South Africa is experiencing xenophobic violence that targets Africans who came to the southern country in search of prosperity and a future. The country that got rid of apartheid and saw how Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president has made its way into the media today due to xenophobic violence. The author, in the following text, relates the flowering of Afrophobia with one of Frantz Fanon’s classic works, The damned of the Earth.
The process that shaped Africa into several Africas and spread it throughout the world – the transatlantic slave trade – is a “crime against humanity,” according to the United Nations. This decision, ratified by the General Assembly in March of this year through a “historic” resolution (see MN 723, pp. 8-9), surprised me in a neighborhood in South Africa, a country that since the 1990s has manifested an increasing Afrophobia or phobia towards black people born and raised in African countries and who migrate to Nelson Mandela’s country for economic reasons. The dances, celebrations and demonstrations of joy derived from the resolution and that are still broadcast in the media, reflect, in part, an Africa polarized by the fracture that is imposed when racism recedes and, in its place, social class becomes omnipresent. Afrophobia is the discrimination, hatred and rejection exercised against black and poor people compared to others of the same race who are not poor. It is an evil that reflects that The wretched of the earth – a book by Frantz Fanon published in 1961 that describes colonized people, now decolonized – have their own agency, regardless of the conflicts inherited from Atlantic slavery.
Afrophobia moves from the Eurocentric space to stay – just to name the capitals of some of the richest countries on the continent – in Dakar, Abuja, Addis Ababa or Rabat. It is a type of phobia that, among other indicators, manifests itself in attacks, destruction of businesses, deaths, forced disappearances, impunity and corruption, a set of actions promoted by political elites, but also thought of and implemented by black people (poor and/or impoverished) from the host countries. Afrophobia, when black people in Africa are among themselves and in relation to symbolic violence, starts with the question of to what extent one is “original black.”
If in Madrid, London or Paris, the question “where are you from” has as its objective the denial of non-white identity within the Eurocentric space, in African countries the objectives are different and are related to Afrophobia. First of all, the individual who asks the question aims to find out the ethnic-cultural origin of the migrant, and later lands – when he or she is poor – with a forceful “and when will the return?” Everything seems to indicate that the economic power granted by belonging to a postcolonial state has been superimposed on romanticized racial solidarity. Not even Bantu or philosophy ubuntusome of the common origins of the African peoples, stand up to the powerful modern State because it, on the continent, has adapted to interests outside the common well-being.
The question “where are you from”, secondly, aims to discover the kinship that black people maintain with the political families that have run dictatorships and soft dictatorships since independence. These political families not only govern with marked political endogamy and corruption, but have also formed a social class with marked Afrophobia. And from power they incite hatred, xenophobia or racism, so much so that, in many school books, the history of Africa is only studied from the colonial struggle. In this way, the rulers disassociate themselves from democratic commitments. The common enemy, in this context, is the West. Political blindness in countries like South Africa is so deep-rooted that the wounds of apartheid They have become the best kept speech by the ruling political elite to agitate its population.
The wretched of the earth are the victims of transatlantic trafficking, but also the creators of Afrophobia. They have known how to transform the trauma of slave slavery into a political business and have become a rich social class that exploits a poorer one within the black race. And while the world celebrates the General Assembly resolution, so far this year, violence in South Africa against black migrants from other countries on the continent has been increasing. This is because Afrophobia, a model of racism, is here to stay.
