ADDAMMS MUTUTA

Conversations about the new South Africa are many and varied. They range from the academic to the political, from the mundane life to policy issues, and from the past to the present. The cross-cutting theme is, however, the race question. Many of these discussions are anchored on the history of apartheid, roughly lasting between 1948 and 1990. During this time, the natives and other subordinated races experienced segregation accompanied by asymmetrical privileges and access to development. The black South Africans, the Indians, the British, the coloured, and other races were politically, culturally, and materially subjected to the Afrikaner political policy of separate development. It is understandable, then, that conversations since the 1990s have been anchored on apartheid as a lingering reference that can account for diverse experiences of the new South Africa.

What seems overlooked is that apartheid affected all races.

Even those who enforced it, or whose official racial determination seemed to afford them cultural and economic privileges, did not escape its adverse effects as the enforced separation created new cultural matrices among all races.

Thus, beyond the rhetoric of race binary, post-1990 can be understood through these cultural lattices. This is especially urgent given the priority of the human dimension of post-apartheid experiences. Issues such as increasingly vocal anti-apartheid whites can no longer be dismissed as mere outlier occurrences. Nor can recent xenophobia be merely dismissed as a matter of black-black hatred. As academic theory, media conversations, and political rhetoric on these issues become increasingly more speculative and terser, it seems reasonable to rethink post-apartheid from a cultural perspective. The above incidences would then signal a new theoretical watershed where we can discuss cultural crises and not race binaries as the new anchor for post-apartheid theory. This is the argument advanced in my 2023 journal article, Theorizing Afrophobia Beyond Apartheid: Conflict Cultures in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.

XENOPHOBIA

My article was published by Critical Arts, a journal that was anti-apartheid from its genesis at the University of Witwatersrand in 1980. Its discussions are based on a critique of Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9 (2009). This film tells the story of aliens stranded in the city of Johannesburg, where their spaceship is seen hovering above the city throughout the film. The main conflict is embodied by the protagonist, Wikus van de Merwe, an Afrikaner bureaucrat who gets infected by the alien blood. Throughout the film, he undergoes partial mutation of his hand which grows into an alien’s limb.

Wikus thus exists as neither fully human nor an alien, becoming estranged from both the human and the alien communities.

The alienated figure is central to the film’s agency of human-human and human-alien conflicts. This figure is the basis of my discussions of the place of conflict cultures in theorising xenophobia / Afrophobia in the new South Africa. The article applies “conflict cultures as a frame to discuss Afrophobia in the context of new identity consciousness.” Afrophobia is an offshoot of xenophobia, a cultural phenomenon where people from different races, cultures, or regions express hatred for those who do not belong to their groups. Afrophobia is, however, specific; it is about hatred directed specifically towards black Africans, as was discussed last year by vice-chancellors at a roundtable organised by the Academy of Science of South Africa.^{[1]See, e.g., this report: Tomaselli, K. G. (2023). Academic xenophobia in South Africa – issues, challenges and solutions: Reflections on an ASSAf Roundtable. South African Journal of Science, 119(7/8). doi.org} This specificity allows a more focused discussion of foreign Africans as constructions of race and geographically aligned race prejudice. This article offers a tiered assay of this crisis.

On the one hand, the Critical Arts article has entered the conversation on xenophobia with two propositions: “(1) that it is beyond the legacies of apartheid ideology, and (2) that it has semiotic usefulness to futuristic cultural enquiry.” In the former, it argues that xenophobia is a placeholder for failed efforts to create true national unity. The national imaginary of the new South Africa, politically actuated through Nelson Mandela’s victory in the 1994 general elections, is espoused in the metaphor of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It stands for harmony in diversity and, perhaps, in retrospect, the significance of sustaining this diversity rather than interfering with it. South Africa is a multi-racial nation and owes much of its diversity to the existence of these variegated cultures rather than their insolvency.

In the latter, xenophobia bespeaks the reality of Rainbowism as a loose “cultural imaginary” that is not yet realised but remains an aspiration towards which all races have found themselves trapped in incessant adjustments.

We can speak of ‘post-apartheid cultures’ as a paradox: they are both there and not there.

They are there when we think of races as bound to specific cultural histories and practices. But also, they are not there when we understand that these cultural histories have been layered with new conditions of existence since 1994 and thus continue to adjust as new political and economic realities arise. The cultural experiences and possibilities of South Africa’s races today are different from 1990. The conversations are also different. To use the Rainbow metaphor, we can say that the colours of 1994 are still there, but their gradations keep changing depending on the conditions in which they are tasked to manifest.

On the other hand, the article has specifically discussed Afrophobia, where blacks practice xenophobia against fellow blacks, as “the contingencies of internal reorganisations of South African national cultures and the arbitrary coping with difficulties of such reorganisation.” Although the origin is the black-black hatred, this is just a frame for discussing the broader cultural anxieties in contemporary South Africa. With its long history of vibrant immigration, South Africa has undergone numerous political, economic, religious, and cultural transformations. The figure of the alien is central to the nation’s past and contemporary imaginaries.

The discussions made in the article emphasise the centrality of the ‘alien’ in understanding cultural crises in the new South Africa. It considers the ‘alien’ as a cultural metaphor that designates the priority of the unknown in theorising the metaphor of the Rainbow today.

While initially, this idea stood for a multiracial nation, the continued emphasis on the negativity of multiracialism, particularly curated through discourses of race-based inequalities, has challenged the validity of its initial meaning. The explicit connotation of harmony in difference – to which the Rainbow is indexical – is counterpoised, literally, with an expectation that the different races must vacate or give way to other races.

The reorganisation of economic and political institutions reifies this expectation and has greatly empowered black South Africans to access education, economic opportunities, and political power. This harmonised coexistence is thus a desirable ideal towards Rainbow nationhood. Yet, the expectation that some races must antagonise others towards this end, and the demand not for co-existence but overhaul, challenges the Rainbow metaphor: what appears to be the case is usurpation of the Rainbow nation with a Monochromatic nation. This is effected through the repeated reiteration of ‘racism’ and the deployment of alienness as a tool to victimise anything alien. The new South Africa is thus best understood in this figurative transformation from a multiracial frame to a monoracial one. While the Rainbow frame allows one to speak of how races negotiate their cultural diversity, the Monochromatic frame uses the proximity between self and the other to change the perspective from the encounters between alienated racial groups to discuss the need to give way to one race.

CONFLICT CULTURES

This article thus sets off from this peculiarity. It suggests conflict cultures – “shared norms that specify how conflict should be managed in organisational settings” – as a suitable theoretical parameter to discuss race antagonisms and cultural crises in South Africa today.  It argues that “there was not one, homogenous “post-apartheid” culture” after 1994. Its hypothesis is bi-forked: 1). “although contemporary national ideals presuppose a usurpation of the political, racial and cultural boundaries of the past, to interpret such ideals within the frame of history is counterintuitive.” 2). “the new cultural turn, most evident in the emerging redefinition of identities, rebranding of nationalist politics, and socio-economic calibrations geared towards inclusivity (such as affirmative action and policies focused on black empowerment) necessitate new interpretations that are receptive to South Africa’s present consciousness.”  Further questions arise:

“What alternative concept may help theorise national cultures that are not legislated to segregate, yet not blended into a cohesive whole? Or even, how do we account for unexpected turns such as the denigration of hitherto celebrated perspectives such as Pan-Africanism, now modulated by black-on-black xenophobic cultures?”

However, the article is not political and does not claim empirical resonance with South Africa’s state of affairs. It is a semiotic critique of the representation of the alien figure in District 9, “where racial antipathies are supplanted with a nebulous culture of aversion.”

For this reason, it uses the diegesis; its plot, characterisation, cinematography, actions, narrative arcs, character arcs, dramatisation, and other visual elements as the basis for narrative-based cultural enquiry about post-apartheid South Africa. It offers a usable experience of film criticism, post-apartheid theory and cultural studies. Discussions of xenophobia and Afrophobia are deduced from the film’s diegetic narrative, which, it is argued, “connotes a less-acknowledged yet canonic reinvention of indigeneity now deployed to pacify the unease of cultural reorganisation.”

Further, it argues that “the image of the alien in District 9 is appropriated as a free-floating signifier of post-apartheid cultural tedium, and Afrophobia as a vent for the psychical anxiety of managing contemporary cultural obligations.” Its proposition of “Afrophobia as a cultural management issue” and also “the significance of cultural contrapuntal in District 9… as an anticipation of a new (cultural) binary responsive to contemporary emergent contingencies” is not a claim to any relation with reality beyond the well-known utility of literary and cinema verisimilitude as an aperture into the phenomenology of our exterior worlds.

CONCLUSION

The Critical Arts article offers a framework for theorising xenophobia / Afrophobia in the new South Africa. It is inspired by recent incidences of xenophobia in South Africa where blacks have turned against fellow blacks. These incidents have often attracted political debates, juxtaposing Pan-Africanist ideals with citizen rights. The main argument is that xenophobia / Afrophobia signals a new but less-acknowledged cultural watershed where all races are tasked to adjust to emergent realities. This is implicit in the article’s central thesis:

“Wikus, an Afrikaner bureaucrat, is a symbol caught between a desire to preserve Afrikaner identity, and the reality of mutations within this group… a blotch within the Afrikaner culture, rather than its emblem.”

Operationalising the alien as a target of revulsion is discussed as less about black-black antagonism but as a usable metaphor for an abrupt but incomplete reconfiguration of races – broadly in the direction of Rainbow ideals and specifically in the internal crisis within any homogenous racial group.

This page is a summary of a recently published Critical Arts article. The full original article can be accessed here: Addamms Mututa (2023) Theorizing Afrophobia Beyond Apartheid: Conflict Cultures in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Critical Arts, 37:3, 17-31, DOI: doi.org