‘Put South Africans First’: Making Sense of an Emerging South African Xenophobic (Online) Community

With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa, a shift has taken place in the organisation of xenophobia as xenophobic activism has adapted to the pandemic and increasingly moved ‘online’. While a large scholarship on the various aspects of ‘offline’ xenophobia in contemporary South Africa has been produced, the recent intensification of online xenophobic activism during the pandemic remains an under-researched topic. The present study sets out to challenge this lack of attention given to online xenophobia in South Africa by conducting a 15-month digital ethnography of an emerging South African xenophobic (online) community, the so-called ‘Put South Africans First’ movement. Aiming to understand the narrative construction of social reality in this group, data gained from the Put South Africans First Facebook page were triangulated with interviews conducted with the leadership of the Put South Africans First movement. Two narratives that are constitutive for this group will be analysed: the story of the ‘harmfulness of Pan-Africanism’ and the conspiracy of a ‘modern-day slavery’. Drawing on a perspective that emphasises the entanglement between the emotional, the narrative and the digital in contemporary forms of xenophobia, the article exposes the working of these two key narratives. The narrative of the ‘harmfulness of Pan-Africanism’ draws on the recycling of colonial stereotypes, the affect of disgust, and on the technique of reappropriating and weaponising history. In contrast, the narrative of ‘modern-day slavery’ is fuelled by a belief in replacement conspiracies and a dystopic longing into the future, where future generations of South African children have become enslaved by ‘foreigners’. The article concludes by pointing out some of the specifics of the South African case in relation to xenophobic mobilisations in other parts of the world.