Abstract
It is tempting to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’, a condition characterised by the expulsion of a person from the order of socially valued existence and the subjection of that person to the vagaries of sovereign power. Although the category of homo sacer does shed some light on the condition of statelessness that leaves foreign migrants ‘stripped of their identity as legal beings’, it also risks misrecognising the lived, embodied complexity of migrant subjectivity. Through a reading of Adze Ugah's The Burning Man, a documentary film about the Mozambican man who was burned alive on 17 May 2008 as a result of xenophobic riots in South Africa, this article highlights some of the concrete, everyday social and affective networks that give migrant lives their unique subjective integrity.
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Notes
Xenophobic violence in South Africa is not a recent phenomenon. For a list of confrontations leading up to the May 2008 attacks, see Landau (2008, Appendix 1); and for examples of xenophobic attacks starting as early as 1994, see Williams (2008).
Numerous explanations have been offered to account for both the immediate and long-term causes of this violence. Commentators have pointed to long-standing anxieties about economic insecurity that were intensified in the period leading up to May 2008 by soaring food and fuel costs (though as some critics indicate, economic explanations alone are unsatisfactory, given that ‘the poorest areas were not those on the rampage’ (Landau, 2010, p. 215)). An electricity crisis and political uncertainty following the 2007 Polokwane conference, as well as the failure of the elections in Zimbabwe that many believed would lead to a renewed influx of Zimbabwean immigrants into South Africa (Landau, 2008, p. 4), have also been counted among the reasons believed to have sparked this particular outbreak of violence. More comprehensive, historical analyses, in turn, point to the political structures and inheritances that create the conditions within which limiting conceptions of citizenship come to be discursively and institutionally legitimated, thereby enabling the political, legal and social exclusion of the post-apartheid South African nation's perceived others. For a detailed breakdown of some of the ways in which South African immigration policy and its shoddy implementation have made those excluded from political membership in contemporary South Africa vulnerable to the kinds of violent outbreaks that tore through the country in May 2008, see for instance Landau, (2008, 2010) and the reports published by the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa and the Wits Forced Migration Studies Program. See also, for instance, the report titled Migrant Mobilisation: Structure and Strategies in Claiming Rights in South Africa and Nairobi (published by the Wits Forced Migration Studies Program) for some of the complex ways in which migrants have been resisting their legal and social exclusion in South Africa. For an analysis of the ideological and political terrains within which xenophobic hatred became part of the South African everyday, see for instance the essays collected in Hassim et al (2008), and for a detailed breakdown of the causes and implications of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa, see for instance Neocosmos (2010).
Since its 2009 release, District 9 has already generated a remarkable body of scholarship debating its merits and shortcomings. See for instance Ray (2009) and all the responses to it on Zeleza Post, the Safundi roundtable on it (Moses et al, 2010), as well as work by Clover (2009), Schürholz (2010) and Ekine (2009).
The events of May 2008 did serve as a catalyst for more widespread engagement with the problem of xenophobia on the part of many of South Africa's writers and cultural workers. On 17 August 2010, for instance, the Cape Town book store The Book Lounge hosted an event entitled ‘Poets Against Xenophobia’, organised by South African poet and academic Kelwyn Sole. The event was catalysed in part also by renewed reports and threats of xenophobic violence in the wake of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The evening featured readings by the following poets: Ingrid de Kok, Liesl Jobson, Rustum Kozain, Antjie Krog, Malika Ndlovu, Karen Press, Ari Sitas and Sole himself.
For some of these announcements, see www.proudafrican.org/.
The films have also been screened at film festivals in Europe, at the Bakaforum conference in Karlsruhe in 2009, in South Korea, the United Kingdom and in other countries in Africa such as Nigeria (Ugah, 2010). The films have additionally been made available on DVD, entitled Reflecting on Xenophobia, and can be ordered from Uhuru Productions: E-mail: arya@uhuruproductions.co.za; tel. +27 (0)11 339 6845.
One could also link this image to a longer tradition of visualising atrocity epitomised, during the apartheid era, in images of the victims of necklacing in the townships. Such images were, however, arguably circulated to serve different ideological ends from those aimed at by the circulation of the Pieterson and Nhamuave images respectively.
For Agamben (as for Arendt) the Nazi death camps served as the consolidating laboratory of modernity in which life was deprived of all social value and made subject to the whims of sovereign power, yet as Heike Härting points out, a study of colonial rule reveals many earlier instances in which human life was defined in terms of its capacity to be killed, and more importantly that ‘[t]he making of bare life is a racialized and racializing process rooted within the necropolitics of colonialism’ (2006, p. 9).
Hassim et al make the important point that if ‘xenophobia is accepted to be a secondary symptom rather than a primary cause of violence, responsibility and accountability must necessarily be more widely distributed. […] Responsibility, in this view, extends to the business and political classes, and perhaps especially to the middle-class South Africans among them who watched the violence unfolding on the evening television news in the comfort of their suburban sitting rooms, while their gardens were being pruned by undocumented Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and Malawians’ (2008, p. 6).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. An earlier version of this article was presented at the ‘Beyond Reconciliation’ conference at the University of Cape Town (December 2009). It was subsequently revised and presented at the Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa (NEWSA) in Burlington, Vermont (April 2010), and at the Canadian Association of African Studies Conference, Ottawa (May 2010). I am grateful for the research assistance of Jesse Arseneault and Jessie Forsyth as well as for comments from Susan Spearey, Peter Van Doepp, Derek Hook, Catherine Besteman, Aboubakar Sanogo, the anonymous reviewers of this journal and others who have responded to the article. Thanks are also due to Pumla Dineo Gqola, for tracking down and generously sending me a selection of the FAR's films. The shortcomings of the article remain my own.
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Strauss, H. Cinema of social recuperation: Xenophobic violence and migrant subjectivity in contemporary South Africa. Subjectivity 4, 103–120 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.7