Rain Blood Nation: Cultural Representations of Afrophobia and the Brutality Against Black Bodies in Post-apartheid South Africa
Date
2024-12
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Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
This thesis investigates anti-Black foreigner sentiments as well as the increasingly bloodthirsty violence against African foreign nationals, at the hands of Black South Africans. Using close reading of James Oatway and Alon Skuy’s photographic book, [BR]OTHER (2021) and Phaswane Mpe’s novella, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (1999), this study intends to examine the persistence of afrophobic ideology and motivated behaviour, particularly in underprivileged Black residential spaces that were established under the apartheid regime, as well as the unprosecuted, “inconsequential violence” regularly inflicted upon the bodies of Black foreign nationals in the South African context. In this study, I am particularly interested in the ever-changing perception of African foreign nationals. I interrogate why the image of the Black foreign subject has transitioned from migrant labourer in allegiance with Black South Africans during the mineral revolution. This evolves to African foreign nationals being deemed as foreigners under the apartheid government. Finally, their imposed identity shifts to that of a demonised Other, regarded as a social burden in post-apartheid South Africa. The third text, Red Dust (2000) by Gillian Slovo explores the textures of violence and it serves as an acknowledgement of the nation’s troubled history. I employ it in this study as an important lens that enables an unpacking of the nature of trauma and fear within the Black body and I suggest the several ways in which this deep-seated terror manifests in present day South Africa. In my exploration of afrophobia as another symptom of the afterlives of colonialism, I distinguish xenophobia from afrophobia, arguing that the violence, unlawful raids, police brutality and discrimination has solely targeted African foreign nationals and not white foreigners and this inhumanity is perpetrated by the Black South African populace. Avoiding an over-simplistic causation of afrophobia, the three chapters of this study recognise and build onto existing scholarship on afrophobia that has largely focused on materialist explanations as the driving force of the hatred. I argue that these texts invite us consider notions of South African exceptionalism, the perils of nationalism, the complex nature of trauma under white supremacy as well as the role played by political leaders, the media and the police in perpetuating an afrophobic climate. This study endeavours to convey the limitations of the romanticised postapartheid rhetoric and what I want to suggest is that without eradicating the conditions that characterised the colonial encounter, the not so new South Africa will continue to regurgitate the same anti-Blackness perpetrated under colonial apartheid.
Description
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2024.