Silence as Security: Adapting to Anti-Immigrant Hostility in South Africa

• In Event: Poster Session: African Politics Conference Group; Middle East and North Africa Politics & Human Rights
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: African Politics: Populism and Privilege in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Silence as Security: Adapting to Anti-Immigrant Hostility in South Africa
Marlon Roundtree
Department of Political Science, International Development, and International Affairs
The University of Southern Mississippi

In the years since South Africa's outbreaks of xenophobic violence in 2008 and 2015, little has changed about the underlying sources of the country's apparent contempt for foreign nationals from its African neighbors. In various places on the continent, one finds a collection of dire human insecurity realities including pervasive poverty, severe food insecurity, the continued scourge of HIV/AIDS, and other existential threats. South Africa – with its widely-celebrated post-apartheid democratization and its status as the sole newly industrialized country in Africa – has become the destination of choice for masses of migrants fleeing unfortunate circumstances in their respective home countries. In particular, large numbers of Zimbabweans continue to cross into South Africa – legally and illegally – in desperate search of increased security and the hope for prosperity. This inquiry explores the difficulties they encounter once they arrive in South Africa and the ways they adapt themselves to reduce their exposure to anti-immigrant hostility. In particular, African immigrants report that they avoid speaking in public spaces to minimize the risk of being detected as foreigners and drawing the ire of South African citizens. Descriptions of these challenges are drawn from journaled accounts by migrants themselves during 2017 and 2018, and they include such issues as xenophobia and scapegoating, access to work in the formal and informal sectors, the acquisition of legal status, personal safety threats, corrupt practices by government agents, and other human security challenges faced by non-citizens. A qualitative analysis of the journal entries by various immigrants in three South African cities reveals themes consistent with the UN-HDR (1994) and related human security scholarship from the intervening years. This paper proposes possibilities for future research within the human security paradigm as well as group threat, scapegoating, social exclusion, and human rights theories.

Author

• Marlon Roundtree, University of Southern Mississippi