Answer to Question #221796 in English for Aud

Question

The critique of xenophobia in its multiple dimensions, is the subject of Welcome to our Hillbrow. Write an essay in which you demonstrate the validity of this assertion.

Answer 1

Xenophobia in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, seems to agree with the appeal by commentators such as Kollapen (1999), for the dictionary meaning of xenophobia should not to be confined to the fear and hatred of foreigners, but to include its description as a violent practice that results in bodily harm and damage. This view may explain why xenophobia is under a magnifying glass thatelevates it above local society to national and international dimension.

In South Africa as the concerns of foreigners taking away jobs that South Africans would otherwise occupy (, deliberately pokes fun at the perpetrators. That is why elsewhere, through the voice of a character, it dismisses this job-stealing claim. Several years later, the ruling African National Congress party leader, Thabo Mbeki, used similar words in his condemnation of the 2008-attacks on foreigners, stating that some foreigners are more skilled than South Africans and they are, therefore, contributing positively to the South African economy .

While back home in Hillbrow the common South Africans of the urban and rural blacks is denied as exemplified earlier in the stereotypical stigmatization of Johannesburg women, in Oxford the common Africans of the black South Africans and Africans from other African states is eroded. It makes no sense that, if such a denial of common Africans did not impress Refilwe while directed at the foreigners in Hillbrow, it should now appeal her when she witnesses it away from home in England. The truth expressed by Gaylard in his critique of Welcome to Our Hillbrow is driven home more explicitly by such a supremacist drama straddling national and international platforms, that the labels we give to each other prevent us from "acknowledging our common humanity" (Gaylard, 2005).

Harris (2002) observes that discourses of the 'New South Africa' and the 'African Renaissance' are significant in the discussion of xenophobia as "both are in common circulation and yet contradict each other at the point of nationalism." African Renaissance, he contends, "is defined in terms of continental borders rather than national barriers", adding that, "In this discourse, an African identity, and not a South African identity, predominates" (Harris, 2002). In contrast, "Nationality is a fundamental feature of [the New South Africa] discourse and a South African identity prevails" (Harris, 2002). The contradiction presented by the two discourses depicts South Africa as a hypocrite in dealing with xenophobia, because in the advancement of nationalism, xenophobia takes root and flourishes, while African Renaissance "underplays national boundaries and emphasizes regional and pan-African cohesion in terms of economics, culture, growth and development" (Makgoba, 1999).