Umganu 🌳

Proverbs 4:23 ❤

[uBHEBHE🇿🇦 @nokwandamhlong0]

All I want for Christmas is a new job in a healthy working environment

[Lepara @lepara_PTA]

Working for a private company is way more challenging than working for any government job

[#PutSouthAfricansfirst @Patriot_S_A]

BREAKING NEWS: Over 3 million applications have been submitted to the Department of Social Development for the SASSA grant by refugees and asylum seekers.

[Que🇿🇦 🐅 ✈️ @QhayiyaN]

People who are not South Africans, people who do not contest in our Elections have absolute power in how we implement our Refugee Act...make it make sense, they can delete, but we'll keep the conversation going. #WeAreAngry

[juli 🪷 @julibicco]

nadie habla del duelo que es aceptar que quizá algunas cosas que imaginabas para tu vida no van a suceder como esperabas, o quizá no van a suceder en absoluto. Y solo queda dejarlas ir en silencio

[H O N E Y @HoneyTooRaw]

adult friendship is basically “i love you, i’m alive, life beating my ass, talk soon.” 😭

[Nurse Ellaaaaaaaa🍯 @HotSexyMamaElla]

i hate poverty so much.
It turns you into a people pleaser. You avoid conflict because you can't afford to lose access, help, opportunities.
It makes you overexplain. You feel the need to justify your existence, choices, or mistakes , it shuts you up.

[Ace Heart @TheGuardian07]

I think an overlooked aspect of depression is that it feels embarrassing.

[ada. @adaezeokaro]

I love a film that trusts you to figure things out yourself.

[Altine Kasire @altinekasre1]

Can we normalize praying, “God, protect me from the version of myself that appears when I'm tired, hurt, and running on empty?”

[PeePee🎀 @peegzy1]

What I’ve realized is that corporate careers don’t really like introverts.

[The Counterhegemon @GillianSchutte1]

Why I Reject “Xenophobia” as the Master Explanation

I reject the automatic description of this movement as xenophobia because I do not accept that hatred of Africans is its principal cause.

Black South Africans do not generally encounter African migrants as an abstract racial or cultural category. They encounter them materially, inside overcrowded townships and an economy defined by unemployment, landlessness, low wages, failing services and competition over extremely scarce opportunities.

The conflict is therefore not adequately explained by fear or hatred of foreigners.

It is produced through competition over work, trading space, housing, customers, public services and economic survival.

Research that uses the language of xenophobia frequently acknowledges that conflict is driven by competition over jobs, housing, healthcare and other resources. The economic foundation is therefore admitted, even while the moral label is elevated above it.

My argument is not that no person has ever expressed hatred towards migrants. Nor am I saying that no act committed during this mobilisation can be motivated by nationality.

I am saying that xenophobia is analytically inadequate as the name for the movement itself.

The term takes a material struggle and converts it into a psychological defect.

It changes the question from:

Why are historically dispossessed South Africans fighting over shrinking economic space?

to:

What is wrong with Black South Africans that they dislike foreigners?

That transformation is ideological.

It relocates responsibility from economic structures, immigration policy and government failure into the supposedly diseased minds of the poor.

Xenophobia as a disciplinary construct

In the South African context, “xenophobia” has become more than a description. It has become a disciplinary category.

It is repeatedly used by sections of the political elite, the professional commentariat and the NGO sector to instruct the poorest South Africans about which grievances they may legitimately express.

The migrant may speak about hunger, displacement and economic necessity.

The South African poor must remain silent about hunger, displacement and economic necessity, because speaking may expose them to the accusation of xenophobia.

The migrant’s search for opportunity is humanised.

The South African’s defence of opportunity is criminalised.

The migrant is understood structurally—as a person shaped by economic conditions.

The South African is judged morally—as a person corrupted by prejudice.

This is an unequal distribution of compassion and political agency.

I therefore regard the indiscriminate use of “xenophobia” as part of the ideological machinery through which the Black majority is disciplined.

The term can be valid when it describes a specific act: an assault motivated by nationality, the targeting of a documented person because of an accent, or collective punishment imposed upon people simply because they are foreign.

But it becomes deceptive when it is used to erase distinctions between violence and protest, between nationality and legal status, between lawful deportation and arbitrary expulsion, and between hatred of Africans and opposition to uncontrolled economic migration.

Once these distinctions disappear, the label no longer clarifies reality.

It governs which parts of reality may be spoken about.

liberation begin with sovereign, organised peoples rather than with the permanent circulation of dispossessed populations across a continent still governed by neocolonial power.

This is a rewritten for social media consumption- from my paper: Beyond Xenophobia: The Dialectics of Class, Borders and Black Survival

[fresils @iFresils]

adulthood is putting up with 20 serious problems in silence and then collapsing because a fork fell.

[Nicky🎀 @jas_d_barbie]

Men love toxic wicked women!!!

[Mofiyinfoluwa Odubanke. @__mofiyinfoluwa]

i remain absolutely stunned by the degree of perseverance needed to build a meaningful life

[🌙 @_Nwai]

I always tell my friends to let me fall apart, let me unravel and be senseless. I promise I'll come back.

That's how I transmute pain.

[MJ @just_drmj]

I’m legit preparing to do life without romance.

[Oluwatimileyin✨🦋 @Timmysofine]

My newest prayer is simple: “Lord, settle it.” Settle my mind. Settle my heart. Settle my spirit. Teach me to walk in peace instead of anxiety, and faith instead of fear. 🤍