For Dr Barney Pityana, the question of why South Africans are turning against foreign nationals is not an abstraction. He has lived it. The veteran anti-apartheid activist spent 15 years in exile as a refugee himself, and he grew up in the New Brighton township, where neighbours from what is now Zimbabwe, from Nyasaland and from what is now Tanzania lived alongside local families for decades without friction. That memory shapes his answer to a painful question: has the country become fundamentally xenophobic?
His reply, offered in an interview with Jeremy Maggs following anti-migrant violence that has left people dead and property destroyed, is a qualified no. Speaking after he addressed the Africa and African Diaspora Conference, where he condemned growing hostility towards foreign nationals and warned that the world was watching in silence, Pityana argued that South Africans are not inherently prejudiced against people from elsewhere on the continent. What has changed, he said, is the economy.
The arithmetic is stark. South Africa was once considered a performing economy, and people came to find their way into it, many staying for very long periods in a country whose legal system, in Pityana’s words, was simply not implementing the law. These are economic migrants, he stressed, not refugees. But over the last 10 to 15 years the economy has been going down rather than progressing, and unemployment is now very, very high. The dangerous mistake, he warned, is the belief circulating among many people that if the so-called migrants, unlawful as they may be, are removed, the jobs will simply emerge. That is definitely not the case, he said.
For the communities living with the consequences, the stakes could hardly be higher. Pityana noted that hostility and violence towards outsiders is unlike the South Africa he knows, because the entirety of the country has been shaped and formed over a very long time by the integration of many peoples, many languages and many colours. In the township of his childhood, people could find work and they had neighbours, so nobody bothered where they came from. Today, he said, movements such as March and March are exploiting public frustration, and they are able to do so because mainstream politics refuses to confront the deteriorating economy and what can and should be done to improve the economic well-being of ordinary people.
Pityana draws a careful distinction between economic migrants and refugees. On refugees, he was firm: the country has an obligation to receive those running away from their own countries because of fear of death or persecution, and that obligation must be upheld. He noted that the courts have upheld it admirably. But he rejected the argument that South Africans, having once been refugees themselves, owe a debt that entitles anyone to arrive. That is not the point, he said. The point is that when people are in need, there must be mechanisms within the country to receive them, to offer hospitality and to assist in every way possible. That is ubuntu, that is humane.
Meanwhile, his criticism extends to institutions that once would have spoken. The silence of religious bodies, he said, is deafening. He raised it at a World Council of Churches sponsored session, drawing on his own five years as director of the Programme to Combat Racism at the council, when it was a voice all over the world for justice and racial equality wherever oppression of people by reason of race, gender or colour raised its ugly head. He took some encouragement from Dr Jerry Pillay, the council’s general secretary and a South African academic, who told him afterwards that they had heard him and were addressing those issues, and whose own speech at the conference insisted that the world can no longer keep silent.
As for what happens next, Pityana’s prescriptions are blunt. Politics needs a major reset, because people have lost confidence in it. Economic players, including business and industry, need to become mindful of the impact of economic decisions on the lives of ordinary people, who are seeking a decent way of living. Crime and crime management must be addressed, and he pointed to the work associated with Madlanga and Zondo as a sign that something is being done, though he wants to see what comes of it. The alternative, he warned, is a South Africa that becomes the murder and gender-based violence capital of the world.
Underlying all of it is what he called the brokenness of society: broken physical infrastructure, broken people, and a broken capacity to think positively about how the country can be reconstructed for the benefit of its people. The appetite to rebuild and renew that South Africa had in abundance in 1994, he said, has been lost. His full remarks, and the conversation around them, can be heard at https://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-podcasts/moneyweb-midday/economic-despair-is-fuelling-hostility-towards-foreign-nationals-pityana/