When anti-foreigner anger finds a new target

Qaanitah Hunter

Watch this week’s episode of Let’s Debrief, on what’s really behind online Islamaphobia in South Africa

Two months ago, it looked like we understood what March and March was about.

The anti-foreigner mobilisation reached a crescendo on June 30, amid an attempt to frame the movement as citizens simply doing what the government had failed to do: ensuring that undocumented foreign nationals left South Africa.

The panic was palpable.

More than 60,000 foreign nationals scrambled to be repatriated. Others made their own plans to leave.

It could have been case closed.

Except it wasn’t.

March and March promised protests every Thursday. The effort to keep the momentum alive continued, and what had been a largely online movement began organising on the ground across the country.

There were fallouts among its leading personalities. Ngizwe Mchunu and Phakela Ndabandaba appeared to differ over the direction of the movement. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma continued to beat the anti-migrant drum.

But something else was happening that I found much more interesting, and troubling.

The language was changing.

Spend enough time following these conversations online and you begin to notice that the target is no longer simply “foreigners”.

Increasingly, it is Muslims.

Bangladeshi, Somali, Ethiopian and Pakistani shopkeepers are not only described as foreigners doing business in South African communities. Their religion is invoked as part of the threat. Islam itself is presented as something that is “infiltrating” communities.

Then the targets widened.

Gift of the Givers, one of South Africa’s best-known humanitarian organisations, has faced attacks linked to its Muslim identity. Deputy Higher Education Minister Yusuf Cassim has been targeted and the language of Muslim “infiltration” has persisted.

That deserves our attention because South Africa has a long-established Muslim population. Estimates of its size vary considerably, but Muslims have lived here for generations.

That does not mean Muslims have never experienced prejudice. South Africa has no shortage of racism, misogyny, classism and other forms of discrimination.

But what we are seeing now raises a different question: Are legitimate grievances about migration and exploitative business practices being transformed into something broader and more dangerous: sustained hostility towards an entire faith group?

Or are we misdiagnosing what is happening altogether?

That is the debate at the centre of this week’s episode of Let’s Debrief.

Thembisa Fakude, a Black South African Muslim who grew up in a township, challenges the premise. He argues that what we are calling Islamophobia may actually be an expression of frustration from communities that feel exploited by some Muslim business owners.

Moulana Sulaimaan Ravat, a prominent religious leader and broadcaster, sees it differently. He believes much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric appears to be manufactured and amplified online. And, looking at global trends, he argues that South Africans should be careful about dismissing it.

I think that disagreement is important.

Because it forces us to distinguish between three very different things: criticism of immigration policy, anger at the conduct of particular businesses and hostility towards an entire religious community.

Those things can overlap, but they are not the same thing.

And once we stop making that distinction, a grievance about what happens at the shop down the road can very quickly become a story about millions of people who had nothing to do with it.

That is why this conversation matters.

Also, while you’re here, you may want to read a feature I wrote about for Al Jazeera.I travelled with the Salaam Foundation to Nquthu, a rural community in northern KwaZulu-Natal, and found that the anti-Muslim hatred so visible online, was not reflected in the community itself.

Watch this week’s Let’s Debrief and tell me: Are we witnessing the emergence of a new strain of Islamophobia in South Africa, or are we giving the wrong name to a much more complicated problem?