South Africa: Anger Displacement or Xenophobia?

Repressed anger, eventually, finds an outlet. The ugly scenes of Black South Africans, periodically, mobbing their fellow Black Africans who have migrated to South Africa from elsewhere on the continent, and the rampaging of their businesses, is not disconnected from this phenomenon that psychologists have termed anger displacement. 

White South Africans being the target of this raw anger, and that group of persons off-limit, Black South Africans, who have inherited legacies of apartheid: trauma, poverty and grievance, have taken to displacing their anger, which the 1995 ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ doused, at fellow Black Africans whom they identify as foreigners.  

Nonetheless, the charge of xenophobia levelled at these South African mobs that disperse from the imijondolo to wreck havoc in cities like Johannesburg, with Nigerian migrants seemingly their convenient targets, is accurate. And this anti-Black migrants feeling isn't limited to the poor. Expression in circles of upper and middle-class Black South Africans is hidden in political language, in unnecessary scrutiny of Black African travellers by SA immigration officials at the airports, in random arrests of same category of persons around town by SA Police, rather than in tyre burning and looting of their shops. 

A child born on that day Mandela became first Black President of South Africa, stamping out a 42-year-long official apartheid, is now 25-years-old and ready to start their family. Yet, economic conditions of Black South Africans haven't improved much post-apartheid. White South Africans (10% of the workforce) presently earning three-times wages of Black South Africans (75% of the workforce).

Addressing social and psychological trauma resulting from hundreds of years of political and economic disenfranchisement, and attendant inhumane degradation of Black South Africans, who were eventually restricted to the townships with 'Pass Law' in the apartheid-era, with a TRC special report of Desmond Tutu taking televised confessions from White South Africans and Black liberation groups over 3 years (1995 - 1998), hasn't worked. 

For many Black South Africans social justice would go beyond affirmative action of ‘Black Economic Empowerment Act (2003),’ to stripping White South Africans of their wealth accumulated during years of apartheid, whether or not it is the right thing to do, morally or politically. 

‘Rhodes Must Fall,’ ‘Fees Must Fall,’ and attacks on Black Africans are cyclical rebirth of a phoenix from the ashes of that sense of incomplete justice that Black South Africans feel. And they have to repress their anger, while none other than apartheid-president, F. W. de Clerk, still says he believes their policy of 'separate but equal' was right. 

It should then be unsurprising that Black South Africans seek destructive ways to express their anger. So commonplace is this bottled-up resentment for the post-apartheid political settlement (Rainbow Nation) that many Black South Africans now say Mandela was never a hero, but a sellout. 

‘One settler, one bullet’ is rallying chant heard at Black students’ protests. And in elections seasons both Malema and Zuma have sang ‘shoot the boer’ and ‘umshini wami’ aimed at reminding their followers of historic injustices in South Africa. 

Studies show psychological trauma can be passed down through generations. Black South Africans wish never to be vulnerable again, and are reacting irrationally. Thought-leaders in South Africa will evade the social issues for which they are to provide answers if they simply label as xenophobia what is a group's displaced anger: a bitter dissatisfaction that centuries of land expropriation and, later, official apartheid, was settled by White South Africans, whom they still see as foreigners, majorly keeping everything.