Ke Nako (It Is Time) to Scrutinise Ubuntu: Negotiating South African Hospitality towards African Immigrants and Refugees in Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Rebecca Fasselt in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
‘Ke nako (it is time): Celebrate Africa’s Humanity’, the official 2010 FIFA World Cup slogan, intended to endorse a positive image of Africa and Africa’s ability to host the world, presented South Africa as a genuine representative of African hospitality. Yet this overriding notion of African humanity, commonly known as ubuntu, belies the (often) fraught relationship between South Africa and the continent, which has become particularly manifest in the violence committed against African immigrants, migrants and refugees residing in the country. Continuing to give force to the notion of the socially committed writer (a common enough stance during apartheid), me recent South African fiction increasingly incorporates African migrant and refugee characters in its cast of protagonists and features discussions of South African ways of (un)welcoming the continent. The present chapter reads Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline (2000) as an example of a post-apartheid text integrating this form of social commentary; the chapter focuses on the critical examination of ubuntu as a counter-discourse to xenophobia. I argue that Schonstein Pinnock’s text scrutinises ubuntu as the political tool into which it has been transformed in post-apartheid nation-building rhetoric; this excludes rather than includes non-national Africans from the embrace of a shared humanity. While the narrator on the one hand frames a community of African immigrants and refugees in Cape Town in the language of victimhood, and thus partially re-inscribes the ‘othering’ discourse it seeks to undermine, the novel, on the other hand, determinedly moves beyond a narrow conceptualisation of ubuntu. Particularly the pictures painted by a Mozambican refugee, elaborated in the frequent ekphrastic passages that suffuse the novel, serve as an alternative realm from which hospitable gestures can be extended and re-imagined, a realm based on the coming-together and entanglement of seemingly incommensurate spaces and identities, rather than understood in terms of difference.