essay about the 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.

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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.

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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

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

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The Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine

Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia

Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 8 PM

Presenter: George Makari, M.D.

Discussant: Kwame Anthony Appiah

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered that while a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, the notion of a dangerous bias called “xenophobia” arose not so long ago.

Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamities that culminated in the Holocaust and its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He then investigates attempts to psychologically understand the rise of xenophobia through the writings of innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy, and psychology, Makari offers us a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups and lead to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.

Historian, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist George Makari is the author of the newly released Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia , a New York Times Editor’s Choice. He is also the author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind and the widely acclaimed Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis . His essays have won numerous honors, including twice winning the JAPA Essay Prize, and have also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, Dr. Makari is Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and Adjunct Professor at both Rockefeller University and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He attended Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.

Discussant Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at NYU. He was born in London, but moved as an infant to Kumasi, Ghana, where he grew up. He has BA and PhD degrees in philosophy at Cambridge and has taught philosophy in Ghana, France, Britain, and the United States. He has been President of the PEN American Center and serves on the boards of the York Public Library and the Public Theater and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He has written the New York Times column The Ethicist since 2015. His most recent book is The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity .

Introduction: Understanding Xenophobia in Africa

First Online: 14 November 2017

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Adeoye O. Akinola 5

Part of the book series: Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development ((AAESPD))

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Colonialism militarised African societies and imposed a violent character upon the state and societies, which explains the spate of political instability, insurgency, terrorism and civil war experienced in many African countries. This chapter provides an understanding of xenophobia and presents xenophobia as all forms of discrimination against those considered to be ‘different’, ‘the other’, and non-national. It engages the politicization of xenophobia, explores its motivations and traces its roots to Africa’s colonial heritage. Although, xenophobic violence which has become part of the African story, is not a new phenomenon, but its destructive nature has become a cause for concern among stakeholders in African peace, security and development projects. From Ghana to Nigeria and Zambia to South Africa, hostility has been directed against ‘the others’ and non-nationals of African descent. While there is a rich literature on the violent manifestation of xenophobia in Africa, few studies have explored the non-violent expression of xenophobia. Thus, this section conceptualizes the diverse manifestations of xenophobia and its effects on the state, economy and society.

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Akinola, A.O. (2018). Introduction: Understanding Xenophobia in Africa. In: Akinola, A. (eds) The Political Economy of Xenophobia in Africa. Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64897-2_1

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Xenophobia – The Fear of Foreigners Essay

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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.

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Op-Ed: What does it mean to be American? Ask an immigrant

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On this Independence Day, we will gather (finally!) with friends and family to celebrate our country and what it means to be American. But what that actually means continues to be the source of much debate.

Some who have pledged to “make America great again” desire to take the country back to a time before many nonwhite immigrants had arrived (and before African Americans, women and members of the LGBTQ community had gained any power or influence). Their definition of “American” is narrow, defensive and exclusive.

We’ve been here before. Xenophobia — our fear and hatred of foreigners — is as American as apple pie. And across the centuries, self-proclaimed patriotic citizens have blamed immigrants for all that is wrong in America — all that is un-American — while proclaiming their version of America and “American” to be the truest.

In the 1850s, anti-immigrant activists formed a new political party devoted to curbing the rights and influence of Catholic immigrants and naturalized citizens. They called themselves the American Party and promoted a new definition of Americanness that named white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers as the true “natives” of the United States. “ Americans must rule America ” was one of their slogans. By the early 1900s, some of America’s most influential thinkers and politicians were increasingly defining Americanism through the lens of white supremacy.

In 1925, eugenicist Madison Grant reported that an “influx of foreigners” would “submerge” U.S.-born white Americans and rallied others to his cause with the cry “America for the Americans.” The Ku Klux Klan fanned fears, claiming to speak for “all true Americans” when it condemned the “flood of foreigners” entering the country and pushing the “native-born” aside. Those (white) immigrants who continued to be allowed into the United States were exhorted to fully assimilate, abandon any loyalty to former homelands and reject hyphenated identities, as former President Theodore Roosevelt urged in 1916 .

A century later, Americans elected a new president, Donald Trump, who labeled Mexicans “rapists” and criminals, who pledged to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and who called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He spent his term working to achieve these goals and more.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese people — and those assumed to be Chinese or Asian — were blamed for the coronavirus, most notably by Trump. Thousands of Asian Americans have reported being yelled at, spit upon, harassed and physically attacked. Some have been killed.

In March 2020, the Trump administration began treating immigration as a public health threat , closing U.S. borders and drastically restricting immigration. The country became gripped by a second epidemic: one of fear, xenophobia and racism.

During the pandemic, the administration halted the entry of almost every type of immigrant seeking to settle here and imposed the most sweeping immigration restrictions in American history. As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden pledged to end the “unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants” and instead implement a “fair and humane immigration system.” But the backlash has been fierce, and immigration reform efforts have stalled.

We are at an inflection point. After the departure of Trump, his xenophobia and racism continue to shape how we understand both immigration and what it means to be American. How do we challenge this worldview?

One way is to recognize that because xenophobia is an inextricable part of systemic racism in the U.S., it must be fought alongside racism. We need to examine and protest the unequal treatment of immigrants as part of this structure. We must counter the narratives that identify immigration as a threat with facts : COVID-19 is not the “Chinese virus.” Immigrants are essential workers, constituting 17% of the civilian labor force . About two-thirds of Americans say that immigrants strengthen the country .

Another way to change the immigration narrative is to focus on real people and real stories. Better yet, give immigrants the power and the means to tell their own stories themselves.

The Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota has done exactly this. The 375 stories we’ve collected through our interactive digital storytelling website , created with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will preserve for future generations what it means to be American.

For Arminda Rodriguez , becoming American meant sacrificing all that she knew and loved to help the next generation. She was an immigrant without papers when she gave birth to her daughter Rubi in Brownsville, Texas. Then came years of hard work supporting Rubi and her siblings. Now a college student in Texas, Rubi recognizes how much her mother gave up to give her a better life: “Thanks to my mother’s sacrifice, I was able to be raised in the United States and get an education here…. I appreciate her more than ever.”

Thiago Heilman came to the U.S. as a child from Brazil and felt fully American even as he lived in the shadows as an undocumented immigrant. After President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for people brought here as children, Heilman was finally able to get a work permit and is now a writer living and working in New York City.

“It took a while, but my American dream is finally coming true,” he says. “Many things that natural-born citizens take for granted are finally happening to me. I’m enjoying this freedom every day.”

Oballa Oballa’s American story is about giving back to his adopted country. After he and his family survived a genocidal attack against their tribe in Ethiopia, they trekked on foot to South Sudan and waited for 10 years in a Kenyan refugee camp before they were finally admitted into the U.S. in 2013. Now he’s a health unit coordinator and recently became the first Black elected official in his town, Austin, Minn., where Spam is made. His story, he believes, can give “ hope to refugees who think the American dream is dead. ” He insists that in America, “if you come with a big dream, you can make your dream come true.”

These immigrant stories show that we have more in common with one another than the divisive rhetoric about immigration would have us believe. We each want safety, freedom, opportunity. We want to honor our cultural heritage while also becoming American. Xenophobia is not just about immigrants. It is also about who has the power to define what it means to be American, who gets to enjoy the privileges of American citizenship and who does not.

If we learn anything from the converging public health, social, political and economic crises of 2020, it may be the knowledge that we can no longer function divided as we currently are. We are — and always have been — dependent upon one another. If we are to survive and thrive, we need to commit ourselves to building a future that is not about “us” versus “them,” but “we.”

Erika Lee is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author, most recently, of “America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States.”

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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.

Also check:

10 Lines on Xenophobia

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.

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. Xenophobia is a complex and multifaceted issue that has significant socio-cultural and political implications.

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

In the age of globalization, where the world is more interconnected than ever, xenophobia poses a significant challenge. As people move across borders for work, education, or refuge, they often encounter unfamiliar cultures and societies. This increased diversity can lead to tension and fear, fueling xenophobia. However, globalization also provides an opportunity for increased understanding and tolerance, as exposure to different cultures can challenge pre-existing stereotypes and biases.

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.

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‘Stop the xenophobia’ — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election

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Election posters for the African National Congress, Economic Freedom Fighters and the Democratic Alliance parties. Credit: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty

South Africans will head to the ballot box on 29 May for a general election at which, for the first time in 30 years, the incumbent African National Congress (ANC) party’s majority is in question. Scientists hope that the next government will stoke South Africa’s faltering economy and reverse its declining trend in research funding. But researchers have also told Nature that they are concerned about the xenophobic rhetoric used during campaigning. Among other things, they worry that these attitudes are making the nation less welcoming to researchers from other African countries.

Scientists voice concern over xenophobia

For years, South Africa has been grappling with violence against people from other African and Asian countries. Universities often look abroad to fill posts, and one out of ten researchers in South Africa is from another country. Now, scientists are warning that xenophobia is rising on university campuses.

Xenophobia “is targeting our top scientists, particularly [those] from the African continent”, says Jonathan Jansen, an education researcher at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF), based in Pretoria.

Earlier this month, the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch cautioned political parties to avoid using xenophobic rhetoric, which could stoke further violence. At an ASSAF round table last year, participants flagged encounters involving verbal and physical hostility towards Black African university staff and students who are not from South Africa.

Even when based in more welcoming academic environments — usually ones that ialready have a high number of international researchers — academics from other African countries and their families do not feel welcome when there are flare-ups of xenophobic rhetoric, says Vukosi Marivate, a computer scientist at the University of Pretoria. “It’s great when you’re in the halls, when you’re in the academic bubbles, but as soon as you leave that bubble, you get affected by it,” he says.

Science is not an election issue

South Africa’s three largest political parties — the ANC, the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters — all mention research in their manifestos. Some of the top campaign issues, such as improving the country’s relatively weak economic growth and bettering basic-education outcomes have direct consequences for science. But research and science have not been priorities during campaigning.

“In South Africa politics, the last thing people debate about or talk about is science, right? We’ll be talking at very material levels about what people need who are desperately poor,” says Jansen.

Over the past decade, the country’s economy has been faltering, with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita falling from US$8,737 in 2011 to $6,766.50 in 2023. Last year, according to World Bank data, more than 60% of people lived in poverty — defined as those earning below $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income countries. One in three adults is unemployed. Frequent power cuts are needed because of a 17-year-long energy crisis.

A mixed report card for research

The ANC has been in power since 1994, when Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa’s liberation struggle against the country’s previous apartheid rule, became its first democratically elected president.

Before the party took power, the majority Black population was overwhelmingly excluded from the country’s community of 22,000 scientists, according to 1991–92 data. That has since changed .

According to 2021 data, Black South Africans accounted for 43% of researchers; 40% were white, and the gap is continuing to narrow. There are also slightly more women than men in South African academia, but not at senior levels. Black women, the largest demographic group in South Africa, make up only 7% of its professoriate.

The ANC inherited a science system with historical strengths in optical astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, clinical medicine, mining and nuclear technology. Military research and development (R&D) was also a strong point.

Public and private spending on R&D has been declining since 2017–18, and sits at under 35 billion rand (US$1.9 billion) for 2020–21, the most recent period for which data are available. That accounts for 0.61% of GDP, below 0.76% in 2017–18 and less than halfway to the government’s target of 1.5% by 2030.

In the short term, the funding situation for South Africa’s researchers is expected to worsen. In February, the government’s Department of Science and Innovation — which supports its main research funder, the National Research Foundation — had its budget slashed by three billion rand over three years, owing to the country’s “serious fiscal constraints”. The value of the rand is continuing to fall against major currencies, making imported equipment and scientific consumables more expensive.

Apartheid's legacy

Several people whom Nature spoke to also lamented academia’s ‘leaky pipeline’ as universities are struggling to attract and retain talent. The problem, they say, starts with basic education.

Four out of five ten-year-olds in South African schools are unable to understand what they read, according to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study .

Keeping young people in the education system is also a challenge. A survey by Statistics South Africa, the national statistics agency, found that, in 2021, nearly 10% of 17-year-olds had dropped out of school . According to some estimates , between 50% and 60% of students drop out of university after the end of the first year of an undergraduate course.

Researchers show resilience …

In spite of these setbacks, the country’s researchers are “punching above their weight”, says Himla Soodyall, executive officer at the ASSAF.

South Africa has a number of landmark scientific achievements. In 2021, a team of researchers in South Africa and Botswana alerted the world to the new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron. South Africa is a hub for palaeoanthropology: its researchers have unveiled two new hominin species, Australopithecus sediba in 2010 and Homo naledi in 2015.

Since 2018, its 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope has been capturing the Universe in unprecedented detail , including the chaotic region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The country is one of the hosts of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. MeerKAT will eventually form the heart of the SKA’s mid-frequency array.

Moreover, the number of South African research publications continues to grow. In 2021, its researchers published 27,052 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science. This is an increase from 3,693 in 2000. The country now ranks 30th globally in terms of the number of scientific papers produced annually. Countries with similar levels of output include Portugal, Mexico and Malaysia. Egypt is the continent’s leading producer of research, with 32,283 articles in 2021.

“If you look at the publications of South African researchers relative to other international researchers where the GDP is much higher, I think we are doing reasonably well,” says Soodyall.

… and must collaborate to survive

Overall, however, South Africa’s research community is shrinking. There are about 34,000 researchers, down from a peak of 36,200 in 2017–18. Partly as a result, and to remain competitive, the country’s scientists are collaborating with researchers in richer countries and universities are seeking talent from other countries on the continent.

“In some fields, such as health sciences, astronomy and high-energy physics, foreign collaboration now typically comprises more than 90% [of papers],” according to the 2023 South African Science, Technology & Innovation Indicators Report by the National Advisory Council on Innovation in Pretoria. In addition to the SKA, the country is also a collaborator with CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.

“We are increasingly relying on international collaborations,” says physicist Azwinndini Muronga, dean of science at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. “If one was to cut that lifeline, we probably would be in a very dire situation.”

Jansen is also concerned that rising attacks could have a similar effect on international recruitment. “Colleagues [from other African countries] tell us outright: ‘We don’t see a long term future for ourselves here,’ given this creeping xenophobia on campuses as well as in the broader community.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01547-x

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NMSU Library’s Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibition: Recent updates

Please check back regularly especially as we come closer to our hosting dates, monday, august 24, 2026 to friday, september 25, 2026.

Published date 05/03/2024

Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibition coming to New Mexico State University Library

Las Cruces — New Mexico State University Library is one of 50 U.S. libraries newly selected to host Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association (ALA) that examines the motives, pressures and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war and genocide in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

Following a highly successful tour to 50 libraries from 2021 to 2023, the touring library exhibition— based on the special exhibition of the same name at the Museum in Washington, D.C. — will travel to an additional 50 U.S. libraries from 2024 to 2026, covering wide distances from Hawaii and Alaska to Texas and New Hampshire.

“ We are thrilled to have been selected to host this important exhibition curated by an esteemed national museum," said NMSU Library Dean Kevin Comerford. “ Planning exhibition programming is currently underway, and we aspire to create programming across diverse disciplines and engage with additional community partners. ”

Americans and the Holocaust will be on display at New Mexico State University Library, along with a series of related special events, from Monday, August 24, 2026 to Friday, September 25, 2026. Be sure to visit the library’s webpage dedicated to this exhibition for upcoming updates: https://library.nmsu.edu/holocaustexhibition2026.html .

The Exhibition

The 1,100-square-foot exhibition examines various aspects of American society: the government, the military, refugee aid organizations, the media and the general public. Drawing on a remarkable collection of primary sources from the 1930s and ’40s, the exhibition tells the stories of Americans who acted in response to Nazism, challenging the commonly held assumptions that Americans knew little and did nothing about the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews as the Holocaust unfolded. It provides a portrait of American society that shows how the Depression, isolationism, xenophobia, racism and antisemitism shaped responses to Nazism and the Holocaust.

In addition to the traveling exhibition on loan, New Mexico State University Library received a $3,000 cash grant to support public programs. The grant also covered one library staff member’s attendance at an orientation workshop at the Museum.

For more information about Americans and the Holocaust and related programming at New Mexico State University Library, visit https://library.nmsu.edu/holocaustexhibition2026.html where you will find more detailed information as we come closer to our hosting dates. To learn more about the exhibition, visit ushmm.org/americans-ala .

Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries is an educational initiative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association. The traveling exhibition began by touring to 50 U.S. libraries from 2021 to 2023; due to widespread interest from libraries and communities around the country, a second tour was developed for 2024 to 2026.

Americans and the Holocaust was made possible by the generous support of lead sponsor Jeannie & Jonathan Lavine. Additional major funding was provided by the Bildners — Joan & Allen, Elisa Spungen & Rob, Nancy & Jim; and Jane and Daniel Och. The Museum's exhibitions are also supported by the Lester Robbins and Sheila Johnson Robbins Traveling and Special Exhibitions Fund, established in 1990.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust .

ABOUT New Mexico State University Library

New Mexico State University Library is committed to providing a rich learning environment where resources and diverse populations come together to engage in scholarship and create knowledge.

About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A nonpartisan, federal educational institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust dedicated to ensuring the permanence of Holocaust memory, understanding and relevance. Through the power of Holocaust history, the Museum challenges leaders and individuals worldwide to think critically about their role in society and to confront antisemitism and other forms of hate, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. For more information, visit ushmm.org .

About the American Library Association

The American Library Association (ALA) is the foremost national organization providing resources to inspire library and information professionals to transform their communities through essential programs and services. For more than 140 years, the ALA has been the trusted voice for academic, public, school, government and special libraries, advocating for the profession and the library’s role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all. For more information, visit ala.org .

For more information, please contact Ms. Aubrey Iglesias at [email protected] or Mr. Dylan McDonald at [email protected] .

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American Post-1945 panel(s) at PAMLA 2024 [extended due date]

We invite proposals for papers dealing with American Literature from 1945 to the present to be shared at the Pacific Modern Lanugage Association, held this year from November 7-10 at the Margariaville Resort in Palm Springs, California. The conference will be held completely in person.

Our panel organizers believe in a capacious understanding of post-1945 American Literature. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. Texts that are written by American-identifying authors or texts about America or American life are welcome.

We are open to proposals on a wide variety of topics, with particular consideration granted to papers that engage with the conference theme of "Translation in Action." The postwar period offers a rich body of writing to consider, as a diversifying America has led to a diversifying American literary canon. Writers who engage with questions of translation do so in a context of a nation becoming more linguistically and culturally variegated, even in the midst of surges of xenophobia and resentment toward changes to an Anglo-dominated, English-speaking, mythical, ahistorical vision of the nation.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:

--Integrating questions of linguistic translation in literary texts

--Managing the presence of multiple languages within a text

--Translation of cultural practices and senses of identity

--Linguistic hierarchies inside and outside English-dominated polities

--Figurative language and stream-of-consciousness as forms of translation

--Translation in light of AI-generated or language poetry

--Postmodernism, the signifying chain, and translation

--Refusing to translate and the untranslatable

--The market for translations

--The place of translations in English departments

--Translation across media

Paper proposals are due on June 30, 2024. Submit your 250-word abstracts via the PAMLA portal: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19145 .

Send questions to Jeffrey Gonzalez at [email protected] .

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Another Milestone in Mexico: Its First Jewish President

Claudia Sheinbaum was born to Jewish parents, but she has played down her heritage on the campaign trail.

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A woman standing by a railing in a government office building.

By Simon Romero and Natalie Kitroeff

Reporting from Mexico City

Mexico elected its first Jewish president over the weekend, a remarkable step in a country with one of the world’s largest Catholic populations.

Yet if it is a watershed moment for Mexico, it has been overshadowed by another one: President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum will also be the first woman to lead the country.

There is another reason there’s been relatively little discussion of her Judaism.

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, rarely discusses her heritage. When she does, she tends to convey a more distant relationship to Judaism than many others in Mexico’s Jewish community, which stretches back to the origins of Mexico itself, and today numbers about 59,000 in a country of 130 million people.

“Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were atheists,” Ms. Sheinbaum told The New York Times in a 2020 interview. “I never belonged to the Jewish community. We grew up a little removed from that.”

Ms. Sheinbaum’s parents were both leftists and involved in the sciences, and she was raised in a secular household in Mexico City in the 1960s and 70s, a time of considerable political agitation in Mexico.

“The way she embraces her own Mexican identity, from a very young age, is rooted in science, socialism, political activism,” said Tessy Schlosser, director of the Mexican Jewish Documentation and Research Center.

Additionally, Ms. Sheinbaum’s story of migration, as the descendant of Jews who emigrated to Mexico in the 20th century, “does not give any political capital” in a political society where candidates often allude to their mestizo or Indigenous roots, Ms. Schlosser said.

Ms. Sheinbaum’s father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, a businessman and chemical engineer, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who fled Lithuania in the early 20th century. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and professor emeritus at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is the daughter of Sephardic Jews who fled Bulgaria before the Holocaust.

But while Ms. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) has downplayed her ties to Judaism, her origins have not gone entirely unnoticed, revealing currents of xenophobia and antisemitism persisting beneath the surface in Mexican politics.

After emerging last year as a presidential contender, Ms. Sheinbaum faced “birther” attacks questioning whether she was born in Mexico or even Mexican.

Among those leading the attacks against her was Vicente Fox, a conservative former president who called Ms. Sheinbaum a “Bulgarian Jew.” Ms. Sheinbaum responded by releasing a copy of her birth certificate detailing her place of birth as Mexico City. “I am 100 percent Mexican, the proud daughter of Mexican parents,” she said.

Still, Ms. Sheinbaum’s candidacy has cast attention on Mexico’s Jewish community, and the array of reactions to her political ascent from Mexican Jews.

While Jewish people first arrived in Mexico in 1519, at the time of the Spanish conquest, and continued arriving in colonial times to escape persecution in Europe, their numbers grew considerably in the 20th century. A large number of Jews in Mexico trace their origins to Syria, while others came from other parts of the former Ottoman Empire or Europe.

Mexico remains predominantly Christian with nearly 100 million Catholics and 14 million Protestants, according to a 2020 census. But Mexican Jews have long figured prominently into public life, including broadcast journalists such as Jacobo Zabludovsky and Leo Zuckermann; writers like Margo Glantz and Enrique Krauze; and politicians like Salomón Chertorivski, a progressive who mounted a losing bid this year for mayor of Mexico City.

Sabina Berman, a Jewish writer and journalist, is among the high-profile Mexican Jews who have sided with Ms. Sheinbaum, calling her “disciplined” and a “great candidate.”

But such endorsements have been far from unanimous, reflecting the skepticism among some in Mexico’s Jewish community about the leftist political leanings of Ms. Sheinbaum, a protégé of the combative current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In one example, Carlos Alazraki, a prominent advertising executive, said that Ms. Sheinbaum was “absolutely resentful” toward people of means because of being raised by parents he called “communists.”

“The envy she has toward the middle class on up is impressive,” he said. “She’s vindictive.”

More broadly, Ms. Sheinbaum also faced criticism during the campaign, accused of exploiting religious figures to connect with Catholic voters. After she met with Pope Francis, her opponents questioned her beliefs and seized on previous images of her wearing a skirt bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a hugely important figure in Mexican catholicism.

“We both had a meeting with the pope,” said Xóchitl Gálvez, her top rival in the race, at a recent debate. “Did you tell His Holiness how you used a skirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe even though you don’t believe in her, or in God?”

Pressed after such attacks to say whether she believes in God, Ms. Sheinbaum said , “I am a woman of faith and of science,” and accused Ms. Gálvez of disrespecting the separation of church and state, a central tenet of Mexico’s political system.

A more nuanced picture of Ms. Sheinbaum’s identity emerges from some of her own statements in the past. “I grew up without religion, that’s how my parents raised me,” Ms. Sheinbaum told a gathering organized by a Jewish organization in Mexico City in 2018. “But obviously the culture, that’s in your blood.”

She told Arturo Cano, who wrote her biography, that she observed Yom Kippur and other Jewish holidays with her grandparents, but that “it was more cultural than religious.”

Like other secular Jews in Mexico, Ms. Sheinbaum has also said she wasn’t pushed to marry within the faith. “It wasn’t like ‘you have to marry a Jew’, which happened with my mother,” Ms. Sheinbaum told The Times.

Writing in a Mexican newspaper, Ms. Sheinbaum said her paternal grandfather left Europe because he was “Jewish and communist” and her maternal grandparents escaped “Nazi persecution.”

“Many of my relatives from that generation were exterminated in the concentration camps,” she said in a letter to the editor of La Jornada from 2009, in which she also condemned what she described as “the murder of Palestinian civilians” during an Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Since the war there broke out last year, Ms. Sheinbaum has condemned attacks on civilians, called for a cease-fire and said she supports a two-state solution.

It remains to be seen how, as president, she will navigate Mexico’s position on the war, an increasingly contentious issue in the country.

Just last week, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with the police outside the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City, and Mexico’s government moved to support South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.

Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City. More about Simon Romero

Natalie Kitroeff is the Mexico City bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. More about Natalie Kitroeff

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