Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp

Abstract

Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• apartheid
• refugee
• migrant
• xenophobia

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented to the 13th General Assembly of CODESRIA in Rabat, Morocco, the Social Factory colloquium in Cairo, Egypt, and the Makerere Institute for Social Research seminar series in Kampala, Uganda. I wish to thank participants in those forums, as well as the anonymous reviewers of Social Dynamics, for helpful comments.

Notes

1. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/anxious.

2. This was a research project of the Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (2008). The report was not without its critics, and was the subject of a critical exchange between this author and the South African anthropologist John Sharp; cf. Sharp (2008) and Pillay (2008).

3. An account of this controversy can be found in the report of the South African Human Rights Commission (2000).

4. “Foreigners Displaced by Violence in South Africa Move into Temporary Camps.” The Canadian Press, accessed June 30, 2008. http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5ibeZeGJbRIF2sQiMsqquz3WRICMw; “Camp Conditions Alarm SACC.” News24,accessed June 30, 2008.http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/Xenophobia/0,2-7-2382_2346122,00.html. “Reintegration the Priority – Government.” Independent Online, June 4, 2008. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=nw20080604125107561C769068; “Go Home or Go Back: Home Affairs.” The Times (SA), accessed June 30, 2008. http://www.thetimes.co.za/SpecialReports/Xenophobia/Article.aspx?id=780888 ; “No ‘Forced Reintegration’ for Immigrants.” The Times (SA), accessed June 30, 2008. http://www.thetimes.co.za/SpecialReports/Xenophobia/Article.aspx?id=781999; “Govt: Victims of Xenophobia won’t be Deported.” Mail & Guardian, June 20, 2008.http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-06-20-govt-victims-of-xenophobia-wont-be-deported; “Cape Town Wants to Evict Refugees.” The Times, accessed May 11, 2009. http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=996699.

5. The genealogy of this argument in African colonial governmentality can be found in the Hamitic hypothesis. Cf. Mamdani (2002b), and also Pillay (2004).

6. Section 5(1) notes that “Every person whose name is included in the register shall be classified by the Director as a white person, a coloured person or a native, as the case may be, and every coloured person and every native whose name is so included shall be classified by the Director according to the ethnic or other group to which he belongs.” Section 7(1) notes that “There shall, in respect of every person whose name is included in the register, other than native, be included in the register the following particulars and no other particulars […],” and it then lists a series of categories including age, sex, date of birth and so on. Section 7(2) in a separate subsection sets out the provisions for those defined as “natives”: “There shall be in respect of every native whose name is included in the register, be included the following particulars […]” and it then sets out a similar list, with a few additions: it adds “his citizenship, or nationality, the ethnic or other group and the tribe to which he belongs” (emphasis added) (Brookes 1968, 19–20).

7. Sidney Kentridge became a senior counsel in 1965 in South Africa, and was a defence lawyer in some of the most significant political trials, including the Treason Trial (1958–1961); he later represented the family of the late Black Conscious leader, Steven Bantu Biko, at the inquest into his death in police custody in 1977. Thereafter, Kentridge practised law as member of the English Bar, and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1984. He served as a judge in Botswana and an Acting Justice in the Constitutional Court of post-apartheid South Africa. This biographical information taken from website of the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa on the occasion of a national order of merit to Kentridge for his role as an anti-apartheid lawyer: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/orders_list.asp?show=395, accessed May 1, 2010.

8. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are taken to be among the most important Enlightenment theorists of a form of government based on the idea of natural rights, drawing on the earlier writings of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694). Noting a distinction between different national conceptions of the natural rights concept, Waswo (1996), in his account of the American genealogy of the concept, as distinct from the British, argues that the early Puritans accepted that it was “natural” that “men” would seek liberty, but they also saw that it contained a threat. Writing in 1630, John Winthrop was to make a distinction between two forms of liberty. The first he described as natural and the second as “civic” or “federal.” “The First,” he argued, “is common to man with beast and other creatures”; and he went on, the “exercise of this liberty makes men grow more and more evil and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia detoriores. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law […] This liberty is the proper end and object of authority and cannot subsist without it” (743–744). See also Hussain (2003).

9. An example of this invocation of Empire can be found in Lindqvuist (1992).

10. The paradoxes between universal claims have been articulated in various forms. In the moment of imperialism, which exterminates the colonial subject, there are the famous debates on the right to imperium and dominum (Grovogui 1996, 17–25). For the latter paradoxes, see also Mommsen and de Moor (1992) and Stoler (1989a, 1989b).

11. To clarify, when Hobbes uses “law” in lower case he refers to the concept of law in general, but when he speaks of “Lawes,” he is describing the particular transcendental law which monopolises authority over violence in the contractual justification for obligation to a sovereign political authority.

12. The Enlightenment formulation of a natural law tradition, out of which this conception of justice arises, draws on a number of historical precursors. In the genealogy of the concept in the West, it is to Aristotle that we most often turn, although there is some dispute about this; see Charles H. McIlwain (1932, 114–115). Particularly, it is to Aristotle’s distinction between distributive and corrective justice, the latter arising from a pre-given sense of right, which lends itself to a historically transcendent conception of law and right in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and Rhetoric (see Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History [1987]). Plato’s conception of natural law entered the mainstream of Western legal thought through the Aristotelian commentary on the Republic by the Andalusian Muslim polymath Ibn Rushd (Averroes), as well as through the writings of Thomas Aquinas (Henry 1993, 39).

13. In the genealogy of natural law, the Enlightenment interpretation is distinguished from the Medieval and Christian conception of jus gentium by the status of natural law in relation to obligation and compliance, which derives from a general acceptance, rather than a rule or force. This is taken up in modern law as “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (see for example the Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, from the Latin principle of ius cogena erga omnes, translated as “law that is compelling in relation to everyone,” or “higher law” or “fundamental human rights,” cf. Hart [1994]). Aquinas argued that whilst the positive legal system “derived from natural law,” these only carry legal force as part of a posited system: ex sola lege humana vigorem habent: ST I–II, q. 95.a3; see Finnis (1980), Fuller (1969).

14. According to Carlyle (1927, 83), this finds its way into Christian doctrine on natural law through Cicero.

15. This point is elaborated on in Althusser (1972), Balandier (1970, 3) and Shklar (1989).

16. It was also a debate presented as a case of the particularity of Afrikaner nationalism’s understanding of law as moral communal values, contrasted with the more universalist and “progressive” orientation of liberal English-speaking white South Africans and the legal tradition they sought to protect; see Lewin (1963).

17. Besides his copious writing on apartheid and human rights law, Dugard has served as an ad hoc Judge on the International Court of Justice and as a Special Rapporteur for both the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the International Law Commission. More recently he has been, in the latter capacity, investigating human rights violations, as well as the colonial and apartheid features of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, and Gaza in particular. For his views on the apartheid features of Israeli occupation, a transcript of a lecture is accessible at http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/d/ContentDetails/i/5240 (accessed July 3, 2010).

18. Whilst some might suggest an incompatibility between this secular and religious convergence, Alain Supiot (2007) has argued convincingly that these are historically entwined domains of a modern rationality.

19. BC 668 (B1.1), Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Cape Town Libraries.

20. http://www.lwandle.com/.

21. As I have discussed above, that apartheid was legal, liberal critics argued, was an aberration of law rather than a calling into question of the Western legal tradition itself.