Malaika wa Azania is convinced that if South Africans could elect their president directly, someone very similar to Trump would appeal to many people.
The news of Donald Trump’s victory sent shock waves across the world. South Africans in particular expressed shock and bewilderment at what they believed to be an atrocious choice of candidate by the American people.
Many have argued that Trump is a racist, sexist and bigoted white supremacist with no regard for the lives of people of colour. This is true. His entire campaign had been based on expressions of deep-seated racism and resentment for anyone who is not white.
It is therefore no accident of history that statistics indicate that a majority of his votes came from white people - men and women. People of colour in their majority voted for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. But the issue is not about which of them was better. Neither Trump nor Clinton follows progressive politics. The issue for me is that Trump represents politics that are not limited to the US.
In fact, I’m convinced that if South Africans could elect their president directly, someone very similar to Trump would appeal to many people across the racial divide in South Africa.
A person like Trump has a great chance of winning a presidential election in this country of ours - with the help of some of the people who were expressing outrage at his election on social media and beyond.
Almost every poll wrote Trump off long before the day of the elections. The world underestimated the depth of the rage that has been festering in the minds of working-class white Americans - a rage that is grounded on the hatred of the “other”. Othering is defined as the process of casting a group or an individual into the role of the “other” and establishing one’s own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this “other”.
In Hispanics, African-Americans, Native Americans, refugees and migrants as well as the LGBTIQA community, Trump saw an “other” that threatened the potential greatness of the US. This “other”, he contends, is responsible for all the socio-economic ills that confront the US and, to eradicate these ills, the “other” must be exterminated.
This kind of politics appeals to the white working-class population that is poor, uneducated, unemployed or holding down bad-paying jobs that offer no security. This is a class that believes, firstly, that the reason for their economic hardships is the presence of the “other”. The “other” is seen to be “stealing” their jobs.
Secondly, this class believes it is facing a demographic extinction, that populations of the “other” are increasing and this increase will result in the “other” taking over. From 2000 to 2012, the Hispanic population in the US grew by 50 percent, while the overall US population increased by just 12 percent. Today, the Hispanic population constitutes 17.6 percent of the total population.
It’s this exponential growth of the “other” that makes the rage and fears of white working-class Americans fester.
Rhodes University academic Mlamuli Hlatshwayo puts it aptly: “It’s about legitimacy - belonging and non-belonging. It’s about those ones’ and who America ought to represent at the end of the day.”
This is about “draining the swamp and removing certain people and depriving them of their belonging, identity and American-ness”.
We have seen this kind of politics in South Africa. In fact, they continue to characterise the ugly face of working-class politics within a large section of the country’s populace.
The ongoing violence, both physical and systematic, that is meted out to black Africans, Pakistanis and other people of colour in our country is reflective of politics of “drain-ing the swamp”.
By classifying any black person who is not South African as a “kwerekwere”, we are not only engaging in the process of “othering” but are effectively depriving people of their belonging and identity.
Just as Trump is saying people of colour in the US are not American enough, we too are saying certain people are not legitimate. They are not human enough to be accorded human dignity. The reasons for our own disregard for the “other” do not differ fundamentally from those of Trump and his followers.
In fact, the conditions that create “othering” are identical. In South Africa, just as in the US, the biggest voting demographic is working class (though in our case it is mainly black people who constitute this class).
This class of poor, unemploy-ed and largely uneducated people is located in rural and urban South Africa and experiences the effects of a historical process of disen-franchisement.
As a result of these historical constructs, black working class people are on the receiving end of structural inequality, poverty and unemployment.
Over the years, Afrophobic violence has been justified with the argument that “makwere-kwere” are the root of the socio-economic ills that are confronting poor black people.
These “makwerekwere” are the ones taking our jobs and benefiting from what we regard as our entitlements. The’re shop-owners in our townships and rural areas.
Furthermore, these “makwerekwere”, if not exterminated, could cause our demographic extinction.
As things stand, according to the 2011 Census and Post Enumeration Survey, migrants constitute about 4.2 percent of the total South African population, with 75 percent of them being “makwerekwere” (a term used specifically for black African migrants). This, to the marginalised and poor in our country, is a problem.
It is for this reason that I have no doubt that if South Africans could elect a president directly as Americans do, and a candidate with Trump’s politics was running, he would stand a serious chance of making it to the Union Buildings.
* Wa Azania is a student at Rhodes University and author of Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent