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‘Us’ and ‘Them’: the discursive construction of ‘the Other’ in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town a

Charlyn Dyers & Foncha John Wankah

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Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville, 7535, South Africa Version of record first published: 27 Jul 2012

To cite this article: Charlyn Dyers & Foncha John Wankah (2012): ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: the discursive construction of ‘the Other’ in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town, Language and Intercultural Communication, 12:3, 230-247 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2012.659186

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Language and Intercultural Communication Vol. 12, No. 3, August 2012, 230247

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: the discursive construction of ‘the Other’ in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town Charlyn Dyers* and Foncha John Wankah

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Department of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa This paper is based on research done on intercultural communication at Greenmarket Square in the heart of Cape Town, South Africa. The Square is well known as a market for informal traders (mainly from other parts of Africa), local people and tourists from all over the world. Using originally collected discursive evidence from market traders, the particular focus of this paper is to show how two groups of traders in the market  South Africans and Africans from other countries, respectively  discursively construct each other. By taking a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to transcribed interviews conducted with traders from both groups, we were able to extract discursive constructions of ‘the Other’, which revealed considerable intergroup stereotypes, intra-continental racism and xenophobia. The paper considers the causes of these discursive constructions, such as dominant ideologies, the dominant political discourses emanating from the South African state itself as argued by Neocosmos in 2008, and the spaces (real and imagined) in which these different actors find themselves. Hierdie artikel spruit uit navorsing oor interkulturele kommunikasie te Groentemarkplein in die hart van Kaapstad, Suid-Afrika. Groentemarkplein is bekend as ‘n mark vir informele handelaars (hoofsaaklik uit ander dele van Afrika), plaaslike inwoners en toeriste uit baie ander lande. Deur gebruik te maak van oorspronklike diskursiewe data verkry van handelaars in die mark, kyk hierdie artikel na die wyse waarop twee groepe handelaars  Suid-Afrikaners en Afrikane van ander lande respektiewelik  mekaar diskursief konstrueer. Die toepassing van Kritiese Diskoers Analiese (KDA) op die getranskribeerde onderhoude gevoer met handelaars uit albei groepe het ons in staat gestel om te sien hoe ‘Die Ander’ diskursief gekonstrueer word, en hierdie konstruksies het aansienlike intergroep stereotiepes, interkontinentale rassisme en xenofobia ingesluit. Die artikel bedink die oorsake van hierdie diskursiewe konstruksies, soos dominante ideologiee¨, die dominante politieke diskoerse vanuit die Suid-Afrikaanse staat, soos geopper deur Neocosmos (2008), en die tasbare sowel as onsigbare ruimtes waarin hierdie verskillende rolspelers hulself bevind. Keywords: South Africa; Cape Town; informal traders; space; migration; intercultural communication; critical discourse analysis; national identity; xenophobia

Introduction and background Intercultural communication (ICC) is one of the most relevant fields for investigation in post-colonial Africa and post-apartheid South Africa, given the freedom of movement between African countries and the wide range of attractions, both *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1470-8477 print/ISSN 1747-759X online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2012.659186 http://www.tandfonline.com

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economic and social, that South Africa holds for people from other African countries. This paper is the second of two papers based on ICC research in one particular space within Cape Town, South Africa’s ‘mother city’. While the first paper (Dyers & Wankah, 2010) focused on particular barriers to effective ICC such as different styles of verbal and non-verbal communication, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, this paper addresses the discursive constructions of ‘the Other’ in the same space and the underlying causes for these constructions. At any given time in Cape Town today we can find tourists, short-term residents from other parts of South Africa, settled diasporic communities from different countries as well as short- and long-term migrants (including students and political refugees), mainly from African countries like Zimbabwe, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. While migrants from other continents appear to have integrated successfully into South African society, the situation is a much bleaker one for poorer migrants from other parts of Africa, especially the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled the economic and political instability in their country. These people have had to face ethnocentrism  negative judgements on aspects of a different culture (Jandt, 2004)  and xenophobia from especially black South Africans (Harris, 2002). Within the context of South Africa with its culture of violence, Harris (2002, p. 170) argues that xenophobia is ‘not just an attitude: it is an activity. It is not just a dislike or fear of foreigners: it is a violent practice that results in bodily harm and damage.’ In 2008, South Africa witnessed an explosion of xenophobic violence against mainly black foreigners from other parts of Africa, resulting in several deaths (Bailey, 2008; Human Sciences Research Council [HSRC] Report, 2008), and these attacks have continued intermittently since then. In the black townships and squatter camps of Cape Town, similar attacks took place resulting in the displacement of thousands of people. Greenmarket Square in Cape Town proved to be a very relevant site for an investigation into ICC, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, as it is here that we find a mixture of traders from South Africa and other African countries (as well as a smaller number of traders from other continents) plying their wares. The Square, a former slave market and farmers’ market, became a popular flea market in the 1960s that gradually gave way to a market dealing mainly in African arts and craft. After the country’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, the Square also saw a transformation in the nationalities of its traders, which now include large numbers of traders from other African countries. The main clients of this popular market are international tourists, making the market a meeting place for people from diverse cultural backgrounds. While English dominates as a lingua franca in this space, one can also hear languages like French, Portuguese, Lingala (an urban vernacular from the Democratic Republic of Congo) as well as urban varieties of South African languages, like Afrikaans and Xhosa, being used in situations where the traders and the clients have these languages in common. The position of Greenmarket Square in the heart of Cape Town is also of relevance to this study. The South African Parliament meets in Cape Town, the legislative headquarters of South Africa. As a new democracy, South Africa has progressed from the ideologies of racism in the apartheid era, to ideologies of nationalism following the birth of its democracy (Harris, 2002; Neocosmos, 2008). For the South African government, nation-building means uniting South Africans of different races (black, white, coloured and Asian) who were formerly kept rigidly separate by the apartheid laws. This emphasis on nation-building and nationalism

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clearly distinguishes South Africans from people from other countries, who, as in the rest of the world, carry labels like tourists, students, political and economic refugees, and both legal and illegal migrants. As one of the top ten tourist destinations in the world, Cape Town attracts many international tourists. It is also experiencing intense trans-local migration from especially the Eastern Cape Province, which is having a major impact on the size and shape of its population. According to Small (2008), the population of Cape Town is made up of the following ethnic groupings: coloured people of mixed ancestry (44% of the population), black people (34.9%) and white people (19.3%). The majority South African languages in this city are Afrikaans, spoken by 40% of the population as home language (HL), Xhosa, spoken by 30%, and English, spoken by 24% (Small, 2008). As in any late-modern urban space, a considerable amount of mixing and merging of these languages is also evident, particularly among the youth (Deumert & Masinyana, 2009; Dyers, 2008, 2009). Theoretical framework The theoretical and conceptual framework for this paper draws on studies in critical discourse analysis (CDA), the spaces (real and imagined) in which our respondents find themselves, and the impact of particular ideologies of nationhood and nationbuilding in the dominant political discourses in South Africa as they are reflected in the discourses of our respondents. Most definitions of CDA emphasize that it analyses the relationships between various forms of discourses and both abstract and concrete structures of power. Van Dijk (2001, p. 352) contends that it ‘is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’. Chilton (2005, p. 24) agrees, and points out how particular social actors with varying degrees of power ‘establish exclusionary attitudes and maybe practices by recurrently and selectively asserting certain attributes (i.e. social roles, behavioural characteristics, physical appearance, etc.) of social and ethnic groups’. For Wodak (2001, p. 2), CDA is particularly concerned with the relations between language and power. The primary concern of any CDA endeavour may thus be to analyse obvious as well as tacit ‘structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language’. Martin and Rose (2007, p. 315) emphasize that practitioners of CDA focus on hegemony ‘as it naturalizes itself in discourse’ and that these practitioners therefore feel part of the struggle against hegemony. Van Dijk has written extensively on racist discourse (1998, 1999, 2001, 2004) and the focus of CDA studies in this area. He identifies three topic classes in racist discourse which are used to refer to ‘the Other’: difference, deviance and threat (Van Dijk, 2004, pp. 352353). According to him, racist discourse is a ‘social practice’ (Van Dijk, 2004, p. 351), as the uses of such discourses in either spoken or written texts are actions that are either directed at ‘the Other’ or about ‘the Other’. In the study on which this paper is based, CDA was applied to the data once we had extracted the various discursive patterns and themes in order to establish the relationships between the discourses and socio-political power in Cape Town. The paper also addresses the influence of the particular physical spaces of Greenmarket Square and the city of Cape Town and more ‘imagined’ spaces like the concepts ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ on the discourses used to construct ‘the

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Other’. According to Vigouroux (2005), every communicative event develops in some timeframe and some space, and both have effects on what happens and can happen, with space being part of the context. Gumperz (1992) asserts that context affects what people can or cannot do in terms of communication, as well as the value and function of their language repertoires and identities which are either self-constructed or ascribed to them by others. Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005, p. 198) support Gumperz’s assertion, adding that space can incapacitate people when they move into new environments where their normal linguistic communicative processes and resources may no longer meet their needs. In a more recent publication, Blommaert (2010, p. 6) notes: Movement of people across space is therefore never a move across empty spaces. The spaces are always someone’s space, and they are filled with norms, expectations, conceptions of what counts as proper and normal (indexical) language use and what does not count as such. Mobility, sociolinguistically speaking, is therefore a trajectory through different stratified, controlled and monitored spaces in which language ‘gives you away’.

Movement into new and different spaces also means encountering the dominant ideologies on aspects like nationhood, nationality, race, behaviour and language in those spaces. Fairclough (2003, p. 9) sees ideologies as ‘. . . representations of aspects of the world which can be shown to contribute to establishing, maintaining and changing social relations of power, domination and exploitation’. In this important definition, we see how ideologies are normally part and parcel of the maintenance of relationships of power in societies. In line with Fairclough’s definition, Dyers and Abongdia (2010, p. 123) argue that ideologies about language are ‘rooted in the socio-economic power and vested interests of dominant groups’. While people may eventually learn strategies for survival in real spaces, the imagined spaces are much more impermeable. Our understanding of these ‘imagined spaces’ is informed by De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak’s contention (1999, p. 153) that concepts like nation and national identity are ‘. . . mental constructs . . .’ which are ‘. . . discursively, by means of language and other semiotic systems, produced, reproduced, transformed and destructed’. At the same time, according to De Cillia et al. (1999, p. 153), ‘. . . the discursive construction of nations and national identities always runs hand in hand with the construction of difference/distinctiveness and uniqueness’. Their arguments are echoed by Lynn and Lea (2003), who analysed the social construction of asylum seekers by the government of the United Kingdom. ‘Predominantly negative portrayals have presented asylum seekers as a threat to the stability of society: a challenge to ‘‘British cultural distinctiveness’’ ’ (2003, p. 426). The discursive construction of ‘the South African nation’ and the much more contested and fairly fragile ‘South African national identity’ which continues to be racialized in the post-apartheid era (Adhikari, 2009; Alexander, 2010; Landau, 2010), is but a short step away from perceptions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and the strong likelihood of xenophobic acts. Harris (2002, p. 175) presents three hypotheses for xenophobia against particular foreigners in South Africa: “

The scapegoating hypothesis  foreigners are to blame for high crime rates, drug peddling, human trafficking and increasing joblessness among South Africans. As Van Dijk (2001, p. 362) contends: ‘Semantically and lexically, the

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C. Dyers and F.J. Wankah Others are thus associated not simply with difference, but rather with deviance (‘‘illegitimacy’’) and threat (violence, attacks)’; The isolation hypothesis  South Africans were isolated for so long from the outside world by the apartheid regime that they struggle to accommodate and tolerate difference; and The biocultural hypothesis  foreigners are easily identifiable as ‘the Other’ in terms of their language use, appearance and style of dress.

Harris (2002, p. 169) contends that the shift in political power in South Africa and subsequent emphasis on nation-building, has led to new discriminatory practices and new victims: ‘Emergent alongside a new-nation discourse, The Foreigner stands at a site where identity, racism and violent practice are reproduced.’ But why, in the era of globalization, mass mobility and superdiversity, are (black) Africans from the rest of the continent so unfailingly singled out as ‘the Other’ or ‘the Foreigner’ in South Africa? After all, there are thousands of migrants from other continents living and working in South Africa. Affirming Harris’ emphasis on the role of new-nation discourses in excluding foreigners, Neocosmos (2008) argues that the root cause of xenophobia lies in the discursive construction of African migrants by the South African state and its national press. According to him, state discourses on African migrants, coupled with negative discourses in the national press on migrants from other African countries like Zimbabwe ‘flooding into the country to find work’ have become internalized by many South Africans. Neocosmos identifies three dominant state discourses which have contributed to the negative perceptions of African migrants: “

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a state discourse on xenophobia  statements by government departments, politicians, the police and others tend to portray the migrants in a negative light (as criminals and economic migrants who are a drain on South Africa’s resources and threaten its security); the discourse of exceptionalism  this particular discourse suggests that South Africans are ‘not really’ Africans, but belong to the most advanced nation in sub-Saharan Africa compared to all those other ‘failed’ states; and finally the discourse of indigeneity  this refers to the debate on which ethnic groups are ‘more indigenous’ than the others in South Africa. Many black South Africans continue to emphasize that other groups (particularly those of European and Asian descent) who arrived in South Africa during the colonial period are not really indigenous and have less of a claim on this country than the ‘real Africans’. However, Neocosmos reminds us that the only ‘true’ indigenous people of South Africa are the San and Khoi, with all other groups having histories of migration to this space.

There are of course other factors that contribute to xenophobia in South Africa. Despite changes in the political landscape, most black South Africans continue to battle poverty and unemployment (Hofmeyr, 2008). In addition, they also face negative discursive media constructions of themselves in the new South Africa (Besteman, 2008; Groenewald & Harbour, 2010). Many of them feel quite strongly that attending to their own problems should be the main concern of the South African government, instead of looking after political refugees and economic migrants from the rest of the continent (HSRC Report, 2008). In addition, the forces of globalization are often seen to be linked to major job losses at local

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level, as local industries compete with other major international players like China (Soko, 2008). Owing to all these above-mentioned factors, the 2008 xenophobic attacks on African migrants were, in the words of Neocosmos (2008) ‘entirely predictable’. The emphasis on the powerful state discourses in South Africa and their impact on the thinking and behaviour of ordinary people is in line with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (1971, cited in Van Dijk, 2001, p. 355), where the discourses of dominant groups like governments may become integrated ‘in the myriad of taken-for-granted actions of everyday life’.

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The study This paper is based on auto-ethnographic fieldwork carried out by Wankah, who was an informal trader at Greenmarket Square both before and during his studies at the University of the Western Cape. He became interested in doing research on ICC in this space and subsequently carried out his research over a period of nine months, from October 2007 to June 2008 (Wankah, 2009). During this period, he worked at Greenmarket Square for four days a week. The paper is therefore a context-driven, qualitative study of originally collected discursive material. A total of 27 traders and 17 tourists completed three questionnaires, respectively; one for South African traders, one for traders from other countries and one for tourists/clients at Greenmarket Square (see the Appendix for the traders’ questionnaires). A further 10 tourists and 10 traders were interviewed individually using the questionnaires and these interviews were recorded and transcribed. Some of the interviews were conducted in English, but traders and tourists from francophone countries were interviewed in French by Wankah. Mindful of his own position as a trader from Cameroon, he made use of a fellow South African trader to interview most of the South African traders in order to encourage as much honesty in their responses as possible. In addition, he took careful note of daily interactions between the traders, as well as between the traders and their clients, in the market. The final data set consisted of 44 completed questionnaires, transcriptions of the 20 interviews conducted with willing participants from both groups, and fieldwork notes based on participant observation of naturally occurring interactions in the market. This paper, however, only draws on the transcribed semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 informal traders (4 South Africans and 6 African migrants) as well as the answers to the questionnaires completed in writing by the 27 traders (11 South Africans, 7 males and 4 females; and 16 male African migrants). In order to extract the discursive patterns in both the interview data and the written answers to the questionnaires, we took note of the issues that respondents repeatedly emphasized. We paid close attention to the emotions respondents expressed in both the spoken and written discourse via recurrent negative/positive descriptive phrases and emotionally loaded terms. Cognitive psychologist Altarriba (2006) studied the association of emotion words (e.g. love, happy) not only to other emotion words, but also to abstract and concrete words. In her study on the use of emotion words among English monolingual speakers and SpanishEnglish bilingual speakers, she found that the concreteness effects in emotion words can be recalled with greater ease and are more easily recognized, imagined and contextualized than abstract words. In other words, the presence of these words in our data indicated that

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the respondents were recalling particular memories, associations or issues that were significant to them. We also took note of the ways in which the respondents spoke about these issues during the interviews  coherently, incoherently, passionately or passively as well as the tone used by the individual respondents. Secondly, taking our cue from De Cillia et al. (1999, p. 163), we analysed the use of particular lexical items in the spoken and written discourse like the personal pronouns ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘they/them’; or noun phrases like ‘those people’, ‘black people’, ‘white people’ and ‘my black brothers and sisters’. For De Cillia et al. (1999, p. 163), ‘‘‘we’’  including all its dialect forms and the corresponding possessive pronouns  appears to be of utmost importance in the discourses about nations and national identities’. We were therefore guided by questions like the following: How did the South Africans as well as the migrant Africans construct notions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’? Was there evidence of a clear South African identity (‘we’) emerging from the data which saw itself as different to people from other parts of Africa (‘they’)? And how in turn did the migrants construct themselves in relation to the South Africans, given their diversity of nationalities? The final stage in our analysis was the application of CDA to the discursive patterns thus extracted, in order for us to identify the discoursepower relationship in our data. De Cillia et al. (1999, p. 157) note that CDA ‘assumes a dialectical relationship between particular discursive events and the situations, institutions and social structures in which they are embedded’. Examining this dialectal relationship in our data meant asking the following three questions, which are based on Van Dijk’s proposed ways of bridging the gap between the micro (language use, discourse, verbal interaction, etc.) and the macro (power, dominance, inequality, etc.) levels of the social order (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 354). (1) How did the respondents’ data reveal the influence of their group membership as either South Africans or Africans from the rest of the continent? (2) How did the data reveal social actions and social processes such as the reproduction of racism? (3) How did the data reveal the influence of the local context, like the space of Greenmarket Square and the social structure of Cape Town and South Africa? Findings This section shows the key discursive themes identified in the data, as well as an analysis of the use of recurrent lexical items in the spoken and written discourse. Although we indicate the genders of the respondents quoted in the findings, we did not find any significant difference between the views expressed by the male and much smaller group of female respondents. The following abbreviations are used in this section: I (Interviewer); R1, R2, etc. (Respondent no. 1, no. 2, etc.); SA (South Africa/n). Discursive theme 1: the role of language in the construction of ‘the Other’ A major contributor to the tension between the two groups of traders in the market seemed to be sparked by the use, and command of, foreign and local languages as well as English, the lingua franca of the market. Among the (black) South Africans, there was the sense that when Africans from francophone countries spoke French,

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they were attempting to be superior to them. There were recurrent references to the use of French by the migrants and a tendency among the South Africans to see this not as one of the colonial languages of Africa, but simply as a ‘white’ language, which indicates a particular language ideology. Note the following two responses to the same interview question:

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I: When you greet these people, do you connect well with them? R1 (sullenly): It is difficult because they like only their language and are too proud. They think that they are the bosses but they are in the market. They think they are the white people. (Female SA trader, Xhosa and English speaking, 37 years old) R2 (with emphasis): For me, I think they should change their attitudes or be chased away like the Boers. They think that they are big bosses. They do not mind to learn the languages here but they just speak their French. They think that they are better. (Male SA trader, Xhosa and English speaking, 43 years old)

The two extracts above correspond with Van Dijk’s racist discourse of deviance (2004, pp. 352353). These South African traders appeared to expect only subservient behaviour from the migrant traders, who were (in the opinion of the two respondents) deviating from the conduct expected from them by those who held local power, i.e. the South Africans. Any show of pride and dignity on the part of the traders from other parts of Africa was interpreted as behaving like ‘the white people’, thinking ‘that they are the bosses’ and being ‘too proud’. It was almost as if these two traders regarded such behaviour as inappropriate in black people, which was ironic, given that both these traders were black South Africans. The clause chased away like the Boers (a reference to the white Afrikaner group in South Africa who ruled the country until 1994) fits in with Neocosmos’ discourse of indigeneity theory, as it seems to imply that the Boers are not, according to the male respondent, really South African. In contrast, the traders from the rest of Africa were shocked to be asked to speak local languages like Xhosa simply on the grounds that they were also black, as can be seen from the following interview extract: I: What difficulties have you encountered in Cape Town? R3 (quietly): Discrimination, the South Africans discriminate against people who are not from here. I: Can you please cite some instances where they have discriminated against you? R3: They speak to you only in their language. If you have a problem and cannot use their language, they do not care about you. When they meet the tourists, they speak English but if it is a Black man, they speak only Xhosa. They even call us ‘makwerekwere’. (Male, Zimbabwean, 33 years old, in SA for three years)

The derogatory term makwerekwere is used to refer to Africans from the rest of the continent by some South Africans. It is said to mimic the way in which the African foreigners speak. During the xenophobic riots of 2008, African foreigners were often identified as ‘the Other’ by their inability to speak or pronounce local languages correctly. There were interesting counter-discourses, also racist in nature, from some of the African traders on the language competence of many of the South Africans, as can be seen from the following two extracts: I: What happens when they get cross in such situations? How do they speak when they get emotional?

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R4 (angrily): Oh, they become very arrogant and rude because they would find it difficult now to express themselves in English and would turn to their home languages, just they code switch immediately, they mix, they use in, they come in with some slang and words that I even don’t understand, immoral and rude words they use on me and things like that. It is common that most people believe that the whites speak perfect English. (Male, Cameroonian, 40 years old, in SA for eight years) R5 (amused): What you get from their pronunciation seems like they are meaning something else. They will call a [bæg] [b g]. Also their accents are also a big problem. Most of the time, speaking with them is really fun because they are always trying to pass their communication, what they have in their minds and you are trying to understand. They use their hands even when they are speaking their own language and sometimes we guess and we understand the right thing. Some time, they speak like it is not English because of accents and tones. (Male, Congolese, 36 years old, in SA for two years)

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e

We note here the use of the generic ‘they’ as if the speakers accuse all South Africans of the same kind of behaviour. The first trader comments specifically on how black South Africans in the market switch to their own languages or informal varieties when they get involved in arguments owing to what the trader sees as their inability to speak English well, while the second trader actually makes fun of what he sees as the poor pronunciation and strange accents used by the black South Africans. All of this is seen as in contrast to white people who ‘speak perfect English’. The data analysed here offers further support for the research carried out in Greenmarket Square by Vigouroux (1999), who found that the francophone traders and clients were discriminated against on the basis of their inability to speak either an indigenous language or English. Eleven years on, we find that the traders in our study are now treated with hostility on the basis of being able to speak English, and have to contend with a powerful and deeply racist language ideology that sees English and French as ‘white’ languages. Discursive theme 2: exaggerating cultural differences or claiming cultural superiority International human migration poses many challenges around the world, one of the most prevalent being the integration into a host community of foreigners with different ideological perspectives on a multitude of issues like religion, the treatment of women and children and normal behaviour (Lynn & Lea, 2003; Vigouroux, 2005). Our data showed that cultural differences were often exaggerated by some respondents in their discursive constructions of ‘the Other’. For example, the different forms of greeting people in different cultures elicited negative comments, as can be seen from the following extracts: I: Are these forms of greetings the same or different from the way that you greet here in South Africa? R6 (emphatically): No they are not the same as our own. You need to see for yourself then you will believe me. They only use their French and I do not know what they are saying or why they take so long to greet. All these people are different from us. (Female SA trader, Xhosa and English speaking, 47 years old)

The manner in which this South African trader refers to the foreign traders shows how sharply she differentiates between ‘us’ and ‘them’. South Africans are referred to as ‘our own’, while the foreigners are ‘not the same’, ‘different’, ‘only use French’ and ‘take so long to greet’. Irrespective of the language being used by the foreigners at the

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time, South Africans usually just refer to it as French. This also illustrates a tendency to lump all the African migrants together as one group: ‘. . . all these people are different from us’.

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R7 (sullenly): I do not like the way that the foreigners say ‘my brother’ because sometimes they are meeting that person for the first time. They do not even want to speak any of our languages as if they are the white people. (Male SA trader, Xhosa and English speaking, 40 years old)

It is clear that the respondent does not want the foreigners to be over-familiar by using a term like ‘my brother’, even if the foreigner is simply following what s/he thinks are polite forms of addressing others. The reference to the languages spoken by the foreign blacks ‘as if they are the white people’ was, as previously noted, a recurrent descriptive phrase. In response, the following counter-discourse was noted from two African traders, whose ideological position on greetings and general behaviour contrasted strongly with those of the above respondents: R4 (surprised tone): It was so surprising that an old woman who is fit to be my grandmother expects me to call her by her name, and not mama or auntie as we do in my country. The people here do not have any respect for the elders because this will be a taboo and such a person should be treated like an outcast. On the contrary, the people here call even their own parents by their names. (Male, Cameroonian, 40 years old, in SA for eight years) R8 (quietly): When you are with the elders, you need to stay quiet and listen to what they say, not like in South Africa where a person can talk anyhow and at any position when he is with an elder. Even when you get into a place, you have to take off your cap when you greet the elders. (Male, Congolese, 41 years old, in SA for five years)

Several of the South African traders had extremely negative perceptions of the cultural practices of the African traders. Among these perceptions were the beliefs that ‘the other’ indulged in cannibalism and used black magic and muti (magic medicine) to steal customers from South African traders, as can be seen from the following extract: R6 (laughing): The ‘kwerekwere’ likes to use a lot of muti. If you are selling next to them, you will never get a customer because they drag them to their shops with muti. That is why I do not like them, so they need to go back to their countries. I: Did you ever attend any cultural event that was organized by the foreigners? R6 (still amused, gossipy tone): I do not want to attend because I heard from my granny that their food is not good and that they eat human flesh. My granny told me how these people use to come take people to Zimbabwe and then eat them. So if you go to their country, they will eat you. (Female SA trader, Xhosa and English speaking, 47 years old)

This South African trader appeared to have absorbed the state discourse of exceptionalism (Neocosmos, 2008) that portrays South Africans as somehow more civilized and advanced than nationals from other African countries. In addition, she accepted unquestioningly the stereotype passed on by her grandmother, which may indicate that these discourses have been in existence in South Africa for a long time. Under the apartheid regime, the state media also tended to paint very negative pictures of other African states, which were probably absorbed by all segments of South African society to a greater or lesser degree.

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An African trader commented on how the South Africans claimed cultural superiority over other Africans: R9 (angrily): They are fond of saying ‘our culture is the best’, they even tell you sometimes that ‘you must speak our language’, you must dress like us, you must do this like us . . . they are claiming superiority over everything. (Male Sudanese trader, 42 years old, in SA for 10 years)

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The data discussed here relating to cultural differences and presumed cultural superiority support Harris’s biocultural hypothesis (2002) as well as Van Dijk’s racist discourses of difference (2004, pp. 352353)  the foreigners behave differently, speak differently and even eat different food or use magic medicine to attract clients. Discursive theme 3: ethnocentrism and xenophobia Although the written data revealed that eight of the African traders had not suffered much ill-treatment and claimed to have ‘lots of local friends’, the majority regarded most black South Africans as extremely ethnocentric and xenophobic. R10 (sad and monotonous): They do not look at us like human beings. If you tell them that this is what you do in your country, they will tell you that if your country was good as you say, you would not have come here. They do not respect elders and you cannot beat a child when that child does wrong. There are lots of things that we do different from them. Although we may be eating the same kind of food, it is prepared differently but they will behave as if it is something else. (Male Kenyan trader, 44 years old, in SA for eight years)

This extract portrays South Africans as racist, disrespectful and deeply suspicious of African migrants. It also reveals the speaker’s own underlying ideologies on respect for older people and the disciplining of children. The saddest line is ‘They do not look at us like human beings’, which shows just how cruel and xenophobic, in the mind of this African trader, some South Africans have become. In line with Harris’s scapegoating hypothesis (2002), the South Africans often claimed that the migrants were criminals or caused poverty in South Africa as they were stealing the jobs of the local people, common claims in racist discourses all over the world. Van Dijk (2001, p. 361) notes that many studies reveal ‘a remarkable similarity among the stereotypes, prejudices, and other forms of verbal derogation across discourse types, media and national boundaries’. However, these traders often create jobs for South Africans, as can be seen in the next extract: R8 (cynically): I used to employ two ladies and one boy to help me, but now, I prefer to employ a foreigner because these Xhosa people do not want us. We give them jobs but they say that we are stealing their jobs and women. They are lazy because when you teach them, they only work for a salary and will not copy what you do. (Male Sudanese trader, 42 years old, in SA for 10 years)

Owing to the hostile behaviour from the black South African traders in the market, the African migrant traders tended to mix only with others from the same African region as themselves. Despite their diverse backgrounds and different languages, they appeared to be forging a common identity as a result of all of them being ‘othered’ in the same way by South Africans. This can be seen in the following extract:

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I: What is it that makes you feel different whenever you talk to people? R4 (with considerable emphasis): When I meet my brother from another country who can speak French, I speak French to him because it is better. I feel at home. These Xhosa people don’t like us but they are black people like us. The people from Congo, Gabon, Mali and many West Africans are my brothers because we are treated the same and speak the same language. We cannot go to the ‘location’ because we will be murdered just because we are foreigners. (Male, Cameroonian, 40 years old, in SA for eight years)

In this extract, which also implies Van Dijk’s racist discourse of threat (2004, pp. 352353) as perceived by the respondent, we note the stark difference between the ways in which the respondent portrays African migrants and certain South Africans. The intimate term ‘my brothers’ is used to refer to African migrants from several countries, in whose company the respondent feels ‘at home’. Referring directly to Xhosa South Africans, he remarks that ‘they are black people like us’ but ‘don’t like us’  an indication of an underlying ideology that people, simply by virtue of being black, should support and welcome one another into the different spaces of Africa, irrespective of national differences. The ‘otherness’ of the South Africans who are so unwelcoming as opposed to the foreigners who bond together and support each other, is further brought out by the reference to the geographic space ‘location’, which traditionally means a black South African township. During the xenophobic riots of 2008, black foreigners were driven out of these townships, and many have subsequently done their utmost to avoid living in these areas. This has led to certain suburbs of Cape Town becoming areas which have large numbers of people from different African countries, e.g. the suburb of Sea Point has large numbers of Congolese, Angolans prefer the suburb of Woodstock, and Cameroonians have shown a preference for the suburb of Goodwood. This super-diversification of Cape Town’s population may therefore be redrawing the sociolinguistic map of CT, and deserves further research.

Discursive theme 4: acceptance and appreciation of ‘the Other’ Despite all the negative stereotyping of African migrants by the South Africans, we also (as was noted above) encountered more positive comments from some of the African traders who completed the questionnaire, as well as from five (male) South African traders. This can be seen in the following extracts from the questionnaire in response to the same question: Do you have any African friends? (1) No, I am meeting the other people from Africa, like the people from Congo and Senegal and they treat me nice. (2) Yes. These people from Africa are very hardworking and good people to be with because they are not selfish. (3) Yes, they invited me to their party and made me feel like one of them. People from Africa are so caring. Although the three South African traders in the extract above stressed a sense of otherness by referring to the traders from other African countries as ‘people from Africa’ as if they themselves were not from Africa, they revealed far more positive attitudes than those cited earlier. The sole white (male) trader among our respondents acknowledged in his written responses to the questionnaire that many

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South Africans were largely ignorant about other African countries, resulting in negative stereotyping:

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The first thing you have got to do is to find out their culture, how they interact with one another, see how they think, see how they share their values, and try to absorb their values within the shortest time possible. I would sacrifice sometimes to be with these people just to learn how they interact to know their habits, socio-economic conditions, the standard of living in their countries, the way they go about living and conducting business. I believe that we must humble ourselves and become one big family. All that is happening is a high form of illiteracy.

It can of course be argued that the written responses would express fewer negative sentiments by virtue of some respondents lacking the linguistic skills to express themselves clearly in writing. Nevertheless, these more positive responses are hopeful signs that better intercultural understanding and less racism can emerge over time in South Africa. Recurrent lexical items denoting commonality versus difference The main recurrent lexical items in the discourses of our respondents, as can also be seen from the extracts quoted above, were the pronoun ‘we’ and its referents (I, you, us, our/s) and its polar opposite ‘they’ and its referents (their/s, them). As was pointed out above, De Cillia et al. (1999, p. 163) regard the use of these pronouns as being of great importance in the discourses about nations and national identities. We noted that the discourses of the South African traders, in both their responses to the questionnaire as well as in the interviews, actually revealed very few examples of the pronoun ‘we’ and its referents, and a far greater use of its polar opposite ‘they’ and its referents. In addition, for some of the black South African traders ‘we’ clearly excluded other South African identities like ‘whites’ and ‘the Boers’, and referred instead to a black Xhosa-speaking South African identity, which supports Neocosmos’ discourses of indigeneity theory (2008). Taken as a whole, it was as if the South Africans in this study, of all races, were still constructing a South African identity as being totally different to the identities of African migrants (often referred to as these people from Africa), but without any clear articulation of precisely what an overarching South African identity meant for them. Given South Africa’s fractured history and the difficulties inherent in building a ‘unifying national identity’ (Gumede, 2010, pp. 67), this is perhaps not surprising. On the other hand, the majority of the African migrant traders in this study, despite their diversity of backgrounds, used ‘we’ and ‘they’, including other referents of these pronouns, to indicate a shared sense of identity of themselves as victims of xenophobia, exclusion and multiple daily cruelties, as well as a sense of shared brotherhood with one another. They also tended to single out black Xhosa-speaking South Africans as being particularly xenophobic. Two other recurrent lexical pairs present in the discourses were the antonyms ‘black’ and ‘white’. The presence of these emotionally loaded antonyms offers more evidence of the continued racialization of the South African identity as noted in the studies previously mentioned in this paper. As was noted above, black South African traders were highly critical of the African migrants who spoke colonial languages like French instead of learning to speak local African languages. They also interpreted the behaviour of the migrants as mimicking that of white people, and it appears as if such behaviour and language usage might have made them feel as if the African

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migrants were trying to be superior to them. In turn, the migrants (many of whom were highly educated and from a higher social class than their South African counterparts) spoke disparagingly about the poor command of English of the South Africans and their frequent refusal to speak English to any other black person. All these discourses pointed to an ideology in which ‘white’ appeared to represent, for both the migrants and the South Africans, something superior to ‘black’. These frequently used lexical items also appeared, as can be seen from the above examples, in the presence of other emotionally loaded words and phrases (Altarriba, 2006), e.g. nice, too proud, scared, murdered, bosses, foreigner and makwerekwere, which offered further clues on the attitudes of the respondents to ‘the Other’ and also served as textual guides to the key discursive themes. Conclusions We conclude this paper by discussing the discoursepower relationships in the data. As was explained in ‘The Study’ above, these relationships were examined by asking three questions which attempt to link the micro-levels of discourse (our interview and questionnaire data) with the macro-levels of ideologies and racism in the new South Africa on the one hand, and expectations of a better life in this country, coupled with a sense of a shared African brotherhood, by the African migrants on the other hand. In other words, we tried to move from a description of the discourses of our respondents to an explanation of them in terms of ‘properties of social interaction and especially social structure’ (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 353). (1) How did the respondents’ data reveal the influence of their group membership as either South Africans or Africans from the rest of the continent? The South Africans quoted in the interviews tended to identify themselves as black people who had a different identity to other ethnic groupings (especially ‘the white people’) in South Africa. At the same time, as citizens of the new South Africa, inhabiting the imagined space of new nationhood, they regarded everything South African as superior to the rest of Africa. Emphasis was put on how different the migrant Africans were to them in terms of language use, behaviour and cultural practices, very much in line with Van Dijk’s (2004) deviance, difference and threat topic classes. In similar ways, the migrant Africans were very clear on those aspects that set them apart from the South Africans  they saw themselves as better behaved, more intelligent, more hardworking and having greater proficiency in languages like English than the South Africans. Their ideological expectations of a brotherhood with black South Africans not having been met, the discourses suggest that they formed a brotherhood with Africans from other countries instead. (2) How did the data reveal social actions and social processes such as the reproduction of racism? As a social practice, the racist discourses in this study were mainly about ‘the Other’ (Van Dijk, 2004, p. 351). Many of the responses in the interviews with the South Africans were marked by prejudice as well as crude stereotyping of African migrants from other countries, who tended to react with racist counter-discourses of their own. In our analysis of the discourses that emerged from our study, we

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found a number of examples that revealed a strong relationship between state discourses of xenophobia (Neocosmos, 2008) and the everyday discourses of ordinary people. The social process of news-making could also be a contributory factor. The South African and international media continue to portray the rest of Africa in extremely negative ways, with the political and economic instability in Zimbabwe and the wars in countries like the Congo and Somalia seldom far from the headlines.

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(3) How did the data reveal the influence of the local context, like the space of Greenmarket Square and the social structure of Cape Town and South Africa? The migrants were constantly made aware that they were in ‘some-one else’s space’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 6) and reflected this especially in their written responses to the questionnaire. Greenmarket Square is one of the most strictly legislated spaces in Cape Town, and many of the migrant African traders are regularly deprived of their licences to trade for a variety of reasons, which occasionally includes being found to be illegal migrants. As some of the discourses showed, they also felt unsafe in the black townships, and did their best to find alternative spaces where they lived with their compatriots. At the same time, many of their discourses revealed that they had held idealized perceptions of South Africa as a land in which they could prosper and enjoy some of the freedoms and services their own countries lacked. The discourses of the black South Africans also showed the influences of the local context. Some of them, recent migrants from another province, were still trying to establish themselves in Cape Town. Many of them were also limited to the black townships of this city (referred to above as ‘the location’), spaces in which poverty, over-crowding and crime are commonplace. While as South Africans they may have held symbolic power over the migrant Africans, they lacked any real power in the space of Cape Town, and still held on to ideologies that white people were superior to them. This tended to make them very hostile to other Africans competing with them in the same space. To conclude, in this paper we attempted to show how the discursive construction of ‘the Other’ is related to both the abstract and concrete structures of power in the setting of Cape Town, South Africa. The paper reveals many of the inequalities in the social relations that frame the experiences of African migrants in Cape Town  the hegemony of cultural racism and exclusionary state policies as well as the often violent exposure to xenophobia. This is clearly a topic that should be researched in greater detail in future studies, which could also include an investigation of the superdiversity that is re-shaping the spaces of Cape Town. Acknowledgements We express our sincere thanks to Michael Neocosmos and Kasper Juffermans for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper, as well as the Senate Research Committee of the University of the Western Cape for the funding of our research project.

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Notes on contributors Charlyn Dyers (Ph.D Linguistics) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She has published several articles on language attitudes and multilingual language practices in post-apartheid South Africa, and chaired an invited panel on multilingualism in Africa at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB8) in Oslo in 2011. Her research interests include languaging and literacy in peripheral urban settings, the language ideologies of Africa and languaging in mobile communication. Foncha John Wankah (MA Linguistics) is from Cameroon, and is currently reading for his Ph.D in Education at the University of the Western Cape.

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Appendix A. Questionnaire for the SA traders (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

How long have you been an informal trader? Do you have friends from other African countries with whom you interact regularly? Have you ever invited them to any of your cultural events? If yes, which ones? How did they react to this? What did they say after the event? Have you ever been invited to any of their cultural events? If yes, how were you treated by the people who were present there? Were they friendly? Did you learn anything new from them? Would you attend another event like that? Why? What are some of the things that you do different to them? What do you like most about them? Do you understand each other well when communicating? What might be some of the difficulties involved in your communication with them?

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(11) Who are your most preferred customers in Greenmarket Square (state which countries), and why? (12) Who are your least preferred customers in the Square and why? B. Questionnaire for the traders from other African countries

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(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14)

Where did you come from, and how long have you been an informal trader? Why did you choose Cape Town as your destination? Do you have South African friends with whom you interact regularly? Have you ever invited them to any of your cultural events? If yes, which ones? How did they react to this? What did they say after the event? Have you ever been invited to any of their cultural events? If yes, how were you treated by the people who were present there? Were they friendly? Did you learn anything new from them? Would you attend another event like that? Why? What are some of the things that you do different to them? What do you like most about them? Do you understand each other well when communicating? What might be some of the difficulties involved in your communication with them? Who are your most preferred customers in Greenmarket Square (state which countries), and why? Who are your least preferred customers in the Square and why? What are some of the things you miss about your country?