More Complete Story Needed Behind South African Xenophobia

Today a coun­try once sep­a­rat­ed by Apartheid has become the cen­ter stage of xeno­pho­bia. The head­lines have been filled dai­ly with the ongo­ing killing of for­eign­ers in South Africa.

When we think of South Africa, Nel­son Man­de­la’s strength and fight for free­dom is what comes to mind. This con­tributed in mak­ing South Africa the nation that it is today.

But now we see South Africa becom­ing the nation killing their own neigh­bors.

For those who do not know, the actu­al def­i­n­i­tion of xeno­pho­bia is “the intense fear or dis­like of a per­son from anoth­er country.”

For 50 years, South Africa was under an all-white gov­ern­ment which ruled the nation by imple­ment­ing a seg­re­ga­tion rule to sep­a­rate blacks from whites. Reg­u­la­tions such as The Pop­u­la­tion Reg­is­tra­tion Act of 1950 were put into place to clas­si­fy blacks, mixed race and whites.

Though there is some pro­gres­sive his­to­ry in South Africa, includ­ing a peace­ful peri­od led by its first elect­ed black pres­i­dent, Nel­son Man­dela, the coun­try has turned away from its morals. This has stripped the African con­ti­nent, South Africa espe­cial­ly, of its image of uni­ty and reconciliation.

On every cable news chan­nel these days there are reports on the grue­some attacks on for­eign­ers in South Africa  But the ques­tions is: how has main­stream media han­dled the report­ing and the pre­sen­ta­tion of the issue to the public?

Let’s take a look.

Mil­lions of read­ers and view­ers need to know about the issues behind this major attack on for­eign­ers. Why aren’t media look­ing at South Africa’s econ­o­my and see­ing the miss­ing com­po­nents of the sto­ry need­ed to explain to the pub­lic how and why this began?

Some news orga­ni­za­tions have gone into the streets and class­rooms of South Africa to bring news to the oth­er parts of the world. In this video we see a BBC news cor­re­spon­dent in a class­room in South Africa, inter­view­ing the chil­dren of for­eign­ers  in the country.

We are told by oth­ers that xeno­pho­bia is linked to the extreme pover­ty being faced by many cit­i­zens in South Africa.

In 2008, the Asso­ci­at­ed Press explained the root cause of the prob­lem at the time, say­ing, “South Africans are strug­gling to buy food as prices rise amid stub­born­ly high unem­ploy­ment, and many com­plain the gov­ern­ment has­n’t worked fast enough to build hous­es, schools and hos­pi­tals for the black majority.”

Then, they pinned the blame on the South African gov­ern­ment, say­ing “fail­ure to deliv­er enough jobs, hous­ing and schools” seemed to be a part of the problem.

In this great write-up, the Huff­in­g­ton Post gives us the Why to the What about the recent events. The analy­sis is more in-depth, which makes it easy to under­stand what is actu­al­ly tak­ing place.

Yet many oth­ers failed to explain why these for­eign­ers are being blamed and killed.

Accord­ing to the World Bank, South Africa is ranked as an upper-mid­dle income coun­try. It is a coun­try with the sec­ond largest econ­o­my in Africa, but cit­i­zens say there are not enough jobs to sup­port for­eign­ers and the locals.

Research per­formed in 2012 by an orga­ni­za­tion called the Migrat­ing for Work Research Con­sor­tium con­clud­ed that 82 per­cent of the work­ing pop­u­la­tion were non-migrants and 14 per­cent were domes­tic migrants.

With a pop­u­la­tion of about 33 mil­lion peo­ple, this means around one to two mil­lion of them are inter­na­tion­al migrants. These facts are not pre­sent­ed by news orga­ni­za­tions so that the audi­ence can decide what the issue at hand real­ly is.

Mean­while, the facts pre­sent­ed by these orga­ni­za­tions show that there are deep eco­nom­ic and his­tor­i­cal issues that should be exam­ined beyond the super­fi­cial por­tray­al of for­eign­ers tak­ing away local jobs and paint­ing it to be a war between Africans.

From a local stand­point, The Den­ver Post, which usu­al­ly pro­vides a fair amount of for­eign news, this time dis­ap­point­ed. There is lit­tle or no infor­ma­tion about the recent killings in their report­ing. What is avail­able is infor­ma­tion which they recy­cled from the AP.

Still, the attacks have not been addressed and there have been no arti­cles about the attacks. Com­pare this to cov­er­age of the Niger­ian elec­tion. In that case, The Post had more con­tent, which sup­ple­ment­ed with mate­r­i­al from oth­er news organizations.

From the Voice of Amer­i­ca, the nature of the events is cap­tured by writ­ers Thu­so Khu­ma­lo and Ani­ta Pow­ell as follows:

“The anti-immi­grant vio­lence erupt­ed again in recent weeks. Soma­li and Ethiopi­an nation­als own­ing gro­cery shops in Sowe­to town­ship were the first to be tar­get­ed. They were beat­en and chased away by locals who took over their businesses.”

There is no expla­na­tion for why this is hap­pen­ing, except the expla­na­tion that “South African author­i­ties have denied the coun­try is expe­ri­enc­ing xeno­pho­bic attacks, pre­fer­ring to call them “crim­i­nal acts.”

The ques­tion then becomes whether it is just the  BBC, New York Times or the Huff­in­g­ton Post for exam­ple, that fill all the gaps in the cov­er­age of this impor­tant subject.

Why is this, one might ask?

One rea­son could be that the BBC and New York Times  have more resources to gath­er infor­ma­tion, much more than the small­er and more local news orga­ni­za­tions in our backyard.

Sources with more resources have been able to pro­duce more deeply infor­ma­tive pieces on the under­ly­ing caus­es of the attacks. For instance, The World Post explained, “The Zulu monarch unde­ni­ably made inflam­ma­to­ry remarks in which he com­pared immi­grants to fleas or lice — com­ments clear­ly heard in record­ings of his speech. These are pow­er­ful and dis­ap­point­ing words from a leader many hold in high regards, not least because of their rem­i­nis­cence to terms used dur­ing the 1994 Rwan­dan genocide.”

This is a great exam­ple of how the media should be cov­er­ing the news. In this case, The World Post gave infor­ma­tion that no oth­er news sta­tion was report­ing on. This shows the influ­ence lead­ers hold in the thoughts of their cit­i­zens. This infor­ma­tion is often not pre­sent­ed to the pub­lic for them to under­stand the source of anger which cit­i­zens feel.

Media must research every cor­ner and every lit­tle lead to ensure they are giv­ing the pub­lic a fair chance to ana­lyze how this start­ed. More­over, there needs to be a light shined on the real rea­sons behind xeno­pho­bia and oth­er soci­etal ills, includ­ing genocide.