Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

CUJPIA: Vol. 7 No.2, Dec. 2019

Xenophobic Violence in South Africa and the Reactions in Nigeria

  • Adeleke Olumide Ogunnoiki
Submitted
December 18, 2019
Published
2019-12-18

Abstract

In South Africa, the year 1994 marked the end of the apartheid regime and the beginning of constitutional democracy. This political transition which many black South Africans witnessed, raised their hope of a country devoid of racial segregation and all forms of inequality. But not long after the African National Congress (ANC)-led government got to work vis-à-vis the actualisation of the common hope of its people that the rainbow nation became a destination for migrants. Almost three decades after becoming a constitutional democracy, many of the locals in South Africa’s townships are still impoverished and unemployed unlike the foreign nationals. Thus, the aggrieved locals have occasionally attacked mostly African immigrants for allegedly taking away the few available jobs, their women, for drug peddling and other criminal activities in their communities. This paper studies the 2019 xenophobic violence against African immigrants in South Africa and the reactions that ensued in the Nigerian State. For this study, the historical approach was adopted and the qualitative method of secondary data collection. Theoretically, the relative deprivation theory, frustration-aggression theory and, scapegoat theory were knotted to explain the rationale behind xenophobic violence in South Africa, the link between disgruntled locals’ frustration and aggressive behaviour and lastly, why African immigrants are occasionally victimised. This paper concluded that the Nigerian people and government reactions to the recent wave of xenophobic violence show that they have had enough of the one too many attacks on Nigerians living in South Africa.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...