In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER THREE The Construction of a Post-apartheid Nationalist Discourse of Exclusion: Citizenship, State, National Identity and Xenophobia African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached, and whose operative value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism, African unity takes off the mask, and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself (Fanon 1990: 128). The migrant labour system became transformed in the post-apartheid period not so much as a result of a democratic development but rather as a process of nation formation led by the state which then organised a distinction between citizens and foreigners. This distinction differed from both the apartheid state’s distinctions as well as from the popular nationalist one founded on political agency and forged in the crucible of popular struggle in the 1980s. Citizenship now became reduced to indigeneity and formalised by legislation. It now became overwhelmingly formed by state prescriptions rather than popular ones. Nevertheless, this required the defeat of popular-democratic ideology and politics and its replacement by state politics which rapidly achieved hegemonic status. Along with the de-mobilisation of popular organisations in the 1990s went the de-politicisation of society, and a ‘civil society’ now develops as an NGO-dominated realm whose function becomes one of supplementing or taking over state activities (particularly in social welfare provision). As a result the hegemony of a state domain of politics is rapidly secured over a popular -subaltern domain (Neocosmos 1998, 2005). The process of citizenship-building by the state was facilitated by the economic and urban perspective which I have already discussed, and which now became a state discourse associated with the more social-democratic RDP-aligned Left within state structures. I shall show below that this view equated the end of migration with a process of ‘democratisation’ and thus ended up in the paradoxical position of justifying exclusion on democratic grounds. In South Africa, the process of nation formation was one which went against the trend of globalisation which is usually said to encourage regional/ethnic identities 62 From 'Foreign Natives' to 'Native Foreigners' along with a corresponding decline of central state power. In South Africa, the process of state-nation formation was explicitly and intransigently opposed to the democratic recognition of ethnic divisions which had been the basis of oppression under apartheid. The right of self-determination for minorities was interpreted in itself as conducive to the maintenance of privilege for the previously dominant ethnicity (Afrikaners), and the fear of threats of Zulu secession were real in the 1990s. This right was only grudgingly put in the constitution and not in the Bill of Rights. This state-nation formation perforce had to exclude those not seen as belonging to the nation as defined by the state, in other words ‘foreigners’. This process provided one of the conditions within the configuration of power relations for post-apartheid xenophobia. State legislation and practice, the former criminalising migration, the latter left untransformed from the apartheid period, have operated within a discourse and practice which not only have reduced citizenship to indigeneity and denied a history to migration, but also enabled state arbitrariness towards ‘foreigners ’ through the excessive power provided to state personnel and the reproduction of racism in a modified form. At the same time, class, gender and racial distinctions made possible the actual practice, if not the formal idea, of ‘degrees of citizenship’, whereby some come to possess greater claims to being part of the nation than others, and others are often close to being foreigners or largely ‘rightless’ because politically weak and marginalised. These latter groups can therefore always turn to even more vulnerable groups of ‘non-citizens’ such as children and foreigners in order to assert some power. The fact that it is only working people from Africa and not Whites from the West who are the objects of xenophobic practice testifies not only to the inherited racism of the state apparatuses and weakness of the latter, but also to the inability of workers organisations such as unions to state politically the commonality of all working people in South Africa irrespective of communitarian origins. The inability of a universalising ideology such as Pan-Africanism to take hold of the population, despite the government’s propagating a (neo-liberal) notion of ‘African Renaissance’, has resulted partly because the term ‘African’ has been conflated with ‘Black’ in state discourse, so that national and racial categories have been...

Share