Why sex is greatest cause of Xenophobia in S.Africa

By Immanuel Ben Misagga

The ongoing wave of xenophobic attacks by black South Africans on migrant Africans has attracted concern from all corners of the continent. A lot has been said about the how xenophobia, which literary means a fear of foreigners, is fuelled by politics and economics. However, from my experience as someone who often travels, invests there and other Southern African states, I believe it all stems from the mindset of some South African men. Women in South Africa don’t support xenophobia because they lose out more.

First of all it is easy to forget that a united South Africa is just 25 years old and, therefore, many South Africans are yet to overcome the classification, stereotyping and confinement they endured under apartheid.

I’ve been privileged to visit the leafy communities of South Africa as well as its shanty ghettos in Soweto.

My first shocker was the huge influence of food and supermarket chains across the country but whose prices were tailor-made for the different communities. For instance, the same burger in Soweto could be thrice as cheap as that in upscale Sandton which is ironically just a few kilometres away.

In other words, every class of South Africans was sorted in their own locality and it is quite rare to find a suburb like Naguru or Namuwonge, where the wealthy rub shoulders with the poor.

There is an invisible distinct line that one doesn’t cross.

Since the end of apartheid, there has been an influx of other African migrants into the country whose potential for opportunities is unmatched in Africa.

Owing to the tough economic and political conditions from their countries of origin, these migrants easily mixed up with the oppressed South Africans.

However, this has unsettled the downtrodden societies and this has become mainly rife in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Over the years, these migrants have used every loophole or opportunity in the economic chain of wealth to create their own class of merchants who often sell basic necessities.  

What started as mere retail shops owned by the migrant Africans soon became upgraded to mini supermarkets and in some cases mini franchises that act as linkages between the rich and the poor — mark you shops were started by East Africans and later Nigerians in around 1996 in combons, compounds and villages. Therefore, xenophobia can be instigated by mega supermarkets for locals that lost market and hence use the cover of xenophobia to attack and close or crush those shops opened by migrants in order for the locals’ supermarkets to raise their sales.

This, in the process, greatly reduced the influence of many major supermarket chains from the shanty suburbs.

With time, South African locals came to realise that they had become dependent on services offered by the migrants — especially shrewd Nigerians — who have a huge economic influence in the lower-income communities. 

I have interacted with a number of South African friends who, however, point to something queer as the major cause of these xenophobic attacks. “They’ve taken our women and eroding our culture… that hurts our pride,” my friend Thobile told me.

It was a strange allegation but one needs to go to Soweto to understand this. I recently learnt that this bruised pride stems from the sexual practices among indigenous communities who, for instance, prefer dry sex and so demand that women use methods to ‘drain’ their private parts so as to increase pleasure for their partners. Ironically, this ‘dry sex’ is the opposite to East Africans who prefer it wet. Coupled with this indifference to wet sex, South African women have since discovered that unlike their local South African men, East Africans and Nigerians know how to glorify women.

The influx of migrants also brought along a cultural pluralism that ate away some of the old South African practices; thereby stirring anger among some South African men who ‘lost’ their women to the migrants.

To them, it is acceptable to be economically inferior to the migrants but taking their women is unacceptable. Reality is that all pretty and beautiful local women are taken by rich migrants who work within the locality. It is also true that South African women feel so happy dating foreigners than their men who don’t want to work and thus depend on women from whom they even demand dry, rough sex which is painful. Unofficial local reports even claim that’s the reason you find lots of single mothers in SA than in other countries. So, to me the main problem which brews xenophobia is WOMEN. The economic reason is just used as a desperate gesture to hide the core truth.

This thus makes xenophobic attacks just a spark and unfortunately that will always be the case as long as the indigenous people feel that they have been rendered beggars and womanless.