Intimate foreigners or violent neighbours? Thinking masculinity and post-apartheid xenophobic violence through film

abstract

This article analyses post-apartheid public culture and two contemporary short films to build two arguments about the interplay of masculinity and violence in the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic outbreaks. The films are Xoliswa Sithole’s Thandeka and Martine and Andy Spitz’s Angels on our shoulders, both made as part of Filmmakers Against Racism’s 2008 interventions against xenophobic violence. I argue that ‘foreigners’ are made under conditions of perilous intimacy (not ignorance) and that feted forms of post-apartheid masculinity enable negrophobic/Afrophobic xenophobic violence.

keywords:

• Xoliswa Sithole
• Andy Spitz
• heroic masculinity
• aspirational masculinity
• intimacy
• xenophobia

Notes

1. This article includes arguments that I first presented in my paper (2016) ‘Laughter balanced on a tear’, presented at Intersect: Class, Race, Gender Symposium at the Gordon Institute for Performing Arts, University of Cape Town, 12–13 February, and my essay (2015) ‘Hollow promises to stop South Africa’s xenophobic violence’, in The Africa Report, June, 12–13.

2. The FAR films are Xoliswa Sithole’s Thandeka and Martine, Andy Spitz’s Angels on our shoulders, Richard Green’s Asikhulume, Omelga Mthiyane and Riaan Hendricks’s Baraka, Adze Ugah’s The Burning Man-Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, Okepne Ojeng and Kyle O’Donoghue’s Congo my Foot, Rehad Desai and Arya Lalloo’s Two Camps, Tumi Moroka’s Nowhere else to go and Danny Turken’s Affectionately known as Alex. Several other independent film makers contributed cameras, equipment, and other resources to the ensure the speedy shooting, editing and finishing of the films, in the hope that eTV and SABC would air them films upon completion, an agreement that was not honoured by the broadcasters until much later.

3. I include here the extensive work of literary criticism on different South African epochs, including political (bio)graphy; women’s activist (auto)biographies; feminist critiques of representation of women’s activism in various genres; scholarship on women’s movements and women’s activist bodies; feminist activist campaigns and coalitions; writing on women and/at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; feminist critiques of militarism; as well as criticisms of the accompanying tropes of ‘stoic mother’/mother Africa and founding father.

4. I have spent some time defining the ‘New South African Woman’, one of these post-apartheid aspirational figures/subjects in A Renegade called Simphiwe, Johannesburg: Melinda Ferguson Books/Jacana (2013) and the 2016 article ‘A peculiar place for a feminist? The New South African Woman, True Love magazine and Lebo(gang) Mashile’ in Safundi: the Journal of South African and American Studies, 17, 2: 119–136.

5. Socialist filmmaker Xoliswa Sithole has made more than 15 documentary films, has received numerous accolades across the world, including two BAFTAs and a third nomination, a Peabody, a BANFF Award, a Washington DC Documentary Festival Award, a San Francisco Documentary Festival Award, the Gold medal at the Chicago Film Festival, and a One Media World Award. She returns in her films to violence against women and girls, African and Zimbabwean nationalisms, HIV/AIDS, women-only households, family, sexuality and children’s education.

6. Social environmentalist filmmaker Andy Spitz’s work explores the gendered dimensions of parenting/carework, sexual and gender violence against refugees, varied aspects of refugee life, migration, women’s interactions across race and class, sexual identities, the difference age makes as well as returning various times to the textures of South African xenophobia. Spitz’ social justice commitment is laid bare in her consistent exploration of shifting intersectionalities in order to provoke questions about power. Her films have shown at the Berlin Film Festival, Hot Docs, Cannes and Vision Du Reel; she received the African Arts Institute Film Festival Audience Award for Angels on our shoulders and her film Hear their Voices is now used as the core tool in training by the UNHCR. Angels on our shoulders has a second life in an extended format as the critically acclaimed film We are nowhere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pumla Dineo Gqola

PUMLA DINEO GQOLA is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and award-winning author of What is slavery to me? Postcolonial/Slave memory in post-apartheid South Africa (2010), A Renegade called Simphiwe (2013) and Rape: A South African Nightmare (2013).