Laura Freeman

With support from the European Union (EU), the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF) has commissioned this study in order to examine the legislative, policy and operational framework governing the South African Police Service's (SAPS’) response to xenophobic violence and related hate crimes, and, in so doing, identify opportunities to improve service delivery to non-nationals.

Across the globe, migration is becoming securitised. Restrictive European polices and the US exclusion list prevent inward migration and are justified on the basis of security and other ‘threats’. In this global context, Kenya is no exception. Kenya’s Al Shabaab security threat has been increasingly externalised as an ‘outsider’ problem. The clear outsiders have become Somalis in Kenya, be they asylum seekers, refugees, Kenyan citizens, or Al Shabaab members. This externalisation has led to a strong security response to Somali refugees and citizens, who are seen to typify and collectively reflect the domestic (yet ‘external’) terrorist threat.

In Kenya, the overwhelmingly security-focused approach has led to an array of policy reactions, not least the securitization of (Somali) migration and asylum in Kenya. By tracking major policy and operational responses to terrorism from 2011-2019, this chapter will show how anti-terrorism government and state actions in Kenya have increasingly targeted Somali refugees and Kenyan Somalis. This has included tightening immigration and refugee policies, including unconstitutional and unlawful removal of services; increasing border and security controls; and militant and aggressive police raids and operations.

Kenya’s governmental responses and shifts in policy and practice have tended to accelerate in the immediate aftermath of Al Shabaab attacks. During these times, security and nationalist discourses are used to justify such moves. By tracking state responses, we see how the effect of policy and operation shifts, while populist, have counter-productive results that often undermine democratic values and fail to manage the so-called ‘social ills’ that come with outsiders. Indeed, the chapter clearly shows that Kenya’s response to terrorism has been ‘killing a mosquito with a hammer’, and has had profoundly negative effects of Somali asylum seekers, refugees and citizens in Kenya.

How should we understand the interconnections between environmental change, migration, and conflict in Africa? Should the rise of Islamic terrorism and Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria be directly linked to the drying of Lake Chad? Should cattle raiding in Kenya be seen as a result of drought across East Africa? Does the constrained migration of the pastoral Tuareg in the Sahel causally connect to desertification and their rebellion against governmental forces? Despite the compelling and often persuasive case for directly connecting environmental change to migration and conflict, there is a growing agreement in both the environment-migration and climate-conflict spheres that intervening variables determine if and how environmental change causes population movements and political violence. This article presents a case for migration as an intermediary and bidirectional causal variable. The article argues that close attention needs to be paid to local-level manifestations of conflict and (mal)adaptive forms of migration to understand the potential propensity of environmental change to lead to conflict in Africa.

To date, warlordism in Africa has been viewed solely negatively. This has come about, in part, because of the analytical lenses that have been used. Typically, warlordism has been examined at the state level; and behavioural traits, rather than definitionally necessary components, have been the focus.
In effect, ‘warlord’ has been confused with other violent actors. I suggest here a reconceptualisation ‘from below’, which takes into account variation in types of warlordism, and which allows for both positive and negative effects of warlordism on society and the state.

De Doorns is a small rural farming town in the Western Cape, South Africa, and one without many economic and social opportunities, besides seasonal work on the surrounding table grape farms. De Doorns is particularly interesting in that it is the only rural site of xenophobic violence that occurred during the 2008/2009 nationwide attacks. The attacks aimed to drive Zimbabweans out of the community, who were perceived to be, at the time, systematically accepting lower wages from the farmers and, as a result, the farmers preferred to employ them over the locals.

Khayelitsha Site C is part of the broader Khayelitsha, a township near Cape Town which was established in the early 1980s. The population composition of the area is mostly dominated by isiXhosa-speaking people and as such it is nearly ethnically and linguistically homogeneous. This linguistic and cultural homogeneity of residents, while enabling easy social interaction for the majority of residents, is perceived to be a social barrier for ‘outsiders’.

The findings reveal that community members find an opportunity to loot foreign-owned shops, often following attacks on foreign nationals. Respondents suggested that skollies were behind xenophobic incidences both in the past and in recent attacks, where a number of Somalis were killed in Site C. However, there were different narratives and there was no consensus about the motivations behind these recent killings. Some residents, including some within community structures, argued that the violence was the result of conflicts between certain Somali businessmen over ‘territory’, whilst others reported that the violence was perpetrated by gangs who were looking for guns from those shopkeepers suspected of owning one. Other respondents viewed the violence as a form of revenge from gangs in the area, as some Somalis had allegedly killed some of their brethren who tried to rob Somali businesses in the past.

Motherwell is a sprawling and underdeveloped urban settlement located approximately 20 kilometres from the city centre of Port Elizabeth in the metropolitan area that constitutes Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality (NMBM). It has been in existence since the 1980s to accommodate mostly isiXhosa-speaking people from informal and illegal dwellings built on the flood plains in Soweto-on-Sea, and to cater for the influx of people into the urban area, but its formation was heavily rooted in apartheid logic and segregation. Since its creation, vigilante violence has formed part of the community make-up, often viewed as a manifestation of frustrations towards the police and the justice system. Locals and foreign nationals generally believe that the community is ‘good’, and both think that the main problem is criminality among the youth, which breaks trust between local community members and foreign nationals. A major hindrance to social interaction among locals and foreign nationals seems to involve cultural barriers as well as foreign nationals’ distrust of community members because of the criminal acts and violence towards them.

‘Afrophobia’, as an explanation for attacks on African outsiders in an African country, is a term that has become increasingly utilised in the South African press. This chapter questions the Afrophobia hypothesis, which rests on the idea that attacks on ‘foreigners’ in South Africa are a form of black self-hate. Empirical research conducted on South African attitudes to ‘foreigners’ following violent attacks on immigrants and others seriously undermine the Afrophobia hypothesis. The author finds that ‘xenophobia’ provides a much stronger conceptual framework around which to explain violence directed at perceived or actual outsiders. Bias within the media itself, as well as a lack of critical reporting and the underreporting of smaller-scale incidents, means the media has a propensity to uncritically adopt explanations such as Afrophobia.