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"Broke-on-Broke Violence"What the U.S. press got wrong about South Africa's xenophobic riots.

By Kerry ChancePosted Friday, June 20, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET

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David Plotz pondered the deteriorating sanity of Thabo Mbeki. In 2004, Jennifer Abrahamson considered the progress of South Africa 10 years after apartheid. In 2000, June Thomas discussed South Africa's warm electoral reception of an alternative to the ANC.

Finally, we are told that President Mbeki is exacerbating the battle between foreigners and the South African poor. Even the most accurate and nuanced U.S. coverage, a New Yorker piece by Philip Gourevitch, focuses attention on Mbeki's failed economic policies and his complicit silence about his pal Robert Mugabe's reign of terror in neighboring Zimbabwe.

Mbeki's an easy target. In South Africa, he is widely regarded as a distant leader out of touch with the people, an elitist comfortable with elites. As Gourevitch mentions, Mbeki has been rendered a lame duck by the ANC—ousted as party leader in favor of Jacob Zuma, who is poised to claim the presidency next year. By pinning South Africa's recent failures on Mbeki, the press coverage downplays the role of Zuma and the ANC.

Despite having been presented as a minor figure in the coverage, Zuma's role has been hotly debated in South Africa, as has the "Zuma factor" in the riots. Reports have circulated of rioters singing Zuma's controversial trademark song, "Bring me my machine gun." Some of the shacks that were demolished were tagged with pro-Zuma graffiti, and Zuma's rallies have often taken on a decidedly ethnic character, with his supporters wearing "100% Zulu Boy" T-shirts. In his recent court appearances, where he was acquitted of rape and still faces trial for corruption, he has frequently referenced his Zulu background. His leadership of the ANC has brought up all sorts of anxieties about the party's past and future. Some in South Africa fear he will jeopardize the nonracial and nonethnic nationalism that the ANC was built upon. Others see his struggle bona fides and his "pro-poor" populism as taking the party back to its roots.

Zuma is not to blame for the attacks any more than Mbeki is, and both have condemned the violence. But for all his mass appeal within the party, Zuma's policies are much the same as Mbeki's on development and Zimbabwe. And ANC officials at the national, provincial, and local level have reiterated the message that the "flood" of "aliens" from other countries will be the ruin of development for the poor. If anything, Mbeki's fall illustrates that the machinery of political power in South Africa turns around the ANC as a party rather than the office of the president.

Ultimately, xenophobia goes beyond the hatred of foreigners, beyond the scarcity of resources, and beyond the identity of the current or future president. But nothing about xenophobia in South Africa is, as a Time headline claimed, "beyond racism." Rather, xenophobia is racism, wrought from the messy apartheid past and post-colonial present.

Focusing as it does on foreigners, the poor, and the president, the U.S. coverage rarely mentions the old colonial state apparatus that the ANC inhabits. This apparatus includes the police and bureaucrats, some of whom occupy the very same positions they held under apartheid.

The "elbow tests" used in the recent pogroms are instructive. The police used them for years. On the basis of such "tests," poor African migrants and refugees have been sent to the notorious Lindela repatriation center, a place of well-documented neglect and abuse, where suspected "aliens" await an uncertain fate. Wealthy foreigners from Europe and the United States, who routinely break the law by overstaying their visas, are not tested by police, nor are they put in Lindela.

"Elbow tests," say commentators in South Africa, recall apartheid-era "pencil tests" that apartheid officials used to decide a person's race—and hence his ability to vote, to live, and to work in certain places—in essence, his citizenship—by sticking a pencil in his hair. In its simplest form, if it stuck, he was black; if it didn't, he was white. Under apartheid, black South Africans were treated as foreigners, down to the notorious pass books and curfews in the cities.

The election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 meant that claims to citizenship based on race, birthplace, and ethnicity were forever changed. But as Philip Gourevitch noted in The New Yorker, the peoples' struggles continue.