Xenophobia, social change and social continuity: Changing configurations of intergroup allegiance and division among farm workers and farmers in De Doorns, 2009-2013 Philippa Louise Kerr March 2017 UKZN Pietermaritzburg 1 Declaration This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Graduate Programme in Psychology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. I, Philippa Louise Kerr, declare that 1. The research reported in this thesis, except where otherwise indicated, is my original research. 2. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 3. This thesis does not contain other persons’ data, pictures, graphs or other information, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other persons. 4. This thesis does not contain other persons' writing, unless specifically acknowledged as being sourced from other researchers. Where other written sources have been quoted, then: a. Their words have been re-written but the general information attributed to them has been referenced; b. Where their exact words have been used, then their writing has been placed inside quotation marks, and referenced. 5. This thesis does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet, unless specifically acknowledged, and the source being detailed in the thesis and in the References section. _________________ _____________ _______________ Name of student Signature Date _________________ _____________ ________________ Name of supervisor Signature Date 2 Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Gina Fourie, Mariza van Wyk, Nqaba Nkomana and Lionel Lottering for coming with me to De Doorns as research assistants, for their moral support and for bringing their own research experience to this fieldwork; to our host who showed us around the town on the very first evening in December 2009 and helped me get into the Hex Valley in November 2012; all the people in De Doorns who agreed to talk to us and whose opinions form the empirical basis for this thesis (but who might not agree with what I have made of those opinions); Nqobile Zondi, Adèle Naude, Luzelle Cable and Dumisa Sofika for translating and transcribing; the examiners of my master’s thesis, who made suggestions for further reading which have been incorporated here; Brice Gijsbertsen of the UKZN Cartographic Unit for producing the map of De Doorns in Figure 1; John Dixon, for encouraging and instructive input at different points in this thesis process; Andrew Kerr and Denise Gray, my brother and sister-in-law, for having me to stay in Cape Town during the strike, and for lots of conversations; my parents, Nick and Barbara Kerr, who have supported me in many ways through this PhD process; the academic and administrative staff in the UKZN Psychology department in Pietermaritzburg, for being my academic home and for helping me get registered every year; and the original members of SPLAB, especially Tamaryn Nicholson, Nicky Human, Dumisa Sofika, Siyabonga Thabethe and Clinton Rautenbach, for your companionship on the personal and academic journeys we have made together as postgrads and marginal UKZN staff members. Thanks also to DIRAP at the University of the Free State for giving me time to finish this PhD. Finally, thanks to my supervisor, Kevin Durrheim, for suggesting and funding my first trip to De Doorns, and for years of talking, collaborating, thinking and arguing about social psychology, race and the art and politics of research. Working with him has been formative. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not to be attributed to the NRF. Parts of Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 7 of this thesis have appeared in the following publications: 3 Kerr, P. & Durrheim, K. (2013). The dilemma of anti-xenophobia discourse in the aftermath of violence in De Doorns. Journal of Southern African Studies, 39 (3), 577–596. Kerr, P., Durrheim, K. & Dixon, J. (2017). Beyond the two-group paradigm in studies of intergroup contact, conflict and inequality: Third parties and intergroup alliances in xenophobic violence in South Africa. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 47-63. DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12163. 4 Abstract This thesis is about continuity and change in South African intergroup relations, especially group relations implicated in xenophobia, as new African migrants have arrived on a scene dominated by long-established, but also changing, South African race/class relations. It also critiques social psychology’s ‘two-group paradigm’, which conceptualises intergroup conflicts in binary terms involving dominant and subordinate or minority and majority groups. In November 2009, a community of Zimbabwean farm workers was forcibly evicted from the informal settlements of De Doorns, a grape-farming town in the Western Cape, by their South African neighbours. South Africans accused Zimbabweans of taking their jobs by working for white farmers at less than the minimum wage, which Zimbabweans and farmers denied. Two interview-based case studies were conducted with De Doorns residents, one in December 2009 (37 interviews), and the second in 2012-2013 during and after the Western Cape farm workers’ strikes (33 interviews). While xenophobic violence can be seen to involve two parties – black South African perpetrators and foreign black victims – in 2009 residents constructed an ‘alliance’ between farmers and Zimbabweans, excluding South African workers, and differently judged this alliance as legitimate or illegitimate according to ideological imperatives of black liberation, white responsibility, anti-xenophobia or free- market capitalism. The 2012-2013 interviews show that, despite the absence of xenophobic violence during the strike, the anti-xenophobic imperative had not necessarily triumphed, as Zimbabwean and South African workers interviewed both continued to level and rebut the same accusations about the 2009 violence while claiming that their relationship had improved since then because of adjustments made by the other group. Also, a ‘new’ racial division appeared – between coloured and all black people irrespective of nationality. Thus, the nationality category ‘South African’ workers, that appeared united in its opposition to the Zimbabweans in 2009, can itself be historicised as an ‘alliance’ among groups with different but converging interests in change. The intersection of racism and xenophobia in this community is considered, as are dilemmas of taking an anti-xenophobic stance which problematises the Zimbabwean-South African worker relationship but does not sufficiently problematise the overall farmer-worker relationship. Overall I argue for a historical approach to intergroup conflict discourse which treats constructions of intergroup relationships as oriented to speakers’ interests in change. 5 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction..........................................................................................................10 Chapter 2: What happened in De Doorns in November 2009?.............................................22 De Doorns in context...............................................................................................................22 Different explanations for the eviction of the Zimbabwean community................................26 The eviction.............................................................................................................................31 Responses to the violence.......................................................................................................32 How De Doorns followed the trend of the May 2008 xenophobic violence...........................35 A different research agenda: Intergroup relations in De Doorns............................................38 Chapter 3: De Doorns in context: A brief history of recent changes and continuities in Western Cape commercial farming communities.................................................................45 Introduction............................................................................................................................45 Black labour migration in the Western Cape under apartheid...............................................46 Paternalism on fruit and wine farms......................................................................................46 The paternalist quasi-alliance comes partially undone: Effects of labour law.......................54 Deregulation of commercial agriculture.................................................................................56 Further change: International labour migration to the Hex Valley after apartheid................58 Conclusion: Intergroup relations, change and continuity.......................................................60 Chapter 4: A two-group paradigm in the social psychology of intergroup relations...........62 A two-group paradigm in Sherif’s realistic conflict theory......................................................63 A two-group paradigm in the contact hypothesis...................................................................64 A two-group paradigm in social identity theory......................................................................68 Beyond the two-group paradigm in self-categorisation and social identity theory................71 Third parties in the South African xenophobia literature.......................................................73