Profoundly South African

The word “xenophobia” is fraught with contradiction. It has kidnapped Zen from the realm of enlightenment and tossed it into a world of fear. A word that belongs to the shortest chapter in the dictionary, xenophobia is not only directed toward minorities but is a minority itself. Moreover, when pinned to the atrocities committed by South Africans in May 2008, the word slides from the tongue with clinical detachment.

Xenophobia seems to suggest that a combination of quantifiable conditions can account for violence and murder and evokes a less passionate outcry than the word “racism.” In contrast with racism, xenophobia is seen as an unfortunate result of complex socio-economic influences. In contrast with xenophobia, racism is considered an ethical perversion. Both acts are equally abhorrent yet one term is considerably “sexier” from an editorial point of view than the other.

Xenophobia is far more than the fear of strangers its etymology implies, far more sinister than unflattering assumptions about individuals based on their nationality or physical appearance, far more unfathomable than an innate collective mechanism designed to protect resources. The word is a linguistic cop-out designed to prevent reality from annihilating sanity. As long as we fail to see it as such, this strange brand of indiscriminate targeted violence will continue to elicit a cursory public response.

A little over a week ago, seven Zimbabwe nationals died in a fire in a township near Worcester. Less than seven newswire lines were dedicated to the story on IOL on Monday 23 February. The shack was “allegedly set alight” according to the report. The story reappears on Tuesday 24 February with the announcement of a murder probe via Sapa as well as a xenophobia probe according to an IOL writer.

On Wednesday 25 February, IOL posts a Cape Argus report that states that a suspect is to appear in court and mentions witnesses describing that “youngsters surrounded the shack, armed with knobkieries and sticks.” According to the residents, the uninvited guests “attacked the occupants, locked them in the shack and left them to die in the fire.” Despite the nationality of the victims and evidence of mob violence, police “ruled out xenophobia as the motive behind the attack.”

The latest and most comprehensive online report following the incident appears on a Zimbabwean site on Thursday 26 February. The ZBC News article reports a bungled robbery attempt on two Zimbabwe nationals who sought refuge in “a shack belonging to their compatriots.” The robbers then assembled “a reinforced group of about 10 to 15 people” who “doused the shack with an inflammable liquid that looked like fuel and set it alight.”

The fact that this mysterious story has created such a marginal blip in South Africa’s mediascape is worrisome. Given what occurred in South Africa last year, news like this demands adequate public response and debate. South Africans can’t afford to let even an alleged case of xenophobia escape scrutiny let alone the strange tale recounted above. If what it takes is a new word that strikes real fear into heart of the population, our scribes need to come up with something fast.

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As the world grows more accustomed to the face at the helm of the United States, the phrase “first black president” is being less frequently tagged to the name Barack Obama. Given the history of discrimination in the United States, Obama’s achievement lent itself to being branded as symbolic of America’s progressive attitude towards race. The media, however, has all but exhausted this angle, providing an opportunity for free thinkers to reflect on what has really happened.

Naturally, President Obama’s physical appearance does have historical significance. In this respect, Obama’s inauguration provided an opportunity to reflect on America’s extraordinary Civil Rights Movement and the contributions of key African American figures to shifting the consciousness of the Unites States.

Nevertheless, by blindly dubbing Obama as “black,” the media has brought into play an old-school method of considering the slippery notion of race. Barack Obama is a person of dark-skinned Kenyan and light-skinned Hawaiian parentage. Describing him as “black” reflects a strain of binary mentality that harks back to America’s One-Drop Rule or South Africa’s profound Pencil Test.

What makes Barack Obama a really progressive choice from the perspective of race is that the fact that he is a figure who resists a simple racial tag. Ambiguity does a good job of dismantling defunct ideas! In reality, the concentration of melanin in Obama’s skin had as much to do with his success in the elections as the fact that his first name rhymes with Osama and his middle name is Hussein. The guy put together a much better campaign. Period.

If American liberals insist on patting themselves on the back for breaking the mould, let them take pride in contributing to bringing about regime change. As for the title of the world’s most significant “first black president,” this still belongs to South Africa. Nevertheless, South Africa’s national consciousness has yet to deal with prospect of a presidential candidate with a light complexion. Inconceivable? As a person of light-skinned Scottish and dark-skinned Jamaican parentage once said, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

Clicks:

• Music Video: Brenda Fassie - Black President
• Brown Paper Bag Test: Chocolate News - First Black President?

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A profoundly South African bumper sticker weaves its way through Gauteng traffic on route to Tswane. While ascribing social characteristics to skin-colour or nationality is backward, there appears to be some truth to the fact that we all dance to the tune of money.

Clicks:

• Money Race: IOL Inequality Survey Article
• Do the Math: Gini Coefficient

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Way back in the 1440s, the word “spud” was used to describe a digging instrument used to inter the seedling of a plant that yielded a starchy tuber. By 1845, the word was used to describe the starchy tuber itself. And so began a word’s etymological journey through the world of language, at least until a meddlesome polyglot by the name of Mario Pei came along. Author of The Story of Language (1949), Pei attributed the origin of the word “spud” to the acronym of a league of potato-fearing englishmen called “The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet.”

Although linguists sniggered and pointed fingers, Pei’s assertion was founded on a subterranean history of British potato suspicion. It started with the concern among Scottish clerics in the Seventeenth Century that potatoes weren’t mentioned in the Bible. When the first Great Irish Famine (1740-1741) saw infected potato crops decimate the population of Scotland’s neighbor, the Holy Order had a field day. To top things off, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published in Edinburgh in 1768) referred to the potato as a “demoralizing esculent.”

Things settled down and potatoes lay dormant in the Scottish psyche until Spud returned in the form of a bespectacled and emaciated heroine addict slinging brown slime across the breakfast table. It was 1996 and the film was Trainspotting. Democratic South Africa was two. Ten years later a South African would write a novel entitled Spud. The book would tell the story of a boy in a boarding school in South Africa in 1990.

Clicks:

• Etymology: Spud
• Related PSA Post: Safe House

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It’s the mid-70s and a French philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) has just hammered out a book concerning the birth of the prison system. The work tracks the evolution of the social and technological mechanisms used to entrench dicipline in Western Society. His ideas serve up an effective theoretical means of understanding the dystopian world conceived by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover, Foucault has devised a philosophical matrix through which the existence of Big Brother can be perceived in familiar contemporary contexts.

Discipline and Punish asserts that we live in a state of perpetual imprisonment, drawing connections between the mechanisms of law enforcement in modern society and the panopticon. A type of prison building dreamed up in the Eighteenth Century, the central characteristic of the panopticon was that the guards could observe prisoners while prisoners were unable to see the guards. The bottom line was that the prisoners never knew when the guards were looking. Fewer guards were needed, costing taxpayers less money. Everybody was happy.

Needless to say, Foucault would have drawn profound conclusions concerning the evolution of enforcing the speed limit on South African roads. Once upon a time, traffic cops crouched behind bushes and cables were intermittently stretched across roads in unexpected locations. When it was discovered that the income generated by speeding fines was not commensurate with the cost of conducting these stealth operations, the government turned to the panopticon method, slapping up signs like the one above.

As there were no cameras to go with the signs, people quickly realised that there weren’t any guards on duty. Big Brother was caught napping and all the mice came out to play. When the cameras arrived, the farmer’s wife raised her carving knife and speeding vehicles broke wildly to avoid persecution. However, they remembered where the cameras were located and formulated a strategy of slowing down in all the right places.

In a flash, the intuition of South African drivers sped to the lofty philosophical heights of Foucault. These days, even in unfamiliar territory, the collective consciousness of drivers around you makes it clear when there is trouble ahead. Nevertheless, the panopticon approach may not have been completely exhausted. Empty green boxes perched on metal poles might just do the trick. For the time being anyway.

Clicks:

• Horse’s Mouth: Foucault Quotes (Wikiquote)

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