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The Second Great Purge: Xenophobia as the perfect political condition

Richard Poplak was born and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. He trained as a filmmaker and fine artist at Montreals Concordia University and has produced and directed numerous short films, music videos and commercials. Now a full-time writer, Richard is a senior contributor at South Africas leading news site, Daily Maverick, and a frequent contributor to publications all over the world. He is a member of Deca Stories, the international long-form non-fiction collective. His first book was the highly acclaimed Ja, No, Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa (Penguin, 2007); his follow-up was entitled The Sheikhs Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop-Culture in the Muslim World (Soft Skull, 2010). Poplak has also written the experimental journalistic graphic novel Kenk: A Graphic Portrait (Pop Sandbox, 2010). His election coverage from South Africas 2014 election, written under the nom de plume Hannibal Elector, was collected as Until Julius Comes: Adventures in the Political Jungle (Tafelberg, 2014). Ja, No, Man was longlisted for the Alan Paton Non-Fiction prize, shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Literary Award and voted one of the Top-10 books of 2007 by Now Magazine. Richard has won South Africas Media-24 Best Feature Writing Award and a National Magazine Award in Canada. Since 2010, Poplak has been travelling across Africa, seeking out the catalysts and characters behind the continents 21stcentury metamorphosis. The coming book, co-authored with Kevin Bloom, is called The Shift.

As state-sanctioned anti-foreigner sentiment takes root, one has to wonder: Is Zimbabwe’s political condition South African xenophobia’s best hope?

Last week I was in Harare, reporting for this newspaper on the subject of South African immigration policy and how it has impacted Zimbabweans at home. I found the city to be rather charming. I’ve always liked the place, but these days it has settled into a sort of purgatorial slumber: it is the city of waiting. No human alive can predict what will happen after—or, rather, if—Robert Mugabe passes on to the next world. The country bobs around in a vat of amniotic goo, and no one knows who or what will emerge when the political whelping properly begins.

Which, frankly, makes it all rather pleasant. Everyone I met, from every possible walk of life, is locked firmly in the present. Has Mugabe, through sheer longevity, invented Aristotle’s perfect political condition—a state that is good enough? Has he created St. Augustine’s City of God, which is actually a City of Waiting for Shit to Happen? Interesting questions, until one considers what is happening on the other side of the Limpopo, and the many thousands of Zimbabweans that are being deported back into this place of non-being.

It does make one wonder, though, if the Afrophobia—the constant room tone of anti-foreigner hatred that defines “street” discourse in this country—isn’t actually something of an ideal political condition itself. The relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe on this score is incredibly intimate, which is unsurprising given the countries’ shared borders and histories. But there does seem to be something else at work, a series of symbiotic purges that send people back and forth over the border, seeking a better life when only a worse one beckons.

Take the former residents of Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church, who were forcibly removed from the premises last Friday morning by a phalanx of cops, soldiers and immigration hacks, all under the auspices of Operation Fiela, or “clean up the garbage). The church is less a church at this point than a symbol for this country’s most singular dysfunction—its inability to protect society’s most vulnerable.

And in becoming a symbol, the church has also become a red herring: there are dozens of buildings in Johannesburg’s CBD inhabited by families of destitute foreign nationals. And there are dozens inhabited by families of destitute South Africans. More often than not, those buildings are one in the same. And in the social make-up of those buildings—these “houses of many mansions”, as per John 14:2—we find the makings of a political play.

The foreign cohort is, of course, politically negligible. They simply don’t count, which means that they can be used to fulfill any number of functions, the most notable of which is to act as the fall guy in waves of tacitly sanctioned violence that blow through maligned communities every now and again. I shouldn’t say “every now and again”: foreign nationals are always under threat in this country. Which doesn’t mean that a percentage of uitlanders aren’t criminals. And nor does it mean that all uitlanders are criminals. In the middle of that imaginary ratio you have a policing problem.

But you also have a political solution.

What has become abundantly clear over the course of the latest government raids that have swept through “crime and xenophobia hotspots”—the hostels in Jeppestown; Madala hostel in Alexandra; Hillbrow; Central Methodist—have been used to remove foreign nationals rather than protect them. Very little has changed in these communities, few services have been delivered or promises kept. But the purges, when they come, deliver change that reinforces a number of shibboleths regarding foreigners in South Africa: they undercut local shopkeepers; they are dirty and bring disease; they steal; they are not of this place.

Operation Fiela’s bundling of illegal foreigners with criminal activity, drugs and weapons is but the most obvious example of this. These clean up sweeps have great historic resonance with other terrible events in other terrible places, but we don’t have to look too far away in either time or space to find their corollaries. In South Sudan in December of 2013, when President Salvo Kiir’s Dinka Republican Guard swept through Juba looking for Nuer males, it was termed a “clean-up operation” by the country’s interior minister. After that bout of ethnic cleansing, the country is in pieces. There is Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe in 2005 that cleaned up Harare and sent Zimbabweans running for the Limpopo.

This insistence on defining an Other is an ancient and fundamental human impulse that can only be managed by concentrated political will—it is one of the reasons we have politics in the first place. But in South Africa, as we creep towards some sort of End Game that even those at the controls have no idea how to play, there is zero concentrated political will. Or rather, there is deliberate political lassitude. And so the clean-up sweepers, a confluence of various agencies, police departments and our armed forces, have gone to war against a manufactured enemy.

Very often, that enemy was manufactured in Harare.

Doesn’t it seem strange, how much hatred our Zimbabwean neighbours engender? It’s almost like they’ve come here to be hated. In the NGOs and crisis groups of the capitol, there is much talk about their own government’s tacit acceptance of South African xenophobia. Sure, Zanu has made a few statements here and there, but the people that have fled to South Africa are—once again—of no political utility. So what does it matter?

In all of these successive purges that send people across borders and into refugee camps and onto the bottom of the sea, there is no help to be had from either government. The great irony—the giant joke being played on what remains of South Africa’s collective morality—is that in Zimbabwe’s frozen political state there may emerge a leader who doesn’t want to see his or her compatriots set alight in South African communities. We, too, are waiting for some movement in Zimbabwe, something that will break us out of this political non-state. Change won’t come from here—that seems impossible. But the funny thing about Zimbabwe is that whenever I visit, I get the sense that the joint could be fixed in a day. Perhaps it will be South Africans hotfooting it across the Limpopo in order to look for work in Harare during month-long load-sheds, when the rand goes into a death spiral, when populist jackboot politics replace actual governance for good.

Will Zimbabwe one day be thought of as the Promised Land? Don’t scoff. Change happens quickly. And the refugee buses, I’m told, travel both ways. DM 

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