Innocent violence: social exclusion, identity, and the press in an African democracy

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by David B. Coplan

Indeed it is in this era that police, not very visible where actual street crime is concerned, have been spurred into self-enterprise by nationalistic exclusionary public sentiment. 'Border police' as they call themselves in Johannesburg, have made it their business, literally, to prey on African immigrants, extorting bribes if they had the money, detaining and deporting them if they did not. Corruption became endemic at the country's actual border posts, with cash substituting for passports, permits, and visas in well-accepted practice (Coplan 2001). Down at the main office of Home Affairs in Johannesburg, South African identity went on sale, with any and every document available for the requisite unofficial charge. In this system, the impossibly long lines of foreign African asylum seekers appeared to be comprised of either stingy or undesirably impecunious identity cheats, unwilling to pay overworked officials justifiably exorbitant fees for the privilege of living unharassed in the beloved country. As Hein Marais wrote in the Mail and Guardian:

   ... the conduct of the Home Affairs department and especially the
   police has afforded them [the attacks] a veneer of legitimacy, too.
   The institutionalised denigration of refugees and the routine
   rounding-up of foreigners in 'anti-crime' sweeps have helped
   amplify the common slur that they're thieves, imposters--and
   legitimate targets. The pillaging that has accompanied the most
   recent attacks is an amplified echo of the extortion and shakedowns
   many foreigners experience at the hands of the South African
   authorities, including the police. The routine victimisation and
   exploitation of foreigners--facilitated by their inability to
   summon the protection of the state--has legitimised their status as
   'deserving' targets of outrage and expropriation."

To be not ungrateful to my adopted compatriots, I myself became a citizen and obtained a South African passport through the proper official procedure for an official fee that was a tiny fraction of what this would cost an immigrant to the United States of America. Of course I was not arriving from anywhere in Africa. Still, there is some public expression of the sentiment that, just as one had to be white to be South African under apartheid, so now one has to be born black and in South Africa, and not white or Asian or black in another country, to be South African. So, naturalised black South Africans born in neighbouring countries were among the targets of the recent attacks. In the late 1990s, the father of one of the black murderers of prominent physician Dr. Po was quoted in the newspapers as inquiring why the third-generation Chinese South African (despite being deceased) did not go back to the country where he came from. And during the recent violence, in my own quiet suburb of Westdene, a white woman was confronted by a dancing mob and told to return to where she came from. An Indian man next door, who attempted to remonstrate with them, was assaulted. (12)