https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7020-2949
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ABSTRACT
In August 1972, the Ugandan dictator General Idi Amin Dada expelled the 70,000-strong Asian community from the country on charges of economic sabotage, corruption, and refusal to integrate with the majority. The accusations that Asian Ugandans faced at the time were reiterated almost half a century later in South Africa while the country experienced its worst civil conflict since the country’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s. The coastal port of Durban, home to the largest population of Indians outside of India, became the epicentre of the violence and saw ethnic tensions between the Afro-Indian community explode with ferocity as racism reared its ugly head. Amid the violence and in the aftermath of it, strong anti-Indian sentiments characterized the entire narrative of the riots with one distinct characterization that Indians are the “Jew of Africa”. Delving into this indictment, this paper analyzes this claim by exploring discrimination against the Jewish people and comparing this to the “Jews of Africa’s” own predilection. At its crux, the research highlights the dangers of scapegoating.
Acknowledgements
The researcher would like to acknowledge the support provided by the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (NHSS) which funded this publication. The author is also thankful to the support provided by his supervisor, Prof Chris Landsberg who chairs the South African Research Chair: African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, and his colleagues at the University of Johannesburg namely Dr Julie Grant, Lou-Ann Anderson, and Smangele Zwane.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 While the Durban violence was also directed at white-owned businesses and infrastructure, and similarly the white British population was expelled in Uganda in 1972 as well, the researcher sought to focus on Afro-Indian tension.
2 Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014), acclaimed writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.
3 Beginning with Saint Augustine, Christian theologians viewed Jews as a cursed people doomed to wander in misery until the end of days as testament of their own depravity and Christian superiority. The Wandering Jew later developed as a wretched, lowly figure of Christian folklore, circulating as the well-known European Ahavser legend beginning in the thirteenth century. In the traditional formulation, a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to his Crucifixion is cursed to roam the earth until the end of days (Marcus Citation2010).
4 In the medieval period, city states and fiefdoms represented government power while the Church wielded a greater amount of supranational power over Europe.
5 The stab-in-the-back myth was an antisemitic conspiracy theory that was widely believed and promulgated in Germany after 1918. It maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front—especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labor unrest (Kershaw Citation2016).
6 In East Africa, Asian refers to people of Indian descent, many of whom came to East Africa to build the railways under British rule.
7 The Buganda are a majority ethnic group in Uganda. Uganda’s capital city of Kampala is in Buganda land. The Kabaka is the King.
8 Appiah and Gates (Jr) (Citation2005, 292) estimate that Uganda’s Asian population dropped by 25% between Independence and 1971.
9 This however did not stop Amin from speaking about tribalism as the stumbling block to the nation in a April 1973 speech (Hansen Citation2013).
10 The major port city of Durban was targeted by apartheid government officials early on to test its legislation. This legislation sought not only to segregate Whites from “non-Whites,” but also to segregate different kinds of “non-Whites” from one another. The notorious Group Areas Act of 1950 was first tested in and around Durban, with devastating consequences. An estimated 75,000 Indians and 81,000 Black Africans were “relocated” from established communities, and several areas of the city that were racially integrated at that time were effectively destroyed (Dixon, Durrheim, Thomae, Tredoux, Kerr, Quayle. 2015).
11 In a study by Hughes (Citation2007), the author suggests that while the settler state had an interest in driving a wedge between Africans and Indians, such sentiments for separation were felt from below as well.
12 There was a wide belief that South Africans took instruction from the Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru who idealized Indians and Africans working towards a “united front” to oppose the South African Government. In a study of newspaper articles published in the Mercury between 1948 and 1994, Pillay (Citation2017), notes how tension was fostered to prevent joint struggle against the government.
13 Phoenix is a South African town about 25 kilometres northwest of Durban Central, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was established as a town by the apartheid government in 1976, but it has a long history of Indian occupation.
14 See Maharaj (Citation2014).
15 In South Africa, the xenophobic attacks were aimed at Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and African foreign nationals from Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique (Misago Citation2016, 445). According to Nyar (Citation2011, 1). They are therefore perceived as threats and unfair competitors in the struggle for job opportunities, houses, and other valuable resources that supposedly should be enjoyed by South Africans (Nyar Citation2011, 1).