Xenophobia to come in the spotlight
IT WAS during this month in 2008 that South Africans from informal settlements and shantytowns, armed with clubs, machetes and torches, attacked foreigners from Mozambique, Somalia, Malawi and Zimbabwe
To remember these attacks and have discussions on xenophobia, an international three-day conference started in The Hague in the Netherlands yesterday.
A local research organisation, the South Africa-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (Sanpad), is at the forefront of international exploration and discourse into possible policy solutions for xenophobia.
Sanpad chief executive Anshu Padayachee said the conference had drawn delegates from South Africa, the Netherlands, Ireland and India.
In May 2008 locals accused foreigners of taking jobs away from them. This was among the other grievances that led to xenophobic attacks in South Africa.
Over a period of just two weeks, more than 60 foreigners were killed, several hundred injured, and many thousands of migrants were displaced or forced to return to their home countries.
The three-day conference, titled "Taming the demons: comparative perspectives on violence, mobility and diversity", will launch a comprehensive study by multi-national academic teams exploring global and local dimensions of xenophobia.
Padayachee said throughout the world, communities were being spatially and socially transformed by human mobility.
But, the expansion and diversification of urban centres were also generating new social relationships and patterns of conflict, poverty and violence.
Loren Landau, director of the Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, will lead discussion on xenophobia in SA.
His panellists will include professors from various universities, including Steven Robins (Stellenbosch), Francis Nyamnjoh (Cape Town) and Kwandiwe Kondlo (Free State).
Padayachee said the workshop on xenophobia would be different from the existing tendency in research which is often limited to one country and is sometimes based on anecdotal evidence, leading to broad conclusions.
"A major drawback to solutions for xenophobia at this stage is that research initiatives on this subject are fragmented," she said.
"As a result, the experiences in the various countries are not established and are illuminated by experiences in other countries that have both experienced and studied the xenophobic phenomenon."
She said the thematic workshop would examine migration, xenophobia and racism as complete social facts, based on systematic and comparative experiential research conducted by multi-disciplinary teams from various countries.
tpaz
Foreigners are easy targets, especially when people are protesting against service delivery.I would like to see xeno against foreign whites. Sometimes us blacks we shoot ourselves in the foot.
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ubhunu1
@tpaz - I am trying very hard to say something positive after your comment. You will be accountable for your comment, in this ife or the next.Report Abuse