It was Adetshina’s ‘Nigerian-ness’ that became the entry point through which people online could make her the newest face of the cultural war that has emerged between the two states. It was her ‘Nigerian-ness’ that led social media users to harass South African state authorities into investigating the validity of her citizenship—something that no other contestant, not even the one of Congolese origin, was subjected to. In the aftermath of the Adetshina situation, many have asked me whether the South African imagination holds a special place for prejudice against Nigerians. Why do many Nigerians claim that South Africans hate us? And yes, there is a long history of cultural and political tensions between the two countries.  

However, this is an oversimplification of the issue. While xenophobic rhetoric portrays Nigerians as coming into the country to ‘steal women’, sell drugs, and commit fraud, this narrative is part of a broader, longstanding prejudice. Long before the end of apartheid, Mozambican migrants were similarly marginalized, despite their ethnic similarities with South Africans. Zimbabweans and Malawians have been branded as job thieves, while people of Pakistani origin are accused of deliberately selling expired food to poison South African youth in townships. Somalis, meanwhile, face accusations of trafficking weapons. 

Nigerians, however, have the added advantage of a prominent entertainment industry and a large economic size, both of which create a hypervisibility that makes it difficult to blend into the background as an unknown ‘other’ from a less prominent country. If Nigerians are to experience xenophobia, it will be direct—one considers the public feud between Burna Boy and the late South African rapper, AKA—and is aware of the naira’s current freefall. A disproportionate amount of attention is given to the perception of specific Nigeriaphobia in South Africa, because when Xenophobia affects Nigerians, it is often acknowledged, perhaps by someone as prominent as Davido.  

Ijeoma Opara, a Nigerian-Samoan cultural critic and feminist academic based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, explores the transnational identity of West African migrants in South Africa in her 2022 essay, ‘Neither here nor there: exploring the transnational identity of West African migrants living in South Africa’.  She argues that West African migrants who have lived in South Africa for extended periods often experience a lack of cohesion and integration into South African society. This disconnect is largely attributed to various barriers, including antagonistic portrayals of their West African origins, which hinder their ability to fully integrate. 

I have thought a lot about what it must mean for Adetshina to be Nigerian in such a defiant manner. This reflection took me back to my adolescence when I first encountered what it meant to be West African and a woman in South Africa. In telling this story, I do not wish to reiterate the now-famous African booty scratcher narrative that has circulated on X. I would just like to elucidate the society in which Adetshina was attempting to run in. My close friend, a first-generation Nigerian-South African immigrant, was having a conversation with a boy, about 16 years old, who was quite shocked to learn that she was Nigerian. In fact, he remarked that he had never seen a Nigerian woman before and assumed they would be unattractive because Nigerian men often dated South African women. Finally, he asked her about the size of her feet. 

Much has been written about foreign men and the xenophobia they experience, especially by Dr Pumla Dineo Gqola in a book titled, Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa. Gqola argues that xenophobia is a manifestation of apartheid. She suggests that immigration is a perceived threat to the dominant constructions of masculinity in South African society, fostering a sense of emasculation among local men. Furthermore, she contends that xenophobic sentiments are particularly directed at Black immigrant men who threaten the perceived entitlement of local men to specific resources, including women.