees and asylum seekers in the country as of July 2014. By the end of 2015, this number is expected to top 330,000.

Xenophobia in South Africa is not new. Some, like Michael Neocosmos, Director of Global Movements Research at the University of South Africa (UNISA), recall anti-migrant sentiment in the early nineties, when the new government was in the midst of planning new economic policies and politicians of all stripes began drumming up anti-immigrant sentiment.

“It is important to recognise that xenophobia can exist without violence. And it’s not sufficient to simply recognise it when people start killing each other,” he said.

A survey in 1997 showed that just six percent of South Africans were tolerant to immigration. In another survey cited by Danso and McDonald in 2001, 75 percent of South Africans held negative perceptions about black African foreigners.

In a most painful of ironies, many South Africans associate foreign black Africans with disease, genocide and dictatorships.

The ills of Apartheid: skin colour, complexion and passes, in this case citizenship, are still the determinants of a better life, or discrimination.

Little illuminates this disparity more than the infamous Lindela Repatriation Centre, built in 1996 for undocumented foreign nationals entering the country. Lindela, outside Johannesburg, has been a scene of abuse, corruption and incessant overcrowding. But the undocumented are also held at police stations, even army bases.

“There is evidence that even in 1994, the records have shown that foreigners were thrown out moving trains because they are killed of bringing diseases, taking jobs, the same rhetoric we hear today,” Jean Pierre Misago, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand, said.

“It didn’t start or end in 2008. It had been building up,” he said.

And build up it did. In 1998, three foreign-nationals were killed on a train, between Johannesburg and Pretoria. In 2000, a Sudanese refugee was thrown from a train on a similar route. The reasons were all the same: blaming foreigners for a lack of jobs, or economic opportunity . In 2007, a shop in the eastern Cape was set alight by a mob.

The violence that escalated in 2008, was distinctive and decisive. It affected black, African foreign nationals; poor and disenfranchised South Africans; in the townships, but there is no evidence to suggest white Europeans were attacked, or those from the Indian subcontinent.

A very particular demographic paid the price, but researchers remind us that at least one third of the victims were actually South African. Xenophobia is not a problem unique to South Africa.

With so many economies battling recession for the better part of the past decade, the deadly triad of competition-survival-blame has seen fear of the foreigner rise across the globe.

“Xenophobia is experienced in the north and the south, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regions and other countries. It’s a worldwide phenomenon,” Misago said.

But, contrary to popular belief, xenophobia in South Africa is not just a problem of the poor.

A national survey of the attitudes of the South African population towards foreign nationals in the country by the South African Migration Project in 2006 found xenophobia to be widespread: South Africans do not want it to be easier for foreign nationals to trade informally with South Africa (59 percent opposed), to start small businesses in South Africa (61 percent opposed) or to obtain South African citizenship (68 percent opposed).

The violence of 2008 was still shocking.

The country fell into mourning; South Africans understood that the innocence of democratic transition, purposefully packaged in cotton and celebrated with confetti, had finally been taken. The mask had fallen.

This was a country now reverberating under the internal schisms of rising dissent and desperation. The South African government, for its part, refused to label the violence as ‘xenophobic’.

Then President Thabo Mbeki, at the very end of his second term in office, said those who wanted to use the term were “trying to explain naked criminality by cloaking it in the garb of xenophobia”.

When I heard some accuse my people of xenophobia, of hatred of foreigners, I wondered what the accusers knew about my people, which I did not know ... and in spite of this reality, I will not hesitate to assert that my people are not diseased by the terrible affliction of xenophobia which has, in the past, led to the commission

of the heinous crime of genocide."

FMR. PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI

The government attempted to reduce the perception of the terror meted out on foreign nationals as benign, unexceptional acts of criminality. If they were orchestrated attacks, they said, ‘a third force’ was behind the violence, apartheid parlance for acts perpetrated by outside forces, or intelligence agencies.

“Of course violence against foreign nationals is criminal. But it can be criminal and xenophobic, it doesn’t have to be either or,” Misago said.

And even before the onset of the latest wave of violence in 2015, there was more to come.

In early 2013, a young Mozambican man named Mido Macia was tied to a police van and dragged through a street close to Johannesburg by officers. He had parked his taxi on the wrong side of the road.

The violence was captured on video

and spread across social media. Resounding condemnation from the middle classes in South Africa and the international community followed. President Zuma himself condemned the incident, but there was still no acknowledgement that these incidents constituted ‘hate crimes’.

When the riots broke out in Soweto in January 2015, it surprised no one.

Jean Pierre Misago

Researcher at the African Centre for

Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand

Michael Neocosmos

Professor and Director UHURU

Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University

Does South Africa have a history of violence against foreign nationals?

How different is South African xenophobia different to what we see in Europe, for example?

READ MISAGO'S RESPONSE

What’s happening now is not new. It’s happened long before 2008, but it peaked in 2008 when so many people died and many people were

displaced. It never stopped since then.

So that we are seeing violence again in different areas of the country is no surprise to us. The way we see it is that government has always tried to call it criminality,

insisting that there is no xenophobia behind it but from a research point of view that’s not correct.

Because, of course violence against foreign nationals is criminal. But it can be criminal and xenophobic, it doesn’t have to be either or.

READ NEOCOSMOS' RESPONSE

It’s not all that different in what was happening in other countries in Europe where those in power have been creating precisely an exclusionary understanding of who the nation is. People who migrate from elsewhere are outsiders who come here to steal…including

apparently stealing our democracy. It’s within that context that we have to understand this rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes more generally. The violence couldn’t take place if the attitudes are not there, and we have to insist on the fact that xenophobia is not a problem of the poor.

How is it xenophobic?

Who in SA is xenophobic?

What’s happening now is not new. It’s happened long before 2008, but it peaked in 2008 when so many people died and many people were displaced. It never stopped since then.

You can see from various survey, attitude surveys taken through the years, that in fact xenophobia is widespread throughout all racial and ethnic groups, all gender groups, all political party groups- supporters throughout the country. In other words, xenophobic attitudes are prevalent irrespective of who you are talking to.

And there is also a culture. When various individual politicians speak, they don’t just simply speak and then everyone forgets about it. It creates a culture. It creates a culture in the same way as the people in the media create a culture by repeating discourses over and over again. And in the media, there was a systematic targeting of immigrants, has calmed down, except for one or two well known cases. But in the 1990’s even supposedly serious newspapers were going on and on about Nigerians all being drug dealers. This creates a culture.

Do we know how it was created culturally? And what’s currently feeding it?

There are different accounts and scholarly accounts on what’s causing xenophobia. And one thing I can say is that xenophobia is not unique to South Africa. It is experienced everywhere, in rich and poor countries, in the north and the south, in the SADC regions and other

countries. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. Migrants, especially poor migrants are affected by these kinds of feelings and sentiments.

One account is that xeno or the tendency to fear the stranger is inherent in human nature. Some scholars give the example that when you go to visit family and you touch a kid and the kid doesn’t know you the reaction is what? To cry, as in “to put away, and I want to go back to my mum”. By this theory, the feeling is natural. But the other theory says that it is actually a social construction. So, this suggest that yes, even if there might be initial fear of the norm, after a while the kid is going to warm up to you once realizing you are not a danger.

It becomes a problem when there is something that perpetuates that fear, the feeling that this person is bad. And that’s where the social

construction comes in. And from that perspective in South Africa, we see the legacy of the past, for instance where the movement of people was perceived as a threat to residents and their livelihoods.

People were told to stay where they are: this is where you live, this is where you get your livelihood. Don’t move. The current dispensation has not been able to shake off that legacy. Movement is seen as a problem, as a threat to peoples’ lives, and we have to remember it’s not just about foreigners.

And so in South Africa the main explanations are the legacy of segregation; this legacy has not been addressed. And even the current leadership keeps using that kind of rhetoric: but calling immigrants or outsiders as criminals as bringing diseases, and blaming them for all sorts of socio-economic ills we face. From the national level to local level where local leaders blame the presence of foreigners for

the shortcomings of service delivery. "We can’t deliver because so many people keep flocking here". "Hospitals can’t cope because we are too many Zimbabweans coming in". "Not enough housing because too many foreigners". "Not enough jobs because foreigners are stealing them".

That kind of rhetoric forces that feeling that foreigners are here to take what is ours, what we deserve, and what supposed to be ours. And we don't have what we want, "because of the presence of outsiders".

Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 3

On a busy Monday morning in mid-March in Soweto, Mphuti Mphuti, the acting head of the South African Spaza and Tuckshop Association, appeared on national TV, waving his South African identity document.

“Your government is saying this document means nothing. They are saying foreigners are equal to you,” Mphuti said.

In the weeks following a wave of attacks against foreign-owned businesses in Soweto earlier this year, groups similar to this association and claiming to represent some 3,000 businesses, have been particularly vocal about the presence of foreign nationals in the townships.

“There is tension, there is anger, especially amongst those who fear competition from the so-called foreigners,” said William Veli Sithole a 56-year-old food vendor in Dobsonville.

But while the gall of the mob shocks other South Africans, their activities have also managed to escape censure.

However, business owners in the country are not likely to be found hurling petrol bombs, or rocks, at foreign owned shops. Often it is a mob, made up of the township mainstay of unemployed youth that form the front lines of service delivery protests, vigilante justice, and repeated attacks against foreign nationals.

“At the time of looting the mob rule takes over, you do not have time to reason; you (only) have time to do what others are doing,” Sipho Mamize, a representative of the NGO Afrika Tikkun's Wings of Life Centre, in Diepsloot, told the national broadcaster.

Mphuti, however, said that at the heart of these township battles is the dereliction of government’s duty to its people that has spurred the resentment of foreign nationals here, culminating in the violent looting of foreign owned stores in January.

The people expect a lot from the government, he said.

For others, like Cynthia Khanyile, a street vendor in Jabulani, the blame lies elsewhere.

“I hate foreigners. I really don’t like them. They take business away from us. We work hard, but then the foreigners come and take our business and our jobs,” she said.

According to 2015 figures released by Statistics South Africa, 21.7 percent of all South Africans live in extreme poverty. At least 53.8 percent survive on less than $75 a month.

It is the politics of survival.

The close knit structures of migrant communities which foster micro-lending and bulk buying schemes popular among Somalis, for example, has only served to disempowerment among locals. The upward mobility of those “from the outside” amidst local inertia is frustrating.

“As South Africans, we still cannot speak about the fruits of this democracy,” Mphuti said.

Sociologist Devan Pillay said that despite the redistributive rhetoric of the ruling-party, the new South Africa has “unleashed a socio-economic system of market violence against the majority of the population.”

Here, the perpetrators of xenophobic acts are victims of the violence meted out by the market.

“Whereas in other instances this might have taken a gendered form, or an ethnic form, in this instance, the convenient scapegoats were easily recognisable foreign nationals,” Pilay writes in “Go Home or Die Here”.

South African townships are a scene of daily pandemonium with residents protesting against poor service delivery, low levels of development or improvement to their lives. Twenty years on, the majority of South Africans continue to live on the margins.

It is this desperate level of inequality, social scientists have warned, that continues to drive resentment and instability.

The attacks on foreigners do not happen in

a vacuum, nor can they be explained simply by hatred of all things foreign. This, after all, is a country still searching for social and economic reconciliation.

We have seen very little government intervention and upliftment of small businesses in the township,"

MPHUTI MPHUTI

“And that’s why we are saying before government can say we are equal with foreign nationals, government must empower small South African businesses. But the critical thing is, South Africans must in the interest

of people who carry the ID book, the green ID book is our license to get preferential treatment from government.”

Days later, a formal agreement between foreign traders and South African business leaders was eventually reached.

The drama of Mphuti’s TV soliloquy was perhaps necessary to assert the will of a subdued population. He understands the discontents in Soweto, and he also knows how those discontents spill out onto the streets.

Orlando East

Jameel Buhle Gobile

Dobsonville

Kwanele Godfrey Gumede

The trouble started in Snake Park and the violence spread everywhere. We were here in the city, and each and every shop is owned by the Somalians. You see what started this, we don't want these people here.

I was born in Soweto, I know what is going on here. There is a way of dealing with this problem. I don’t want to blame government but people are hungry. Me too, I’m hungry. And people will do anything when they are hungry.

READ THE REST OF KWANELE'S STORY

Because when we see lots of shops owned by this people and when we see the shops that was owned by our peoples have been closed.

Each and every shops that was owned by our people has closed. Our brothers our sisters had shops, but when these people come, nobody was buying from our shops, for example: you can sell less price, our people will seek products that's high cost prices, so we feel it's not fair.

I looted their shops, I took the stuff from the shop. We were many, many people, young people, older people, men and women, everybody was angry. There was no leader, it was just us fighting them. We broke their shops and took everything. We were all over Soweto. We went this side, and then go another side, finish that side and go another side.

We were busy looting all over the place.

I didn’t get caught by the police but some of my friends were locked up. Then the police released them after two, or three days.

But now the Somalians are all back and we feel angry, angry, angry, we feel the law is failing the citizen. Because all of them they do business, and we know for sure they don't pay taxes, because they pay taxes to the police. The police they come here and they demand

cold-drinks, biscuits, snacks, sweets, and cigarettes from them. The police are involved in everything, because the police they come here and they demand.

I was working before but this year I don't have a job.

In this township there are a lot of young guys who have a matric certificate but no jobs. I don't have a matric, but when I see my friends, there are many people living here who are not employed. So I’m staying here, each and every day I can see things are not the same. All of my life I was staying here in Soweto. There are a lot a

lot of people without work, I can't say that they don't want to work, but many of them they are trying, but, there is no change. I can't see change.

I can say even if one shop, they hire maybe two, or three people, it will make a big change in our country, I can't say in our country in our city. Because in our city there is full of them.

Yes, when I can see our people they don't have enough strength to open their shops again because everyone buys from the Somalians shops. Yes, I also still buy bread, milk and airtime from the Somalians’ shops.

I can buy the bread from South Africans shops for R12, for example, but the bread by the Somalian people is R11. Everyone will go to Somalian people, because of what, one rand. That's it.

READ THE REST OF JAMEEL'S STORY

People have listening to many false promises from people to employ them, or to create employment. And then on the other side the foreigners are trading and they are successful here among people who are hungry.

And then when there are problems it is usually sparked by service delivery because when protests against service delivery happens, people begin to take advantage of foreign owned shops and then they

drink. If you look into it, after the looting has taken place, two days later, that service delivery protest also dies down because there’s nothing left to loot, nothing to burn, no property to damage, or ransack. What we saw happening in January, we saw young and old,

carrying things from foreign shops like they have just gone shopping. You see, people are hungry and they are unemployed.

For me the solution lies in foreign nationals, who are large in number, to hire a South African in each shop they run. So now, if we estimate, there are 5,000 foreign owned shops on the East Rand, then 5,000 South Africans can be employed there.

People wait for an excuse to raise their issues, like we see what happened here in Soweto after the child was killed in Snake Park. One child was killed by one foreigner but all foreigners were affected. So you see, people wait for an excuse to express their frustration against foreigners.

But you see, if we say the foreigners must go, but if we do that, I think we are bringing economic sanctions to our our country. We depend on foreigners and on imported goods also.

William Veli Sithole

In January, it started when they said a schoolchild was killed by foreigners. Anger boiled, and then it sort of took over even some criminal elements who saw a way of destabilizing the shop owners.

READ THE REST OF WILLIAM'S STORY

My community was drastically affected because in the aftermath of the attacks and looting, people suffered. They were forced to go to faraway places like Shoprite and other shops to go buy food.

We have gotten used to foreigners, they supply most of the things that we use in our houses and they are not far from us. But now there is a criminal element you must know of. The drug addicts, they are the ones

who are being used by certain local shop owners who fear competition from the foreigners.

I don’t fear competition. The foreign shopkeepers are like my brothers. Why should I fear them? They are as human as I am.

I tell you what though, the government and the governments of those foreign nationals struck a deal of which we know nothing of, to have these people, to be brought in, because one morning we woke up they were here, hiring buildings, making shops in people’s houses, even though the rents are exorbitant but they are paying. It’s their own deal the shop owner and the owner of the house.

Foreigners are also trying to make a living for themselves, even though somewhere, somehow they don’t pay tax, while it’s a government issue to handle, its not for me to question how the government goes

about their own stuff regarding taxes.

Our government also knows, the State Security people, know who the perpetrators of the violence are, and they looking the other way sometimes. And mostly, it’s because of power hungry people that cause all those conflicts that only if they could, they should sit around the table and resolve their differences for the sake of peace.

But our government, must address poverty. It is poverty that makes people lose their minds.

We are a peace loving nation. And we accommodate people from outside.

We need to work together to keep things running smoothly for the sake of peace because no parent would like to see their child perish in a war.

Who is responsible for the violence? Individuals or groups?

It’s a group of people coming together and deciding to attack. Most of the time violence happens after a general public meeting, organised by the community leaders, where foreigners are discussed, and then a decision is taken to remove them from the community. In those meetings, it a matter of taking charge: "this is the situation, we can’t continue like this", or "there is nobody else to take care of this issue," or "It’s now us who has to deal with it".

So there is clear evidence that violence happens after local leaders, and they don't have to be local government leaders, meet and decide. And this is another issue: often local resident groups are more

powerful than the local government.

Local council members are often reminded there are other powerful groups calling the shots, and those are the ones they listen to, and in some instances, these informal leaders or groups have specific incentives in the removal of foreign nationals because it consolidates their power and their power comes with economic benefits.

We tend to think that community leadership is a voluntary kind of business, but it’s not. It’s paid, it’s a form of income generation, because community leaders charge you for a service. If you have a problem, they don’t hear the problem before you give them something.

They locate space for big sharks; they locate land, they resolve conflicts and for that everybody pays. So the more legitimacy, the more clients, and the more economic avenues they have. So that’s why we often conclude that the violence we see is politics of other means because it has political and economic motives behind it.

Even if the general communities say we have no problem with foreign nationals because actually we benefit from their presence, their voice gets drowned out. And the police and everybody doesn’t do anything about it. And the problem is, those are not the amongst those arrested. Only those caught in looting and taking things from the shops. But the true perpetrators who are behind the violence are not touched and they continue to influence the next…whenever they feel it

suits their interest. That’s why we have seen some areas have become scenes of repeated violence because the perpetrators are still there, the investigators are still there…there didn’t do anything about the focus…

Who are behind the looters?

We haven’t seen any investigation beyond the looters to look at who is behind the violence; who organised and who reaps the benefits. So people get caught looting, they are released after a few days but the

instigators are still on the streets. The same will happen in Soweto.

So generally speaking, there hasn’t been any systematic sustained will from government, the political leadership and the police to fix this. And it sends out a very bad message. And when there is no political will, there is noone you can call for protection. So what do you do? You try many many things, and that’s where we are now.

Does the larger community never ever intervene?

In some instances, very few, but in very interesting cases, community members have resisted saying that we cannot attack foreigners because we been living with them for a long time. They actually protected them. Even Landlords organising to protect the people who are renting.

But in some of these cases, foreigners have also been forced to agree to certain conditions. Like not selling goods cheaper than the locals, or not opening a certain number of shops.

Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 4

Mxolisi Eric Xayiya, an aide to Gauteng Premier David Makhura, took photos of the fridges and assortment of goods covered in thick plastic at a Somali-owned wholesaler in Mayfair.

He was being ushered through the area west of the Johannesburg city skyline days after foreign traders were attacked in Soweto some 20 minutes away.

Foreign owned stores were looted, foreigners were attacked and their lives threatened.

There, the parking lot of Awash Cash & Carry appeared to be overrun with the salvaged remains of foreign-owned stores.

“We only saw the foreigners leaving but we didn’t know where they were going,” Xayiya said in late January.

At the time, police were still battling to contain the violence and more than 100 alleged looters had been arrested. The violence threatened to spread even further.

And in an impassioned address to more than 500 affected migrants that day, Makhura condemned the violence, but insisted that it should not be seen as anything other than an act of criminality.

“What we have seen happening, ladies and gentlemen, is not xenophobia, it’s criminality,” Makhura told the crowd. “We have gone out to the community to talk, telling our community members that nobody in our communities must try to defend criminality.”

As Makhura continued to condemn the violence, he also commended the police for moving migrants out of what he called “difficult areas”.

A day after Makhura addressed migrant traders, flanked by senior police officials, the City Press made a shocking allegation.

The Johannesburg-based Sunday broadsheet said that people arrested in connection with looting foreign owned stores in Soweto that week claimed local police had spurred them on.

“Cops told us to loot,” the headline said.

Ten Soweto residents in various parts of the township, who had admitted to looting, told the paper that the police had either join in the looting, or looked on while they helped themselves to goods and fridges from foreign-owned stores, while victims raised allegations of police complicity, corruption and neglect.

Two days later, speaking on SAFM, a talk radio station owned by the public broadcaster, Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale, spokesperson for the South African Police Services vehemently rejected City Press’ claims. He said all allegations had to be registered as complaints to be investigated.

However, Makgale admitted that one particular police officer who had been caught looting toilet paper in a widely disseminated video had been identified and action had been taken against him.

“Unlike previous administrations, we don’t brush things under the carpet,” he said. “Any complaints of misconduct by police officers will be investigated without prejudice.”

The South African Human Rights Commission said its research has shown that “negative perceptions of and attitudes to justice and the rule of law abound at the level of affected communities”.

This then points to a “poor relationship between communities and the police and wider judicial system”.

Attacks against foreigners have continued. Researchers say recent bouts of violence against foreign nationals have already outstripped the carnage of 2008. Still no official mention of ‘hate’, or ‘xenophobia’; the language carefully coiled.

In fact, language goes to the heart of the problem, with South Africa conflating rights with nation-state citizenship, despite the promises of the Constitution, to protect all. When the South African government speaks of justice, rights or solutions, the emphasis on citizenship is marked. In so doing, Zuma’s administration, time and time again descend to the very games engendered to create outrage on the street.

In February, following January’s attacks, President Zuma spoke of a “need to support local entrepreneurs and eliminate possibilities for criminal elements to exploit local frustrations.”

And even as Minister of Small Business Development Lindiwe Zulu, recently established a Task Team to look at the underlying causes of the violence against foreign-owned businesses, her point of departure left observers beleaguered. Zulu was reported to the Human Rights Commission for inferring that foreign-business owners in South Africa’s townships could not expect to co-exist peacefully with local business owners unless they shared their trade secrets.

“Foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is to the people of this country first and foremost,” she was quoted as saying .

Minister Zulu later clarified her remarks, but the damage it seems, had already been done.

Analysis

Is there a vacuum of governance that contributes to the problem?

Even before these actions are instigated, organisers weigh up the costs to the benefits. And if the benefits outweigh the costs it is because governance in that specific locality allows it. So there is no accountability, nobody is held accountable, the police do not intervene, the local councillors are not going to help the police and this and that.

The socio-economic and legal controls are in favour of the instigators. In literature they say this happens when social controls are weak. But this is not always the case. Sometimes we see strong leadership is actually behind the violence, using the same social controls to actually mobilize communities toward violence.

The point here is that: violence doesn’t happen if the governance of that area does not allow it. And when I say governance I refer to what is what is broadly defined: moral, legal, social, police, everything

combined. So that kind of governance allows for what is known as a political important structure for violence to take place.

Where do we see violence?

We see violence in areas where… the “official” leadership- from government is either directly involved, as in they’re the ones telling communities to attack foreigners, or complicit with the organisers.

The leadership does not want the state to stand in its way because they, the fear of losing their political positions. That’s the second.

The third scenario is when the leadership is completely weak and has been taken over by those other informal groups who see the use of violence as benefiting them, or responding to their socio-economic interests.

That’s why we see violence not happening in all localities where we see the similar conditions- you have poverty, inequality, poor service delivery in many areas, but we don’t see violence in all areas.

Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 5

Addressing a group of around 300 migrant traders in early March, Amir Sheikh, the chairperson of the Somali Community Board in South Africa, appeared confident. Weeks after violence against foreign nationals erupted in Soweto, he was relating news of progress.

"We have had three meetings with the Minister of Small Business Development and we have given her a briefing of the challenges you face in the township, and what we think is the cause and the solution," Sheikh said.

We know that things are much better now but we don’t want this to happen again."

AMIR SHEIKH

Most of the displaced foreigners had been restored to their stores and a fragile calm had been negotiated. Representatives from both the community and the South African business community in Soweto continued to meet with government to negotiate sustainable conditions for foreigners and South Africans to coexist. Sheikh told the assembled migrants that a cohort of lawyers had offered to take up the case of traders who were affected by the violence in Soweto earlier this year.

The victims of the Soweto violence certainly have a case.

The South African Constitution, along with various international treaties ratified by the South African government, ensures the protection of all persons who reside within the country from violations to the right to liberty and security of person.

And when it comes to cases of violence against foreigners, the state is particularly obliged to protect the victims from individuals who perpetrate the violence.

This time, however, legal redress is not being sought.

Sheik said its the safer, more practical option. He said that two years ago, Ethiopians, Somalis and Bangladeshis were attacked in Duduza in Nigel (east of Johannesburg).

“They actually interdicted the councillors, and the chairperson (of ANC Youth League), and these people were even all detained for up to one week .… But today you go to Duduza and and there is not even a single shop belonging to us there.”

Foreign nationals are reluctant to seek legal redress because of the consequences court cases often inspire. After all, how does justice protect the returning migrant looking to reintegrate into a society already hostile to foreigners?

Lessons learned, leaders of the migrant communities are now determined to prevent a mass exodus of foreign traders from Soweto. With more than 1000 foreign-owned shops in the township, Sheik says: “As long as we can co-exist and agree on certain terms, we don’t want to go the legal route.”

A South African Human Rights Commission report in 2010 (pdf below)

found that “the judicial outcomes for cases arising from the 2008 violence have limited the attainment of justice for victims of the attacks and have allowed for significant levels of impunity for perpetrators”.

About 180 people were arrested in connection with the looting and violence in January. It’s unlikely any of these will result in convictions.

Neocosmos says that the lack of convictions in cases of violence against foreign nationals in South Africa strips the government’s approach through the criminal justice system of any efficacy.

“I know one person was convicted for throwing a guy off a balcony in Durban. How many people are in prison now as a result of those murders? These are murders that were committed on camera in front of everyone. How many people have been convicted?”

The best known case of xenophobic violence in 2008 is of “The Burning Man”, Mozambican national, Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, who was burned alive in the Ramaphosa settlement in full view of the world’s media.

The case was closed in October 2010 with the conclusion that there were no witnesses and no suspects. According to the Sunday Times newspaper, a single sheet of paper indicates detective Sipho Ndybane's investigation :

"Suspects still unknown and no witnesses.” The lack of political will screamed through the short conclusion.

Just over a month after January’s violence against foreigners in Soweto, reports emerge of a petrol bomb thrown at a foreign-owned store in Doornkop. This time, it’s an Ethiopian national that has incurred severe burns. Police say they arrested nine people in connection with the incident.

Two months later this man is still in hospital. No word about his belongings or livelihood. The work of ‘a mob.’

Meanwhile, Abdikadir Ibrahim Danicha,the Somali national who was burned after his shop was petrol bombed in Johannesburg last year, is determined to have his case solved in court.

“I’ve been to court six times already for the one case about public violence and damage to property,” he said. “But the other case, about me burning, I’ve not yet been called to court about it.”

Danicha was one of the traders in the crowd that was addressed by Sheikh and the leaders of the newly-established “Township Business Development-South Africa” group. He is confident that the route chosen by the leadership, the choice of negotiations with government and Soweto business leaders is the right option.

“We have to try to work together,” he said. “Because there is nowhere else we can go.”

Marc Gbaffou

Amir Sheikh

CHAIRPERSON, AFRICAN DIASPORA FORUM

I moved to South Africa from Cote d’Ivoire, in 1997 and in my experience, South Africa can

be very good, and very bad.

CHAIRPERSON OF SOMALI COMMUNITY BOARD IN SOUTH AFRICA.

South Africa is still ahead of many African countries in terms of its economy, its democracy and also the application of the law

READ THE REST OF MARC'S STORY

When you meet people who are not selfish, who know how to liaise with other communities, who know how to regard other communities as an asset, then South Africa becomes interesting.

But South Africa becomes very bad when you have your own brothers and sisters beating you, chasing you away from the community, telling you that you are not part of them. This South Africa is very, very bad.

In 2008, I personally sent 700 people back home because they didn’t feel safe to remain in South Africa.They called on us for help. And with the aid of a local newspaper, we were able to voluntarily repatriate these people.

We strongly believe that the motives behind the attacks against foreign nationals are purely political. It is important that we point out that each time an election is approaching then migrants are being targeted.

We say this cannot continue. Our community members are not scapegoats for the problems of South African communities.

South Africa is very good when you meet with nice people, open minded people who want to change the world, and who want to change the world for everyone, not just for themselves.

I think that we can live together, making use of each other, instead of isolating yourself and being scared of everyone.

READ THE REST OF AMIR'S STORY

Somalia is in turmoil, and that is well known, and when we see some of our other brothers and sisters here, like Ethiopians: they are not even free in their own countries. They can’t talk freely out of fear of being

killed. So in comparison, South Africa has one of the best-written constitutions but implementation is always a problem.

For the Somalis in South Africa who have suffered back home, for the youngsters whose education was disrupted, and who now face persecution in South Africa, it is like being caught between two hells.

But we believe in life after death. But the truth is Somalis in South Africa have a lot of opportunities that we don’t have back at home, despite the problems, the killing, the looting, the maiming, that we face every, single day here.

So between Somalia and South Africa, Somalis have progressed here, some have furthered their education, while others have succeeded in business. We are not in the same state that the first Somali migrants were in 20-years-ago.

Although South Africa has ratified many treaties internationally and in Africa, and also has its own law about the way migrants should be accepted here, we also have to respect the locals, even when they are wrong. We are weak. So even when the Zulu King says all foreigners should leave, we know we can lodge a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission, or we can criticize it in the media, but we cannot go that route because he has many followers and we fear reprisals and victimisation.

So we choose the route of dialogue, sitting with people, explaining to them that we are not a threat to them, and at least we can say we have been successful, because our members are back in Soweto and trading.

But we have also learned through sitting at the table with South African business representatives and government, that even if we are naturalised South African citizens, we will still be treated differently; we will always be a foreigner. We have been called names that can lead to ethnic profiling, we have been accused of being terrorists.

We have found that yes, according to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the law, we are equal to South Africans and but on the ground we are not equal.

What needs to be clarified through better education that it a legal requirement that foreigners have socio-economic rights here.

What are foreigners supposed to do if justice fails them?

Is there a solution to xenophobia in South Africa?

Some foreigners are now turning to illegal firearms for protection. We have seen in January what happens when they use them. That action then legitimizes the violence we see.

So people say, “They are killing us, it’s now self-defence, and we have to protect ourselves. We can’t allow people coming from outside the country to come and kill us in our country.”

This cannot be sustainable. Today it can be foreign nationals, but tomorrow it can be somebody else. So our leaders must be very very careful, they might not care because foreigners are not their constituency… [but] next time it’s going to be somebody else.

When violence makes political and economic sense, it’s dangerous.

Everybody can be an outsider somewhere. We are all outsiders, and we have seen signs when people march to say people coming from another area cannot get jobs here anymore, we should be getting jobs in this company because this is our area.

That’s my view, everyone should get jobs where they born. It’s dangerous, it’s very very serious, I’m very worried because I don’t see leaders taking the issue seriously. They think it's foreigners, but its more than that.

It’s some section of the population deciding who has the right to live where, and to live in our cities and enjoy the benefits they offer.

And that’s dangerous as I said because everyone is a foreigner somewhere. We are all foreigners.

There are solutions but people have to understand there’s a different way of thinking. The only way is people have to sit down and talk and they not talking, there is no culture of talking there is a culture of violence.

So in those situations in where people have organised politically as defending themselves and attacking others, but to bring various people in the community together and talk. Its important to stress that in some places violence has not occurred around foreigners.

And there are important reasons why this has often taken place its because where violence hasn’t taken place people are organised enough to unify the community around certain issues and bring people together to make the point that violence against

foreigners is no solution to anyone.

So this is possible, this idea of talking and organising communally can take place at different levels

of our political society and that is what’s required. Unfortunately in this country we don’t do enough talking.

Photography by Ihsaan Haffejee

Produced by @ajlabs

Mohammed Haddad and Alia Chughtai

BY AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Society and Politics
Art and Culture
Biographies
Publications

Xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa

Xenophobic violence against foreign nationals in South Africa has worsened. South Africa witnessed widespread xenophobic attacks since 1994 in provinces such as Gauteng, Western Cape, Free State, Limpopo and KwaZulu Natal. There has been this and much speculation of the causes and triggers of the violence. A number of reports have highlighted various issues contributing to xenophobia; some of which include poor service delivery and competition for resources. The type of leadership within communities might have an impact on whether or not xenophobic attacks occur in certain communities, which talks to issues of governance. The issue is not only about foreign nationals and their rights, but about the safety of all who live in South Africa. Most incidents of violent attacks have been carried out by black South Africans.

The history of refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa dates back to the 1980s when the country was home to a number of Mozambican refugees, an estimated 350,000, of whom approximately 20% have since returned home. South Africa did not recognise refugees until 1993 and when it became a signatory to the United Nations (UN) and Organisation of African Unity Conventions on Refugees in 1994. The number of refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa has increased in the past years, puts the total number of cross-border migrants in this category at not more than 150 000. The issue regarding the number of undocumented migrants in the country has proved to be a controversial one in South Africa. Central to this debate is the unquantifiable nature of this group of migrants together with a number of credible myths widely accepted as reality in South African society.

South Africa is Africa’s most industrialised country, and it attracts thousands of foreign nationals every year, seeking refuge from poverty, economic crises, war and government persecution in their home countries. While the majority of them are from elsewhere on the continent, such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Ethiopia, many also come from Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Xenophobia is generally defined as ‘the deep dislike of non-nationals by nationals of a recipient state.’ This definition is also used by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). Xenophobia is also a manifestation of racism. Racism and xenophobia support each other and they share prejudiced discourses. They both operate on the same basis of profiling people and making negative assumptions. The profiling in the case of racism is on the basis of race, in the case of xenophobia on the basis of nationality.

When the xenophobic violence in South Africa occurred, the victims were not only foreigners in the sense of a different nationality are attacked but in fact everybody not belonging to the dominant ethnic groups in the main cities, Zulu or Xhosa, was attacked. Members of smaller ethnic groups in South Africa are also viewed as foreigners by fellow South Africans. White people are not viewed as foreigners in the context of xenophobic violence.There had been attacks on South Africans who 'looked foreign' because they were 'too dark' to be South African.

Reasons for the attacks differ, with some blaming the contestation for scarce resources, others attribute it to the country’s violent past, inadequate service delivery and the influence of micro politics in townships, involvement and complicity of local authority members in contractor conflicts for economic and political reasons, failure of early warning and prevention mechanisms regarding community-based violence; and also local residents claims that foreigners took jobs opportunities away from local south Africans and they accept lower wages, foreigners do not participate in the struggle for better wages and working conditions. Other local South Africans claim that foreigners are criminals, and they should not have access to services and police protection. Foreigners are also blamed for their businesses that take away customers from local residents and the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Other South African locals do not particularly like the presence of refugees, asylum-seekers or foreigners in their communities.

Cases of xenophobic attacks

In December 1994 and January 1995, armed youth gangs in the Alexandra Township outside of Johannesburg, Gauteng Province, destroyed the homes and property of suspected undocumented migrants and marched the individuals down to the local police station where they demanded that the foreigners be forcibly and immediately removed. In September 1998, two Senegalese and a Mozambican were thrown from a moving train in Johannesburg by a group of individuals returning from a rally organised by a group blaming foreigners for the levels of unemployment, crime, and even the spread of AIDS. In the township of Zandspruit, a township in of Johannesburg, residents went on a rampage burning down shacks of Zimbabwean foreigners living in the settlement with the intention of driving out foreigners they claimed were stealing their jobs and causing crime.

In 2000, seven xenophobic killings were reported in the Cape Flats district of Cape Town. Kenyan Kingori Siguri Joseph died in Tambo Close, Khanya Park in Gugulethu after being attacked and shot. In separate incidents, two Nigerians were shot dead in NY 99 in Gugulethu. Prince Anya, 36, who owned a restaurant in Sea Point, was hijacked with his wife Tjidi and their toddler in Adam Tas Road, Bothasig. In Mdolomda Street in Langa, two Angolan brothers were trapped inside their house and burnt to death. Nguiji Chicola, 23, and Mario Gomez Inacio, 25, were in their house when it was set alight by several men who then ran away. The brothers burnt to death.

On May 11 2008, an outburst of xenophobic violence in the Johannesburg Township Alexandra triggered more xenophobic violence in other townships. Firstly, it only spread in the Gauteng province. After two weeks, the violence spread to other urban areas across the country, mainly Durban and Cape Town. But it also emerged in townships in more rural areas such as Limpopo Province. The violence consisted of attacks both verbally and physically by inhabitants of the townships on other inhabitants. The victims were called foreigners, referring to their nationality being non-South African and predominantly Zimbabwean and Mozambican.As a result many houses were burnt, 342 shops were looted and 213 burnt down. Hundreds of people were injured, thousands chased away and the death toll after the attacks stood at 56.

Mozambican Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, who was 35 years old, was beaten, stabbed and set alight in Ramaphosa informal settlement on the East Rand. Nobody had been arrested for his horrible murder. Police closed the case on 27 October 2010 after concluding that there were no witnesses and no suspects. In all, 62 people were killed. On 24 May 2008, Spaza shops owned by Pakistan, Somalis, and Ethiopians were attacked, their stocks were looted and the doors ripped down. The looting was widespread in Sebokeng, Orange Farm, and Evaton areas South of Johannesburg.

From 14 to 17 November 2009, 3000 Zimbabwean citizens living in the rural community of De Doorns, an informal settlement near Breede Valley Municipality, in the Western Cape was displaced as a result of xenophobic violence. It selectively targeted Zimbabweans despite the presence of other foreign nationals (e.g. Lesotho nationals) living and working in the same area. There had been destruction and looting of Zimbabweans dwellings by their South African neighbours.

Violence occurred in three informal settlements: Ekuphumleni, Stofland and Hasie Square located in Ward 2 of De Doorns, Breede Valley Municipality, Western Cape. The first wave of attacks took place on 14 November 20009 in Ekuphumleni, displacing 68 Zimbabwean nationals. On 17 November 2009, the violence intensified, spreading to Stofland and Hasie Square. This second wave displaced approximately 3000 Zimbabweans. While the displaced initially sought protection at the De Doorns police station, they were moved to a local sports field called Hexvallei Sportklub on 18 November 2009 as numbers increased. Shelter and humanitarian assistance were provided at the sports field.

On 27 February 2013, eight South African police officers tied the 27 years old Mozambican man, Mido Macia, to the back of a police van and dragged him down the road. Subsequently, the man died in a police cell from head injuries. The incident happened in Daveyton, East of Johannesburg, South Africa. On 26 May 2013, two Zimbabwean men were killed by South Africans mob in xenophobic violence in Diepsloot, South Africa.

In January 2015, a Somali shop owner shot and killed a 14-year-old boy, Siphiwe Mahori, during an alleged robbery in Soweto Township. The boy was shot in the neck and died within 15 minutes. Lebogang Ncamla, 23, was another victim when he was shot three times in the arm. The incident triggered waves of attacks and looting of foreign owned shops. An estimated 120 Spaza shops owned by Somalis and Bangladeshis across Snake Park, Zola, Meadowlands, Slovoville, Kagiso, Zondi and Emdeni in Soweto were looted. It was also reported that police actively stole goods and helped others raid the shops during the worst attacks on foreigners. In Zondi Section, the police instructed looters to queue outside a foreign-owned shop and allowed four of them in at a time to prevent a stampede. Police arrested a suspect accused of killed 14-year-old Mahori, along with a number of looters and foreign nationals for possessing three unlicensed firearms.

On 5 March 2015, xenophobic attacks occurred in Limpopo Province. Foreigners on the outskirts of Polokwane left their shops after protesting villagers threatened to burn them alive and then looted them. Violence erupted in the Ga-Sekgopo area after a foreign shop owner was found in possession of a mobile phone belonging to a local man who was killed. Villagers demanded answers as to how the shop owner got the killed man's phone. They didn't know whether it was sold to him or was brought there to be fixed. Violent protests erupted with villagers sending all the foreigners packing and pushing them out of 11 villages in Sekgopo. One of the shop owners reported loss of stock.

On 21 March 2015, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini made comments that foreigners should go back to their home countries because they are changing the nature of South African society with their goods and enjoying wealth that should have been for local people. This horrified foreigners who have been dealing with a spate of xenophobic attacks around the country. King Zwelithini made these comments at the moral regeneration event in Pongola, Kwazulu Natal Province. The king’s statement came while Congolese nationals were mourning deaths caused by a series of xenophobic attacks. Noel Beya Dinshistia from Congo, a bouncer at a local nightclub, was doused in a flammable substance before being set alight while on duty two weeks ago.

On 8 April 2015, the spate of xenophobic violence increased. On 10 April 2015, two Ethiopian brothers were critically injured when their shop, in a shipping container, was set on fire while they were trapped inside. One of the men died while in hospital. The other is fighting for his life.

On 12 April 2015, Attacks on foreign nationals continued in KwaZulu-Natal when shops in Umlazi and KwaMashu, outside Durban, were torched. In V Section, a shop owned by a foreign national was set on fire by a mob of suspects. There was another fire which we believewas set by local people at a foreign-owned property in G Section. Almost 2,000 foreign nationals from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Burundi have been displaced as a result of the violence. Five people have been killed.

On 14 April 2015, Looting of foreign shops spread to Verulam, north of Durban following a day of clashes between locals, foreigners, and police in the city centre, KwaZulu-Natal. About 300 local people looted foreign-owned shops, and only two people have been arrested. A 14-year-old boy became the latest fatality. He was shot dead during looting in KwaNdlanzi, allegedly by two security guards. In Durban's Central Business District (CBD), a car was set alight and police fired rubber bullets, stun grenades and teargas canisters in clashes between looters and foreigners.

Four refugee camps have been set up by the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government to house the displaced foreigners who say they are destitute, with some saying they want to go home. At least 28 people were arrested on Sunday night during xenophobic violence in which Somali, Ethiopian and Pakistani people were attacked.

Carien, J. T. (2009). Ernesto Burning an analyses of Dutch print media coverage on the 2008 xenophobic violencein South Africa. Available at: https://carienjtouwen.wordpress.com/essays/reporting-on-xenophobia-in-south-africa/ [accessed on 13 April 2015]|Cornish, Jean-Jacques. (2015). South Africa: Xenophobic Attacks Erupt in South Africa's Limpopo Province. Available at: http://allafrica.com/stories/201503051136.html [accessed on 14 April 2015]|IoL news. (2000). xenophobic attacks: seven die in one month. Available at: http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/xenophobic-attacks-seven-die-in-one-month-1.45733#.VS4-LPCROYM [accessed on 15 April 2015]|Misago, J, P. (2009). Violence, labour and displacement of Zimbabweans in De Doorns, Western Cape. Migration policy brief 2 . Forced migration studies programme, University of the Witwatersrand. |Nicolson, G and Simelane, BC. (2015). Xenophobia rears its head again: Looting, shooting, dying in Soweto. Available at: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-01-22-xenophobia-rears-its-head-again-looting-shooting-dying-in-soweto/#.VS4eg_CROYM [accessed on 15 April 2015]|Valji, N. (2003). Creating the Nation: The rise of violent xenophobia in the New South Africa. Unpublished Masters Thesis, York University. Available at: http://csvr.org.za/old/docs/foreigners/riseofviolent.pdf [accessed on 14 April 2015]|Wicks, J. (2015). KZN xenophobic violence spreads to KwaMashu. Available at: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/KZN-xenophobic-violence-spreads-to-KwaMashu-20150413 [accessed on 14 April 2015] |Hans, B. (2015). King’s anti-foreigner speech causes alarm. Available at: http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/king-s-anti-foreigner-speech-causes-alarm-1.1835602#.VSzaLPCROYM [accessed on 14 April 2015]

Listen to exactly what King Goodwill Zwelithini said about foreigners

Xenophobia rears its head again: Looting, shooting, dying in Soweto

Soweto unrest: 'Cops told us to loot '

Collections in the Archives

Know something about this topic.

Towards a people's history

Emma Heaney, "Feminism Against Cisness" (Duke UP, 2024‪)‬ New Books in Gender

Social Sciences

The contributors to Feminism Against Cisness (Duke UP, 2024) showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience. The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalize brutalizing race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, this volume demonstrates the violent work that cis ideology has done and thinks toward a future for feminism beyond this ideology's counterrevolutionary pull. Contributors. Cameron Awkward-Rich, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Jules Gill-Peterson, Emma Heaney, Margaux L. Kristjansson, Greta LaFleur, Grace Lavery, Durba Mitra, Beans Velocci, Joanna Wuest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

More Episodes
New Books Network

Terms of Use

Privacy Policy
By Collections
By Departments

Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia

Access Status

Citable link to this page, collections.

FAS Theses and Dissertations [6566]

Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)

Show Statistical Information

New Times, New Thinking.

The Weekend Essay

What Orwell got right

The more the world in which Nineteen Eighty-Four was written has changed, the more it has stayed the same.

By Robert Colls

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” — O’Brien, “ Nineteen Eighty-Four ”

George Orwell didn’t get everything right. Contrary to popular myth, he often got things wrong. In “Old George’s Almanac” ( Tribune , December 1945) for instance, he predicted that the US and Soviet Russia would do a postwar deal at Britain’s expense, that the Americans would suffer a postwar depression, that Germany would fall into banditry, and that Asia would turn xenophobic. He started the war thinking the British people wouldn’t fight and ended it expecting a collapse in the birth rate. He once argued that you could show your solidarity with people by killing them.

He didn’t get everything right in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , either. There wasn’t a nuclear war or revolution, and whatever system we live under now, it is not a paranoid left-fascist dictatorship. We’ve never had anyone or anything remotely resembling Big Brother. There is no “terror”. We have not been looted of our law or language. Our institutions haven’t been wiped out – they creak on. Some of this happened in other places – Nagasaki and Hiroshima took the bomb, and foul tyrannies took over in eastern Europe and elsewhere – but not all at once and not all in the same way. The Marshall Plan stabilised western Europe and Nato defended it. If you see a Big Brother in the sky above London, it’s more likely to be a rap star.

Then there are those things that have happened but not in the way Orwell imagined. It’s possible to see the novel’s three great global formations in the post-1945 settlement – Oceania in the West, Eurasia in Russia, and Eastasia in China. But the world we live in now is a messier, more volatile place than Orwell’s power blocs, and although proxy wars across continents have never stopped, no wars have been fought directly between the three great civilisations (call them what you will). Decolonisation of the old European empires complicated the world order even more, and the rise of a fourth geopolitical formation, the European Union , has yet to register.

We all have TV, but not like Winston’s TV, which receives as well as transmits information and instruction. We have mobile phones instead, billions of them, one in every back pocket, but what they receive and transmit goes first and foremost to capitalist corporations in God knows where, not a vast central state apparatus in London. Pens have become scarce in our world as well as in Winston’s, but not because everyone now uses dictaphones; and no one makes a phone call in Nineteen Eighty-Four . We have a national lottery like the world of the novel has a national lottery, but ours is not a fraud because people do occasionally win. Nothing works properly in their world, and little seems to work properly in ours, but the reasons are different. In Oceania, the problem is state centralisation and for us the problem is market diffusion.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Administration / Office
Arts and Culture
Board Member
Business / Corporate Services
Client / Customer Services
Communications
Construction, Works, Engineering
Education, Curriculum and Teaching
Environment, Conservation and NRM
Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
Finance Management
Health - Medical and Nursing Management
HR, Training and Organisational Development
Information and Communications Technology
Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives
Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities
Legal Officers and Practitioners
Librarians and Library Management
OH&S, Risk Management
Operations Management
Planning, Policy, Strategy
Printing, Design, Publishing, Web
Projects, Programs and Advisors
Property, Assets and Fleet Management
Public Relations and Media
Purchasing and Procurement
Quality Management
Science and Technical Research and Development
Security and Law Enforcement
Service Delivery
Sport and Recreation
Travel, Accommodation, Tourism
Wellbeing, Community / Social Services

I could make a long list of all our travails compared with all their travails but whatever they are, they are not comparable. Vape lounges are everywhere, but they are not where you go to get vapourised. Pornography is easily available but how much is self-generated? Horrible histories are what middle-class people buy for their children at Waterstones, not what kids are forced to read at school (“In the old days, before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city we know today”). Gay love, if that is what Winston shares with O’Brien, is no longer hidden. Capitalism, if that is what we have, has been transformed, not abolished. Communism has fallen but, according to the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg , Russian security services still appear to be spooked by a shabby little building in Ivanovo calling itself the George Orwell Library. No one talks any more of the Laws of Motion of Capital, and those who do don’t believe it. We are so much richer now (UK GDP is six times more than it was in 1948) but not, as Orwell argued, by holding on to the empire.

All these features of a world Orwell did not imagine have brought their own quandaries that he would have recognised. With a camera computer in every pocket, we have become our own watchers of the watched. Orwell’s newspeak had teams of people employed to reduce language beneath the threshold of everything that makes us human, but this isn’t Twitter, and it can’t be squared with the imminent quantum leap that world media is about to take with AI. Nobody is in control. Since 1949, far from seeing the submergence of the individual by the state, we have seen the rise of mass narcissism regardless of the state. The US saw an attack on its seat of government on 6 January 2020 by a rabble holding mobile phones to their faces. Everything is there to be selfied; and everything selfied is all there is. Orwell feared “fellow travellers” who kept their influence secret. Now we have “influencers” who do it in the daylight.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four , the Party seeks to control all speech and therefore all thought. Our elites also prefer their own ways of speaking and thinking, but they monitor our language by their control of public and business institutions, not party edict. We live in a society increasingly policed by graduates. Come, comrade, show me your language and I will show you how to free your mind. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Orwell never set out to predict. He merely set out the problem and the problem was not the accuracy of his warnings but the hell he unleashed in a book.

Winston and Julia live in a sealed space that has no beginning or end. I say “space” but what I mean is “mind”. As in a nightmare, everything in Nineteen Eighty-Four is about not knowing who or where you are. There is no God . There are no morals. There is no politics. There is no culture. There is no trust. There can be no friends. Soon there will be no thought, only conformity. In the name of redeeming everyone, the state is devoted to destroying everyone. If you transgress, you will surely die. If you don’t transgress, you have lost your mind. Losing your mind, after all, is the point. O’Brien the chief inquisitor is a lunatic, a liar and a psychopath but he knows everything because he has the power to contain everyone. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness,” he says. The Party has abolished objective truth. It has almost abolished the family; the orgasm is next. O’Brien says he could identify as a soap bubble if he wanted to, and float in the air, and as his mind “contained Winston’s mind”, we can see how it works. Gravity only matters when the Party is forced to deal with the real world. “Doublethink”, a sort of dialectical method of thinking treacherously in opposites, allows all this to be true and untrue at the same time. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Winston is insane as well, remember. Not as mad as his interlocutor, still holding on to an idea of the world as it is, but sick enough in ordinary circumstances to imagine raping and murdering Julia only minutes after meeting her. It is Julia, the anti-intellectual in a system of mindless hate run by intellectuals, who is the true hero of Nineteen Eighty-Four . Not Winston, and not O’Brien, even though he gets all the best lines.

In such circumstances we assume that self-surveillance is normal and self-censorship rife. Julia had been self-censoring for years. Winston is learning how, and for a time we think O’Brien and the Brotherhood were (must have been) masters of it. In other words, we feel there must be widespread self-censorship in their world just as we feel there must be in ours. But it’s hard to tell. I’m doing it now. Either way, nobody wants the Two-Minute Hate – “an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowtorch”. WAR IS PEACE.

There are two refrains. One is, “We are the dead” – to which Julia dryly responds, “We’re not dead yet.” And the other is, “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” – a statement Orwell notes as a “mystical truth” and a “palpable absurdity”.

Yet he believed it. In so far as he had a politics, Orwell believed in the common decency and good sense of the English people. He spent the first half of the Second World War working for the BBC’s Eastern Service, broadcasting to the Indian subcontinent. He spent the second half writing about how ordinary people in England saw themselves and their country – not in books and theories, not in newspaper editorials, not in political parties or great leaders, but in each other, out there on the street, in the garden, in the four-ale bar, at work and at home and in the armed forces. What Gramsci rather abstractly called the “national popular”, Orwell cleverly called “My Country Right or Left” ( Folios of New Writing , 1940).

If there was hope it could only be with the proles, and yet right from the start in his notes for Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell recognised their “equivocal” position in the resistance movement (if there is a resistance movement). Big Brother fell but we don’t know who to (although Sandra Newman’s 2023 novel Julia makes a good stab at it). At first his publisher saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as Orwell’s “final breach” with socialism, worth a “cool million votes to the Conservatives”. Orwell was quick to reject this, but he was never slow to identify that mixture of condescension and distaste in left intellectual circles towards working-class people. As for now, our elites still prefer their own hierarchy of virtue to the democracy of other people, and no one pretends that Labour is a working-class party. For the people, maybe. By the people, not. As the American writer Thomas Meaney has remarked in these pages , the globalisation that was wished upon them now feels like a putsch.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in the Hebrides between 1946 and 1948 and published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. Orwell died seven months later in University College Hospital off Euston Road in London. Since then we have all learned to live with “Big Brother”, and “Orwellian” has joined “Shakespearian” and “Dickensian” in an elite company of adjectives. Even the Staggers’ best writers do it. Bruno Maçães’s recent Orwellism – “The globalisation of conflict ultimately means that the only universal principle is conflict itself” – is so good it could be a fake.

We are not talking here about ways of getting things wrong. We are not talking either of “Old George’s Almanac”. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a literary work before it is a political work, taking its cue from a wide range of fiction including, for example, novels as different as Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) and CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945). It was never meant to be a prophecy. Orwell caught what he saw as a last moment in our history and bound it to what was certainly the last moment in his own, to create a hell on Earth that, once born, could never be unborn.

Tortured and beaten and looking in the mirror on legs that look like sticks, Winston is horrified to see that it is him and we are horrified to see that it is Belsen. Orwell once called the work of Salvador Dalí a “direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even… life itself”. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four is not being raped and murdered. It is what being raped and murdered might feel like. It is a work of art stamping on the human imagination forever.

Robert Colls is the author of “George Orwell: English Rebel” (OUP)

[See also: Salman Rushdie’s warning bell ]

Content from our partners

Peatlands are nature’s unsung climate warriors

How the apprenticeship levy helps small businesses to transform their workforce

How to reform the apprenticeship levy

Nigel Farage’s very English populism

Éric Hazan, rebel publisher

Keir Starmer’s promise of stability will come back to haunt him

The Experience of Xenophobia in South Africa

January 2011
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81(1):90-3

Australian Catholic University
This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.

Stellenbosch University

Discover the world's research

25+ million members
160+ million publication pages
2.3+ billion citations

Thabiso Malatji

Muyingnan Lin

S AFR J PSYCHOL

Jonas Sello

Babette Stephanie Gekeler

Ernest Gellner

COUNS PSYCHOL

POLIT PSYCHOL

N Mohlakoana
South Johannesburg
Recruit researchers
Join for free
Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s Most Formidable Opponent

By Masha Gessen

A blackandwhite portrait of Alexey Navalny.

Alexei Navalny spent at least a decade standing up to the Kremlin when it seemed impossible. He was jailed and released. He was poisoned, and survived. He was warned to stay away from Russia and didn’t. He was arrested in front of dozens of cameras, with millions of people watching. In prison, he was defiant and consistently funny. For three years, his jailers put him in solitary confinement, cut off his access to and arrested his lawyers, piled on sentence after sentence, sent him all the way across the world’s largest country to serve out his time in the Arctic, and still, when he appeared on video in court, he laughed at his jailers. Year after year, he faced down the might of one of the world’s cruellest states and the vengeance of one of the world’s cruellest men. His promise was that he would outlive them and lead what he called the Beautiful Russia of the Future. On Friday, they killed him. He was forty-seven years old.

Hours after the news of his death broke, his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, addressed the Munich Security Conference. “I don’t know whether to believe the news, the terrible news, which we are only getting from state-controlled sources in Russia,” she said, from the conference’s main stage. “As you all know, for many years we’ve been unable to believe Putin and his government. They always lie. But, if it is true, I want Putin and everyone around him, his friends and his government, to know that they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, to my family, and to my husband. The day of reckoning will come very soon.”

In Russia, Vladimir Putin was visiting an industrial park in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals. He took questions from staff and students, who were seated a safe distance from the Russian President on what appeared to be the plant floor. Putin seemed to be in an unusually good mood. He bantered and flirted with the audience. He boasted that Western sanctions in response to the war in Ukraine had boosted industrial production inside Russia. He hadn’t seemed so jovial in public in years.

In exactly a month, Russia will hold a ritual that it calls an election. With no actual alternative to Putin, who has total control of the media and the so-called electoral institutions, the current Russian President will be crowned for another six-year term, extending his time in power to thirty-one years. Navalny tried to run against Putin six years ago, but the rigged system stopped him. His very name was banished from the airwaves. Still, even when the system shut him out, and, later, when it put him in prison, Navalny remained Putin’s most formidable opponent.

Putin could only envy Navalny’s ability to mobilize Russians. In July, 2013, as the political crackdown that accompanied the beginning of Putin’s third official Presidential term intensified, a court in the provincial city of Kirov sentenced Navalny to five years behind bars on trumped-up embezzlement charges. That evening, thousands of people risked arrest by taking to the streets in Moscow in a rare spontaneous protest. The following morning, Navalny was summarily released from prison, in violation of established legal procedure. Putin had long been terrified of mass protests. Now he had to be equally afraid of Navalny, a man whose very existence seemed to make people capable of overcoming their own fears.

It’s tempting to see Navalny’s apparent murder, as some American analysts have, as a sign of weakness on the part of Putin. But a dictator’s ability to annihilate what he fears is a measure of his hold on power, as is his ability to choose the time to strike. Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his own future. As he sees it, Donald Trump is poised to become the next President of the U.S. and to give Putin free rein in Ukraine and beyond . Even before the U.S. Presidential election, American aid to Ukraine is stalled, and Ukraine’s Army is starved for troops and nearing a supply crisis. Last week, Putin got to lecture millions of Americans by granting an interview to Tucker Carlson . At the end of the interview, Carlson asked Putin if he would release Evan Gershkovich , a Wall Street Journal reporter held on espionage charges in Russia. Putin proposed that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person, who out of patriotic sentiments liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, probably the only Russian assassin who has been caught and convicted in the West; he is held in Germany. A week after the interview aired, Russia has shown the world what can happen to a person in a Russian prison. It’s also significant that Navalny was killed on the first day of the Munich conference. In 2007, Putin chose the conference as his stage for declaring what would become his war against the West. Now, with this war in full swing, Putin has been excluded from the conference, but the actions of his regime—the murders committed by his regime—dominate the proceedings.

Russian prison authorities have said that Navalny felt ill after returning from his daily walk, lost consciousness, and could not be revived. They have ascribed his death to a pulmonary embolism. Anna Karetnikova, a prisoners’-rights activist and a former member of the civilian-oversight body of Russia’s prison system, has said that prison authorities routinely use embolism as a catchall term. Sergey Nemalevich, a journalist with the Russian Service of Radio Liberty, noticed that the ostensible timing of the death didn’t seem to jibe with Navalny’s recent description of his schedule in solitary confinement: he had said that his daily walk took place at six-thirty in the morning, but prison authorities claimed that, on the day of his death, he returned to his cell in the afternoon. Nemalevich suggested that Navalny was dead long before an ambulance—which authorities said took a mere seven minutes to travel twenty-two miles to the prison—was called to declare him dead.

Navalny, who was educated as a lawyer, became active in politics in the early two-thousands and emerged as a public figure around 2010. His early politics were ethno-nationalist, at times overtly xenophobic, and libertarian. He advocated for gun rights and a crackdown on migrants. But he found his agenda and his political voice in documenting corruption. He built a movement based on the premise that citizens, even in Russia, could and should exercise control over the way that government money is spent. In the ensuing years, he evolved from an ethno-nationalist to a civic nationalist, from a libertarian to a social democrat. He learned new languages, read incessantly, and incorporated new ideas into his program. He focussed, increasingly, not only on political power but on social welfare. During the past three years, he used the pulpit provided by an endless series of court hearings to air his political views. In a courtroom speech on February 20, 2021, he outlined a vision for a country with a better health-care system and a more equitable distribution of wealth. He proposed changing the slogan of his political movement from “Russia will be free” to “Russia will be happy.” He continued to assert this hopeful agenda, even as he grew more and more gaunt and even as he was forced to appear in court on a video screen, separated from his audience by glass, a grate, and thousands of miles.

Navalny’s public voice was full of irony without being cynical. He saw the targets of his investigations as ridiculous men with large yachts, small egos, and staggeringly bad taste. He took their abuses seriously by cutting them down to size. This was half of his charisma. The other half was his love story. More than anything else in the world, it seemed, he wanted to impress Yulia. Confined to a cube in a courtroom, he put his hands in the shape of a heart, gesturing at her. He sent love notes from prison, which were posted to social-media for him. On her birthday last July, he posted,

You know, Yulia, I’ve made several attempts at writing the story of our meeting. But every time after I write a couple of sentences, I stopped in terror and couldn’t keep going. I am terrified that it could have not happened. I mean, it was a coincidence. I could have looked in the other direction, you could have turned away. The one second that determined the course of my life, could have turned out differently. Everything would have been different. I probably would have been the saddest person on earth. How awesome is it that we looked at each other back then and that now I can shake my head, drive away these thoughts, rub my forehead, and say, “Phew, what a weird nightmare.”

This seemed the only thing that could have scared him. Reading his wildly popular social-media accounts felt like watching a romantic comedy, but one that starred a superhero.

A year after the Kremlin’s attempt to put Navalny away failed, Putin took a hostage: Alexei’s brother Oleg was jailed on trumped-up charges. It was an old reliable tactic. The henchmen assumed that, with Oleg behind bars, Alexei would cease his political activities to keep his brother safe. But the brothers made a pact to keep going. Alexei built a sprawling organization that expanded far beyond documenting corruption. He ran for mayor of Moscow. He built a network of political offices that could have enabled a Presidential race if such a thing as elections actually existed. He grew frustrated that journalists weren’t following his leads or undertaking investigations of their own, and so he founded his own media: YouTube shows and Telegram channels that publicized the results of his group’s investigations. Navalny’s work spawned an entire generation of independent Russian investigative media, many of which continue working in exile, documenting not only criminal assets but also war crimes and the activities of Russia’s assassins at home and abroad.

The state harassed Navalny, placed him under house arrest, pushed the organization out of its offices, jailed some of its activists and forced the rest into exile, declared them “extremists,” and started going after people who had donated even a small amount of money to the group. Then, in August, 2020, the F.S.B. poisoned Navalny with Novichok , a chemical weapon. He was meant to die on a plane. But the pilot made an emergency landing, doctors administered essential first aid, and Yulia took over the superhero role, pressuring the authorities to let her take Alexei to Germany for treatment.

After weeks in a coma, Navalny emerged and teamed up with another investigator, Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian journalist then working with Bellingcat. Grozev got the receipts: the flight manifests that showed that Navalny had been trailed by a group of F.S.B. agents, some of whom also happened to be chemists. Navalny supplied the performative flair. He called his would-be murderers on the phone and managed to get a guileless confession out of one, complete with the detail of where the poison had been placed: in the crotch area of Navalny’s boxer shorts. The scene would later be incorporated into the film “ Navalny ,” which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, but, before that, Navalny put it in his own made-for-YouTube movie, titled “I Called My Killer. He Confessed.” It was released on December 21, 2020.

A month later, Navalny flew back to Moscow . His friends had tried to talk him out of it. He wouldn’t hear of staying in exile and becoming politically irrelevant. He imagined himself as Russia’s Nelson Mandela: he would outlive Putin’s reign and become President. Perhaps he believed that the men he was fighting were capable of embarrassment and wouldn’t dare to kill him after he’d proved that they had tried to. He and I had argued, over the years, about the fundamental nature of Putin and his regime: he said that they were “crooks and thieves”; I said that they were murderers and terrorists. After he came out of his coma, I asked him if he had finally been convinced that they were murderers. No, he said. They kill to protect their wealth. Fundamentally, they are just greedy.

He thought too highly of them. They are, in fact, murderers.

All over Russia on Friday, people were laying flowers in memory of Navalny. In the few cities where memorials exist to past victims of Russian totalitarianism, these monuments became the destinations. Police were breaking up gatherings, throwing out flowers, and detaining journalists. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

First she scandalized Washington. Then she became a princess .

What exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans ?

The unravelling of an expert on serial killers .

When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too .

The meanings of the Muslim head scarf .

The slippery scams of the olive-oil industry .

Critics on the classics: our 1991 review of “Thelma & Louise.”

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections, Macron calls snap vote

Outside france and germany, the centre holds.

T HE ELECTIONS to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all in France, where Emmanuel Macron, who saw the hard right trounce his own candidates, responded by dissolving the French parliament and calling a risky snap election.

The continued rise of populist parties in the EU ’s two biggest countries, even if not matched in other countries, will make it harder for centrist parties to run the bloc’s powerful institutions in Brussels without the support of nationalist politicians once considered beyond the pale.

In France the surge of the populist right was so strong that, to widespread surprise, its president, Emmanuel Macron, announced that fresh elections to the National Assembly will be held on June 30th and July 7th. At the vote for the European Parliament, which had been expected to be the last nationwide ballot ahead of the presidential election of 2027, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally ( RN ) was projected to have scored nearly 32% of the vote—more than double the share secured by Mr Macron’s party, which it had beaten only narrowly five years ago. Add to that another 5.5% for Reconquest, a migrant-bashing far-right outfit whose lead candidate is Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, and the hard right now looks like the country’s dominant political force. Even before the result, opposition parties had demanded a dissolution of the parliament in the event of a defeat for the president’s centrist alliance. Mr Macron will now wager the rest of his political credibility on a gamble that could well leave him with a reduced minority and a thumping vote for the RN .

In Germany the ruling coalition also fared abysmally. All three of its component parties were beaten by the nationalist Alternative for Germany—despite a slew of scandals enveloping the party and its top candidate during the campaign. (It was even, shortly before the election, kicked out of its EU -level alliance with the National Rally and others). The Social Democrats of Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, fell to their worst score in a national election in almost 150 years of existence. The liberal FDP , a junior coalition partner, barely exceeded 5%. If the party falls below that threshold at next year’s general election it will fall out of parliament. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union, the main opposition, had a good night, especially for embattled centrists, topping the poll easily.

For all the drama in Berlin and especially Paris, the projections of a broader hard-right takeover of the EU do not appear to have materialised. As results came in, projections were for the combined hard-right forces within the parliament, including the various allies of the AfD , the RN and of Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, to increase their share of seats only slightly, from 17% to 19%.

That is well short of the polls that at one point saw them match the centre-right. In many countries they performed short of expectations. Geert Wilders, the hard-right firebrand who won the most votes in national elections in November, lost to centrist adversaries this time. In Belgium the xenophobic Vlaams Belang failed to top the polls as expected. The Sweden Democrats, also on the hard-right, had a rare bad night.

Despite the big impact the European elections will have on member states’ domestic politics, the actual point of the five-yearly EU elections is to appoint a new chamber of 720 MEP s. Though they have few powers compared with national parliamentarians, their support is essential to enacting key EU -level policies such as cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, or continued assistance to Ukraine.

The first important task for the newly elected parliamentarians will be to approve EU leaders’ choice for the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s powerful executive arm. The incumbent, Ursula von der Leyen, will probably now be given the first shot at staying in the job after her centre-right alliance, the European People’s Party, came top with over 180 seats, roughly the same 25% share as it scored in 2019. The EU ’s 27 leaders will meet on June 17th to discuss their proposed candidate for the top job.

But even the modest increase in the seats going to the hard right may be enough to make it hard for the German to cobble a majority for ratification in the Brussels chamber. The 400-or-so seats that will go to the parties that backed her in 2019 may not be enough to secure 361 votes in what will be a secret ballot. The coming weeks were expected to be dominated by whether Ms von der Leyen could convince the likes of Ms Meloni to back her—and at what political cost. Now, however, all the attention will be diverted to France, where the most pro- EU major politician on the European stage may soon find his authority in tatters. ■

Explore more

A D-Day commemoration that was not just about beating Hitler

Biden, Macron and Zelensky vowed to defend Ukraine and democracy

Peak Europe turns 25: why June 1999 marked the continent’s zenith

Europe had a glorious future, once. What happened?

Remembering the Normandy landings

Thanksgiving in France for the bravery of America and other allies

IMAGES

Xenophobia and Racism: A Global Menace Affecting Human Rights Free
Xenophobia
Xenophobia has accelerated rapidly in the Western countries. According
Theoretical Considerations of Xenophobia
Xenophobia
(PDF) Xenophobia is really that: a (rational) fear of the stranger

VIDEO

"Xenophobia"- humankind xenophobic song| человеческая ксенофобная песня
Xenophobia Rushing The House
React on Xenophobia. What's Xenophobia by Prashant Dhwan sir
Xenophobia and biggotry spreading misinformation to Americans
xenophobia
xenophobia

COMMENTS

5 Essays About Xenophobia
5 Essays About Xenophobia. The word "xenophobia" has ties to the Greek words "xenos," which means "stranger or "guest," and "phobos," which means "fear" or "flight.". It makes sense that today we define "xenophobia" as a fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners. Xenophobia has always existed, but the world has ...
The Long History of Xenophobia in America
One of the saddest things I've seen in the past few years is an internalization of xenophobia. I have volunteered in my kids' public high school, helping mostly refugee students write their college essays. Here in Minneapolis, they are largely from Somalia. In 2017, some of my students had been in this country for only four years.
"They Have Robbed Me of My Life": Xenophobic Violence Against Non
Summary. "Jean," a Congolese shop owner, received a disturbing call on the night of September 2, 2019. On the other end of the line was his landlord, a South African, who told him that rioters ...
PDF Xenophobia in South Africa Nomsa Dumani
This essay is set to discuss and explore the validity of xenophobia in South Africa. A country that was once a victim of brutality, slavery and hatred towards the black minority. The essay will explain the concept of race and racism and xenophobia of and how it has affected South Africa as a country, its citizens and other countries surrounding it.
The Global Rise of Xenophobia, the New Issue of Social Research
This essay examines American xenophobia to identify some of its defining features. Xenophobia has been built upon the nation's history of white settler colonialism and slavery. It has become part of the systemic racism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination that have defined American society. It has adapted to and shaped successive ...
Xenophobia: Definition, Symptoms, Traits, Causes
Xenophobia, or fear of strangers, is a broad term that may be applied to any fear of someone different from an individual. Hostility towards outsiders is often a reaction to fear. It typically involves the belief that there is a conflict between an individual's ingroup and an outgroup.
(PDF) Xenophobia
Abstract. Xenophobia is the social construction of exclusion of outsiders based on a myriad of factors, including notions of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and fear of foreigners or noncitizens ...
Xenophobia in Historical Perspective: Causation, Consequences, and
Xenophobia in South Africa is expressed as negative attitudes toward immigrants, but also it occurs in xenophobic practices such as discrimination, exploitation , and violence. The purpose of this study is to provide a historical analysis of xenophobia in South Africa. It is important to outline the causes and consequences of xenophobia to ...
Xenophobia in the context of African worldviews: A synopsis of the
Monson TJ (2015) Citizenship, 'xenophobia' and collective mobilization in a South African settlement: The politics of exclusion at the threshold of the state. PhD thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London.
Xenophobia: Understanding the Roots and Consequences of Negative
The current xenophobic cultural environment in the United States makes it imperative that psychologists understand the nature of xenophobia and recognize its consequences. This article explores sociological, social psychological, and multicultural research to examine the causes of negative attitudes toward immigrants.
Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia
dc.contributor.advisor: Ziblatt, Daniel F: dc.contributor.author: Riaz, Sascha: dc.date.accessioned: 2022-11-24T04:22:01Z: dash.embargo.terms: 2024-11-23: dc.date.created
Understanding Xenophobia in South Africa: The Individual, the State and
Since the 2008 xenophobic violence in the country, there has been a growing literature on xenophobia in South Africa. This article contributes to the existing discourse by employing levels of analysis as its analytical framework to analyse the recurrent anti-immigrant attitudes and attacks in South Africa.
Xenophobia
Xenophobia is associated with foreigners. It is also associated with guests and even strangers. The feeling of high levels of antipathy or fear towards foreigners is called xenophobia (Wolpe 111). This fear is usually irrational and is associated with some emotional problems though sometimes it can be exhibited by people who are emotionally sound.
Xenophobia in Africa: origins and manifestations
The issue of xenophobia is fast becoming a negative uprising on the African continent with the recent cases of Zambia and South Africa. This xenophobic tendency in Africa is based on prejudice and ...
(PDF) Understanding Xenophobia in South Africa: The Individual, the
The 2015 xenophobic attacks are a fresh reminder of anti-immigrant sentiments in South Africa. Since the 2008 xenophobic violence in the country, there has been a growing literature on xenophobia ...
Essay on Xenophobia
500 Words Essay on Xenophobia Introduction. Xenophobia, derived from the Greek words 'xenos' meaning 'stranger' or 'foreigner' and 'phobos' meaning 'fear', is an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries. It manifests in many ways, ranging from bias and prejudice to violence and hate crimes.
PDF Explaining South African xenophobia
xenophobia, both attitudinal and behavioral. Data from the 1995 World Values Survey showed that South Africans were the most xenophobic nation of the 18 included in the sample (Mattes et al., 1999). A 1998 survey found similarly xenophobic sentiments: Large majorities of the sample of South Africans supported policy proposals that foreigners should
Xenophobia, politics, and religion as we approach the 2024 elections in
March 12, 2024. Introduction. This essay explores the linkages between xenophobia, politics and religion, in the run-up to the general elections in South Africa. Despite this year's general elections coinciding with South Africa's 30-year anniversary of democracy and freedom, there is very little to celebrate: while there have been gains in ...
Xenophobia in South Africa
Xenophobia in South Africa | Chapter 1. In a haze of violence in late January, an angry mob approached a convenience store belonging to Abdikadir Ibrahim Danicha. They pried open its iron gates and looted everything inside. Even the large display refrigerators were carried away. Danicha's life was upended.
Xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa
On 26 May 2013, two Zimbabwean men were killed by South Africans mob in xenophobic violence in Diepsloot, South Africa. In January 2015, a Somali shop owner shot and killed a 14-year-old boy, Siphiwe Mahori, during an alleged robbery in Soweto Township. The boy was shot in the neck and died within 15 minutes.
xenophobia essay
Introduction Xenophobia is one of the major crises that are facing South Africa today. A number of foreign nationals have lost their lives and a countless number of them have been scarred mentally, psychologically and emotionally by xenophobic attacks. Xenophobia is a Greek word that is composed of two words, Xeno meaning foreigners and phobia ...
Emma Heaney, "Feminism Against Cisness" (Duke UP, 2024‪)‬ New Books in
The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalize brutalizing race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and ...
Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia
Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Abstract This dissertation identifies drivers of xenophobic backlash against immigration. I study the case of Germany, a country in which -- as in many other advanced industrialized democracies -- increasing ethnic heterogeneity ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four: What Orwell got right
The Weekend Essay. 8 June 2024. What Orwell got right. The more the world in which Nineteen Eighty-Four was written has changed, the more it has stayed the same. ... and that Asia would turn xenophobic. He started the war thinking the British people wouldn't fight and ended it expecting a collapse in the birth rate. He once argued that you ...
The Experience of Xenophobia in South Africa
2. The Experience of Xenophobia in South Africa. In May 2008, xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa. The targets were. individuals who had migrated from the north in search of asylum. Emer ...
The Death of Alexei Navalny, Putin's Most Formidable Opponent
The opposition leader, who died in prison, had been persecuted for years by the Russian state. He remained defiant, and consistently funny, to the very end. Alexei Navalny spent at least a decade ...
Opinion
Two Opposing Views " (Opinion guest essay, June 3): The retired judge Nancy Gertner's argument against imprisoning Donald Trump omits the simple reality that without prison time, Donald Trump ...
As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections ...
Outside France and Germany, the centre holds. T HE ELECTIONS to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in ...

5 Essays About Xenophobia

“These charts show migrants aren’t South Africa’s biggest problem”

“Opinion: A rise in nationalism could hurt minorities”

“The Deep Roots of Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Policies”

“Nationalism isn’t xenophobia, but it’s just as bad”

Xenophobia ‘Is A Pre-Existing Condition.’ How Harmful Stereotypes and Racism are Spreading Around the Coronavirus

You may also like

15 Political Issues We Must Address

15 Trusted Charities Fighting for LGBTQ+ Rights

16 Inspiring Civil Rights Leaders You Should Know

15 Trusted Charities Fighting for Housing Rights

15 Examples of Gender Inequality in Everyday Life

11 Approaches to Alleviate World Hunger

15 Facts About Malala Yousafzai

12 Ways Poverty Affects Society

15 Great Charities to Donate to in 2024

15 Quotes Exposing Injustice in Society

14 Trusted Charities Helping Civilians in Palestine

The Great Migration: History, Causes and Facts

Get the latest news and stories from Tufts delivered right to your inbox.

The Long History of Xenophobia in America

Xenophobia in America

Historian Erika Lee to Deliver Commencement Address for Class of 2022

Confronting the Legacy of Anti-Asian Racism in America

Cheyanne Atole’s Poetry of Identity

Xenophobia: The Fear of Strangers

What Is the Opposite of Xenophobic?

Signs of Xenophobia

Is Xenophobia a Mental Disorder?

Types of Xenophobia

Xenophobia vs. Racism

Examples of Xenophobia

Causes of Xenophobia

Impact of Xenophobia

How to Combat Xenophobia

History of Xenophobia

Xenophobia in Historical Perspective: Causation, Consequences, and Conquest

Cite this chapter

Access this chapter

Bibliography

Author information

Editor information

Rights and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Download citation

Share this chapter

Xenophobia – The Fear of Foreigners Essay

Introduction

Essay on Xenophobia

100 Words Essay on Xenophobia

Causes of Xenophobia

Impacts of Xenophobia

Addressing Xenophobia

250 Words Essay on Xenophobia

The Roots of Xenophobia

Xenophobia’s Impact on Society

Combating Xenophobia

500 Words Essay on Xenophobia

Xenophobia and Globalization

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Xenophobia, politics, and religion as we approach the 2024 elections in South Africa

Xenophobic violence in democratic South Africa

Collections in the Archives

Emma Heaney, "Feminism Against Cisness" (Duke UP, 2024‪)‬ New Books in Gender

More by New Books Network

Terms of Use

Essays on Immigration and Xenophobia

Access Status

What Orwell got right

The Saturday Read

Content from our partners

Peatlands are nature’s unsung climate warriors

How the apprenticeship levy helps small businesses to transform their workforce

How to reform the apprenticeship levy

Nigel Farage’s very English populism

Éric Hazan, rebel publisher

Keir Starmer’s promise of stability will come back to haunt him

The Experience of Xenophobia in South Africa

The Death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s Most Formidable Opponent