Rethinking Afrophobia: Black Americans in the 1960s Anti-Apartheid Struggle

• In Event: Insurgencies and Assemblies: Towards a Politics of the Street

Abstract

The situation with Afrophobia in South Africa has become lethal. My goal in this chapter--as in the entire book--is to point to the ways that young people born after or around 1994 have escaped becoming the kind of insular, apolitical, malleable, and state dependent Black bourgeoisie that neoliberalism and much of the ANC leadership hoped they would become. Focused on a range of policy issues (land return, gender based violence, xenophobia, etc.) this paper identifies the social dynamics operating and the political forces that stand to benefit from a misapprehension of the political work that Afrophobia unchecked does to consolidate neoliberal South African governance.

Several major thematics in the study of xenophobic violence (shorthand for the "war on African immigrants") in contemporary South Africa obtain. Scholars have explored: 1) the lived experiences of migrants and refugees from the African continent; 2) the ongoing experiences of low level informal economy criminality that target everyone residing in the country—making xenophobia a distracting misnomer; 3) the observation that such violence rarely targets people of European descent. However, even the study of what has insistently come to be called Afrophobia offers only a light touch analysis of the long history of migrant labor, the manipulation of migrant labor, the history of so-called Third Force right wing intelligence agencies initiating violence, and the violent state-led restriction of outlets for organized mass action for economic justice. Another way to examine Afrophobia in South Africa today is to consider how young diaspora based scholar activists positioned themselves to do anti-apartheid activism and the reasons that animated their deep apprehension of why fighting racial colonialism in Southern Africa was relevant to their own lives. Living within vivid and distinctive forms of linked global white supremacy in very different societies and regions, this complex analysis of racial segregationism drew them in to decades of life changing commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle. They did not think of apartheid as exceptional but simply as one form of the bureaucratic administrative application of anti-Black, heteropatriarchy-imposing racial settler colonialism. It was this understanding of the problematics of racial segregationism enshrined in certain genealogies of Black Internationalism & Pan Africanism that have been suppressed and erased in the necessary rush to consolidate ideas about South Africa’s post-apartheid exceptionalism. These ideas made South Africa’s people more readily available for incorporation into a neoliberal global economy based on a depoliticized populace, a tourism-based, and credit and financialization that has weakened the economy. Taken together these dynamics have prevented the possibility of deep macroeconomic restructuring: to end poverty, create jobs, address the deeply discriminatory and violently gendered labor divide, and challenge high levels of recruitment into the violent informal economy.

This paper explores political theorist Cedric Robinson’s writings and experiences and local news coverage about a six week 1962 Operation Crossroads trip to Southern Rhodesia to urge a return to Pan Africanist and Black Internationalist challenges to settler colonial logics, discourses, and rhetorics about citizenship and belonging. Having access to certain qualities of “honorary whiteness”—particularly U.S. and British passports— in the period of the 1960s-1980s, a small but long-lasting cohort of African American and African foreign affairs personnel and activists challenged apartheid and helped delegitimize its norms. Their focus on apartheid as one among other forms of racial (settler) colonialism gave them purchase on a set of analyses that should be carefully returned to in order to grasp the impact and meaning of African migration in South Africa today.

Author

• Tiffany J. Willoughby-Herard, University of California-Irvine