Xenophobia and Civil Society: Durban

Xenophobia and Civil Society:
Durban’s Structured Social Divisions

University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society

Baruti Amisi, Patrick Bond, Nokuthula Cele, Rebecca Hinely, Faith ka Manzi, Welcome Mwelase, Orlean Naidoo, Trevor Ngwane, Samantha Shwarer, Sheperd Zvavanhu


‘…fears about migrants taking the jobs or lowering the wages of local people, placing an unwelcome burden on local services, or costing the taxpayer money, are generally exaggerated.’
Helen Clark, Administrator, UN Development Programme
2009 Human Development Report –
Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development,
New York, UNDP, p.v

‘The response is for each and every stratum in society to use whatever powers of domination it can command (money, political influence, even violence) to try to seal itself off (or seal off others judged undesirable) in fragments of space within which processes of reproduction of social distinctions can be jealously protected.’
David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience,
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, pp.13-14

Part I: Executive Summary

1. Describing xenophobic outbreaks and documenting the way local civil society responds are useful tasks for a journalist, but insufficient for critical scholars. What is required is to understand the profound structural crises associated with low-income communities in Durban that help contextualise the recent surge of xenophobic sentiments, and that also provide clues for long-term, bottom-up antidotes. These crises are being addressed only up to a point by Durban civil society. They have their roots in market and state failures that appear to be beyond the capacity of local organisations which are mainly equipped to do local advocacy, service delivery and in rare cases political solidarity. These failures include:

• extremely high unemployment which exacerbates traditional and new migrancy patterns;
• a tight housing market with residential stratification, exacerbating service delivery problems (water/sanitation, electricity and other municipal services);
• extreme retail business competition;
• world-leading crime rates;
• corruption in the Home Affairs Department and other state agencies in a manner detrimental to perceptions regarding immigrants;
• cultural conflicts; and
• severe regional geopolitical stresses, particularly in relation to Zimbabwe and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa.

2. Because they did not tackle these root problems head on, Durban civil society organisations band-aided the local manifestations of xenophobia only in the short-run and only up to a point. As the case studies of community/church responses in Durban during 2008-09 show, the structural terrain for renewed conflict – probably in the wake of the 2010 World Cup - remains relatively undisturbed. Durable socio-economic and ‘local geopolitical’ problems remain as challenges for more visionary civil society strategists. Some of these can be found in sites like Chatsworth in South Durban, where the Bottlebrush shack settlement was one of Durban’s most brutal sites of displacement in part because of civil society organising failures over prior years. In other neighbourhoods which serve as case studies – Cato Manor and Cato Crest, the Central Business District and Umbilo – there are equally sobering lessons about the limits of social organising during a ‘moral panic’ such as xenophobia, at this stage of Durban civil society’s maturation. Ironically, there are hints of visionary breakthrough in several relationships established by regional (Southern African) organisations, including the celebrated solidarity expressed during the April 2008 dockworker refusal to unload three million bullets and weaponry destined for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. There is hope for post-xenophobic Durban civil society, but only if we work through the processes that have taken us from here to here.

3. Although there are many issues that are important to address, the central problems we believe that can be tackled through public policy and civil society activities alike, are unemployment and the exclusion of the lower classes of society from access to adequate and secure living space. Whereas economic managers long ago introduced a dichotomy between living and working spaces, with ‘The Durban System’ amongst the most sophisticated of migrant labour schemes, this was an artificial division, one which xenophobic attacks traversed by allowing resentments born and kept alive in the workplace to be expressed in places of residence. Blame for xenophobic attacks thus generated should be placed squarely at the door of the economic and political leadership who, from the early 1990s, determined that post-apartheid arrangements would perpetuate and even exacerbate the social divisions associated with migrant labour. Moreover, by placing limits on what Durban civil society can legitimately ‘demand’ (and in the process by excluding mass employment, housing for all, and an end to migrancy), the elites limited the ability of working-class people to respond to the problems the declining economy visits upon them. Amongst the limits are the character of working-class leadership, the politics and organizational forms they can generate, their ideology and struggle strategies/tactics, and their alliances.

4. In this context, we believe the structural problems that have adversely affected jammed Durban’s low-income people – thus contributing to long-term xenophobic attitudinal norms – can be summarised as follows, with suggested recommendations for mitigation: