South Africa and Xenophobia

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors problematize the narrative that South Africans are xenophobic through a critical historiographical and philosophical critique. They disentangle state agency from civil society agency (organized and non-organized) action and reject this narrative as false, and as an opportunistic obfuscation of problems confronting South Africa and the African continent in general. They suggest, rather, that the South African government or the state is xenophobic, as state ideology in Africa does not always translate into popular ideology in society. State ideology is often resisted and militated against by society in various ways both consciously and unconsciously, as the two arise from different social formation processes.