A Post ‘ Pretty girl from Soweto’ first appeared on Africa is a Country
By Fezokuhle Mthonti and Ayanda Charlie
In South Africa, a popular beauty contest is revealing the specter of ultranationalism and anti-blackness.
Image via Chidimma Adetshina on Instagram.
“They never had a pretty girl from Joburg, see me now and that’s what they prefer” riffs Tyla on her second single “Jump” before the percussive punctuation of the log drum hits.
Tyla Seethal, commonly referred to as Tyla, is an emerging global pop-piano starlet and South Africa’s most exciting cultural export. The first line she sings in her latest single is an interesting and bold provocation for us in the face of the xenophobic backlash that Miss South Africa 2024 contestant Chidimma Adetshina has had to endure.
Soweto-born Adetshina is being subjected to the most vitriolic xenophobic-fueled online bullying because of her name and her paternal parentage. Despite having lived in South Africa her entire life and fulfilling all the legal parameters of being a South African citizen, Adetshina is being abused simply for existing outside the bounds of what a few South Africans have understood as being representative of their own people. Perhaps as Tyla croons, those who criticize Adetshina “have never had a pretty girl from Joburg” quite like this.
The Top 16 Miss South Africa 2024 contestants were recently revealed at the end of the first episode of the six-part reality TV show, Crown Chasers. Soon after, the profiles were made known to the public, and Adetshina caught the attention of the South African public.
Instead of discussing her beauty or her platform, as is often the case with beauty pageants, South Africans chose to question whether she qualified for the competition. Despite several online criticisms and questions about Adetshina’s eligibility, the Miss South Africa organization was quite clear:
Miss South Africa entrants must be South African citizens and possess a valid South African ID document or passport. If an applicant holds dual citizenship, they must provide details of both on the entry form … all documentation provided by the entrants is screened and vetted. Chidimma is a South African citizen and has met all the requirements to be a part of the Miss South Africa competition. Her mother is South African (Zulu), and her father is Nigerian.
The South African Citizen Act states that an individual automatically qualifies for citizenship if they are born in South Africa, if at least one of their parents is a South African citizen, and if an SA permanent residency permit holder or a South African citizen adopts them.
Speaking to the media, Adetshina commented: “My dad is a proud Nigerian, and my mother was born and raised in South Africa but had Mozambique roots. My mom’s family still lives in Soweto, and I visit them occasionally.”
It is clear that this uproar was never about Adetshina documents. We quickly learned this when Adetshina’s maternal heritage was announced by strangers in the comment section of the social platform X: “Her mother is South African” was the refrain among her defenders as they naïvely waded through a flood of cynical questions about a South African-Nigerian’s eligibility to enter the pageant.
Then, when her tongue didn’t curve in familiar ways or sound “South African” or perhaps even “kasi” enough, her defenders offered that she grew up in Soweto. Hopefully, now, attached to a universally legible South African blackness and proven to have been socialized in it, Adetshina could silence her detractors. Instead, the xenophobes on X abandoned their legal and social frameworks of belonging and swiftly reached out for arguments steeped in the patriarchal. Adetshina’s South African identity and citizenship were rendered invalid because she has the wrong paternal ancestry along with the wrong name and wrong skin tone. This line of inquiry into Adetshina’s belonging reminds us of the fundamentally unstable state of citizenship as a construct in general, and especially for black South Africans.
By the time South Africa became the land of all who live in it, black people had been African, but not quite South African for 25 years. This was thanks to a piece of legislation called the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970. It meant that Black South Africans could live and work here their entire lives but they could never be South African. With just one piece of legislation they were denaturalised from their place of birth; organized into ethnic and linguistic categories imposed onto them by their racist overlords, and then reduced to migrant labor. Good enough to work here, but never to belong here.
Soon after, forced removals came to animate the lives of Black Africans, and then the emergence of the pass laws and so, the injustices continued, each one requiring a higher degree of punishment than the last. Then, in 1995, a piece of legislation made us all South African again. South Africa was a birthright for all who lived in it, regardless of their ethnicity or race.
Twenty-nine years on, however, we are still waiting for this land to equitably belong to us.
Frantz Fanon had something to say about the crude formulations of post-colonial nationalism. He argued that from “nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned; their street stalls are wrecked”.
Black South Africans want their hard-earned citizenship to mean something. They want the barcodes on their ID documents to translate into access, opportunities, and safety. Unfortunately, this has not happened yet. Today, black South Africans are the least employed and the least protected. Blackness is still rendered last on the totem pole. Black South African citizens for the most part, are faced with perpetual insecurity—politically, socially, and materially. It is in that scarcity that the anti-black xenophobia finds its legs.
If the rhetoric of political parties such as Herman Mashaba’s Action SA and Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance tell us anything, it is that there is a significant portion of South Africans who feel that if they can’t be South African in ways that matter yet, then Chidimma can’t either. This is significant and worth thinking about in the on-going logic of xenophobia.
In his essay entitled “Fear — an important determinant in South African Politics,” Steve Biko recalled the words of Francophone Martinican poet and author, Aimé Cesaire:
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that the Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead: when I turn on my radio and that in Africa, forced labour has been inaugurated and legislated, I say that we have been certainly lied to: Hitler is not dead.
Perhaps in borrowing and extending Cesaire’s words in relation to xenophobic violence and discourse in South Africa, it may be true to say:
Whenever I turn on my radio or scroll on twitter/x and hear that South Africans continue to hold up the logic of Apartheid classification and continue to demarcate value between an us and them, I say that we have been lied to: Hendrik Verwoerd is not dead.
The story of apartheid, which was informed by the story of colonialism, is still animating the lives of South Africans with its prescripts.
Recently, a video of Adetshina surfaced on the internet. She was being embraced by who is presumed to be her father in Nigerian attire while she wore a sash with the words Miss SA 2024 contestant on it. This reignited and intensified the wave of xenophobic bullying she was already facing as various accounts continued to disparage her Nigerian ancestry. One X user commented: “Chidimma Adetshina, the Nigerian imposter in our Miss SA with Drug Dealing and Human Trafficking family celebrating their scam and how they scammed the entire South Africa”
Adding fuel to the fire, Gayton McKenzie, now a cabinet minister in the recently formed Government of National Unity, responded to an account renowned for its misinformation and misogyny after his return from Paris. Chris Excel asked on his account how the minister felt about the “Miss SA shandis.” McKenzie responded, saying: “We truly cannot have Nigerians compete in our Miss SA competition. I wanna get all the facts but it gives funny vibes already”.
This response from McKenzie was unsurprising. Under his stewardship of the Patriotic Alliance the term Abahambe (they should go) became a potent tag line which conflated issues of legality with outright xenophobic and afrophobic sentiment. In a Facebook post in February of this year, Mckenzie wrote that “abahambe is the war cry for people who love South Africa.”
On July 1, mere days before the swearing-in of South Africa’s new cabinet, a criminal complaint was also lodged against McKenzie for the incitement of xenophobic violence, hate speech and intimidation. This was after he encouraged South Africans to “murder vulnerable foreign nationals in hospitals and, by implication, outside the hospital.” This complaint was lodged at Sandton Police Station by Advocate Chitando on behalf of the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit Holder Association (Zepha).
As the newly appointed Minister of Sports, Arts, and Culture, McKenzie would do well to remember his oaths and solemn affirmations to the republic and its citizens. He has been tasked with upholding the constitution and all other laws in the republic. Subjecting a young South African woman to harm to his ill-timed, xenophobic, and bigoted statements on social media is in direct contradiction to the oath that he took gleefully in front of Chief Justice Zondo on July 3.
Soon after his problematic utterances online, Naledi Chirwa of the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters responded to McKenzie on X, pointing out how dangerous and ahistorical McKenzie’s statements were: “You [McKenzie] don’t respect South African laws. You are not ‘patriotic’ at all. You don’t know the South African constitution. You don’t respect the South African governance office at (the) executive level. You do not know South African history.”
It is important that all public servants take this criticism on board.
Adetshina is South African, born in Soweto. She has the potential to signal a new, more African, South Africa. The site of the beauty pageant is not inherently a pure one. Beauty pageants must be consistently critiqued for the intersection of damaging, normative exclusive beauty ideals, patriarchy, and capitalism. However, such pageants are a mainstay in our cultural calendar. In light of this it is worth thinking about their political possibilities. For former Miss South Africa Basestsana Khumalo, the title marked a shift in the way South Africa was understood in the global imagination. For Zozibini Tunzi, the crown became a form of political activism wherein she was able to platform issues of gender-based violence in South Africa. Perhaps, having a contestant like Chiddima Adetshina might signal a new shift in our political imaginaries..
The xenophobic backlash against Adetshina, however, signals that South Africans are not comfortable with the contours of their Africanness. Her mere presence on that stage reminds us of the coloniality that we have naturalized, of our anti-blackness and the ways in which we have weaponized it in xenophobic and afrophobic responses. The thought of having someone like Adetshina represent us from Jozi to Ibiza, as Tyla mellifluously croons in the pre-chorus of “Jump” is uncomfortable for too many of us.
After all, if she were to win this title, she would qualify for the Miss Universe crown. That contest is the largest pageant in the world in terms of live TV coverage, broadcast in more than 190 countries worldwide to an audience of over 500 million people. There are tremendous stakes in who is chosen for this contest. This platform, it is often argued, telegraphs the story of a nation.
Perhaps, it is time that a Sowetan-born South African with Mozambican and Nigerian parentage holds this mantle. After all, she signifies a real South Africa stitched together in all its uncomfortable parts.
