°Pogroms, pt1 - Amakwere-kwere

May 22, 2008


Some posts from dionysus: esp this here. From the Mail & Guardian (thanks d).



A short documentary on xenophobia in South Africa.

On the role of the police.

Really, really awful shit.

Filed under: Biowar + Borders + Democracy
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3 Comments »

  1. This piece from the Ethiopian Review is interesting - the editor’s note in particular…

    All of this reminds me of stuff I meant to write ages ago about what I think might be coming in Tanzania, especially since recent unrest in neighbouring Kenya. Tanzania is considered less volatile in the sense that tribal identity is not much of a big deal, nice and stable for investment, and just opening itself to Export Processing Zones and perhaps the US security apparatus.

    I wonder whether we will soon see this crew moving through Mozambique to end up in Tanzania, looking for work as well as somewhere safe to be… Tanzania has always been a bit of a haven for crew leaving form elsewhere.

    Even in a place like Tanzania, where Somalis and Ethiopians are increasingly heading because the Kenyan camps are no longer safe - both because of increasing collusion between US and Kenyan authorities (there were renditions from Mombasa to Somalia when I was there in Jan 2007) and general upheaval in Kenya - hospitality is not what it once was shall we say. Increasingly alarmist stuff is appearing in the Tanzanian press about “criminal syndicates” bringing in Somalis and Ethiopians.

    Some of the lefty crew loosely affiliated with Black Panther exiles I met in 2007 talked about how the US security apparatus was in discussions with the Tanzanian government about essentially setting up shop in Tanzania. Tanzania I think still has the largest number of African refugees - mostly Burundi/ Rwanda more recently, but increasingly Somalia and Ethiopia, and there are still many Ugandans from the Idi Amin era - numbers are at over 500,000. Tanzania was where many liberation fighters from all over Africa would seek refuge in the 60s, 70s and 80s, - and the word amongst the lefties I hung out with was that US security services were trying to convince the Tanzanian government that it is uniquely placed to provide a home for US security activities in the region because it is still highly regarded by other countries and is pretty stable by comparison with immediate neighbours in East Africa. This “40 years of political stability” is also the pitch for the new EPZs in Tanzania - more here:
    http://www.freshplaza.com/news_detail.asp?id=15243

    These are largely going to be set up in border areas.

    Dar Es Salaam is a useful base in particular for monitoring coastal traffic between Yemen/Somalia/Kenya, which the US government has a keen interest in doing. The renditions in Mombasa of course didn’t make the US many friends in Kenya, nor did the bombing campaigns on the border in Jan 2007 as part of the campaign in Somalia, so it seems that Dar Es Salaam might be a better bet. Many UN trials, and African Union negotiations are held in either Arusha (near the border with Kenya, near Mt Kilimanjaro) or Dar Es Salaam. It is difficult to imagine that the US has nothing to say about Somalis in particular who end up in Tanzania….

    Of course it is not only black Africans who seek refuge in Tanzania. The whites who leave Zimbabwe don’t all go back to Europe or the UK - many of them buy up land in Tanzania or Mozambique, where land tenure is dominated by a British style system that doesn’t recognise the ownership of land of Tanzanians who don’t have papers - and of course many who have been on the same land for generations don’t have papers. And then there’s the problem of the NGO kids - the Swedes and Aussies who come to “help” who find they can afford beachfront properties in Dar Es Salaam on even a lowly NGO worker salary, who are creating an urban land tenure crisis. And as Jello Biafra once asked, who’s going to babysit the babysitters?

    Not usually in to predictions, but I suspect that many of these crew who will be leaving South Africa may end up going in to Tanzania ending up as the workforce in the Export Processing Zones - which, by the way have been a disastrous failure in Kenya and Namibia
    http://eau.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/14/1/101
    And of course they’ll be perfect scapegoats when that goes wrong. There will be competition no doubt from all the lay-offs in the recently privatised state-owned enterprises…

    Liz [May 23, 2008 @ 3:03 am]

  2. thanks for this post. i hadn’t seen any of these the clips before. Anyway, the M&G article a sent you is not very good, and was in fact the first thing i grabbed because i had no idea how how to explain what’s going on…and i figured you would follow the thread yourself. Your comment in the email is of course correct, and this has been building for a long time. But i didn’t see it coming, and now that it’s here…

    A sense: Today we heard that the government transported thousands of people “home” (although, i still need to check the exact figure) who were taking refuge in police stations and churches around the province. When the violence first spread from Alex (a township in Northern JHB) to areas east of the city, immigrants who were assaulted went to police station to complain only to be transported to lindela - essentially a camp for ‘illegals’ waiting to be deported. After the state took some shit for this, they announced that no one seeking refuge would be deported. Meanwhile, the violence - no doubt spurred by images of immigrants fleeing their homes or even in response to the rumours that foreigners fleeing violence in other areas are moving into a particular area - continues to spread. The police (and now the army) have also made it clear that their function is to restore order, not reintegration…so essentially folk are faced with either remaining in the camps that have been set up within the precinct of local police stations, braving the township on their own, or getting on the government sponsored buses.

    Without sense: The violence itself is complicated. At it core seems to xenophobia, but various South African ethnic groups also have been targeted, but certainly not on the same scale. In hillbrow (the part of the city i live in), which probably has the largest immigrant community in the city, and where last weekend a number of attacks took place, things are almost normal except.. the streets are quieter at night (which for hillbrow is strange) under a self proclaimed resident (mainly African immigrant) curfew . Earlier (around 11pm) a friend and i were putting up posters along the main roads and there were still people out. Hillbrow, unlike most of the other areas effected, is probably one of the few parts of the city where immigrants outnumber locals. In fact most of the people we met tonight on the streets were from zimbabwe. One group of guys, made curious by the two of us (a ‘white’ guy and and ‘indian’) strolling around hillbrow after dark (which in hillbrow is strange even during the day), with bucket of glue and handfuls of posters, got really excited when they realized what the posters were about, started telling about a rumour that that the Zulus were coming back late tomorrow night. In fact many people seem to believe that “its the zulu’s who are doing this”. In Alex on the other hand, a community meeting to discuss crime, which then began to focus on the issues of service delivery, took a dark turn when residents apparently decided to go evict a foreigner living in state housing while many south african residents of alex are without housing. On route they began attacking immigrants, but also a few locals who tried to intervene.

    Like i said i still need to think about all this…but right now, i’m going to bed.

    dionysusstoned [May 23, 2008 @ 3:23 am]

  3. Both of these comments are much appreciated. I felt like I needed, even in the absence of particularly lucid thoughts, to put something up. Begin a conversation or, rather, continue a conversation (about pogroms and transformations of work and borders) that (for me at least) were precipitated by Cronulla.

    D - there’s a difference between knowing something has been building for a long time and, nevertheless, still being shocked. The latter one should hold onto, because it’s the sense that things can/might be otherwise.

    That said, I have a dim recollection of a ‘clean up’ campaign directed against itinerant workers in Southern Africa - maybe a couple of years back. But I can’t pin down where, what and how - or if my recollection is right at all. But these rhetorics of cleanliness (which are particularly explicit in the case of Naples) are frightening. Particularly when attached to fire.

    So late last night, I kept returning to the thought that only in ashes can everyone be reduced to the same, irreversibly and absolutely. No doubt the burnings (with tyres) has its particular resonance in SA, but the resurgence of witch-burnings (explicitly connected to unemployment), as well as that more pronounced recourse to crematorium ovens in Europe and elsewhere less recently … and the burning of the Roma camp in Naples last week … well, the phrase ‘ashes to ashes’, and hence the force of Christianity, seems pertinent somehow.

    But the other things which cannot be understated are the sense in which the pretexts for these moments turn around the protection of one’s family, conceived in an explicitly racialised way - the story of the Roma girl about to kidnap an Italian child, the fears of miscegenation and proprietalism at work around Cronulla … And in SA, the issue of unemployments seems - though I gather this from a distance - to be rendered as one of the loss of manliness (castration fantasies). And, when I said it had been building, I was thinking of the whole ‘migrant workers spread diseases’ theme that has been ongoing there for years. How to think all these alongside the questions of labour, EPZs, migration controls, etc?

    These are, still, swirling thoughts. And there are many levels of the conversation and the thinking through to be done - the movements of workers in the region (which Liz talked about), what is being restored in this process (undoubtedly, borders, but what else?), what is being called forth that needs to be opposed and what might be considered an opening … An ongoing conversation.

    s0metim3s [May 23, 2008 @ 12:55 pm]

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