Collage by THE REPUBLIC. Ref: Chidimma Adetshina. WILLEM BOTHA / MISS SA.
THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS / SOUTH AFRICA DESK
Chidimma Adetshina and the Danger of Xenophobia
Collage by THE REPUBLIC. Ref: Chidimma Adetshina. WILLEM BOTHA / MISS SA.
THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS / SOUTH AFRICA DESK
Chidimma Adetshina and the Danger of Xenophobia
In August 2024, due to online bullying and heckling that resulted in an investigation into the validity of her citizenship, Chidimma Adetshina dropped out of the Miss South Africa pageant. Two weeks after the incident, I stood at the immigration desk at O. R. Tambo international airport about to leave South Africa. After inspecting my passport, the home affairs official asked me if my name was Nigerian and then enquired as to how I got my citizenship. ‘Not even one South African name,’ she said with a look of disgust.
It is universally accepted that the immigration line at any airport is not the place for snarky remarks or talking back. But I wonder if it would have mattered if I had replied her question saying, ‘In the 1800s when my ancestors were brought to South Africa as slaves that would racially be classified as coloured, or in 1994 when Bantustans were abolished and Black people gained citizenship rights in South Africa.’ I could tell her about my mother being South African but all she had to go by was a name, a Nigerian name that invalidates space and removes belonging. In this same way, although on a much larger scale, I can imagine that the release of Adetshina’s name on the list of top 30 contestants for Miss South Africa evoked a similar feeling of unease. For Adetshina, her presence in the competition was enough to stir the latent tensions that have simmered between South Africans and Nigerians for years. Her beauty became politicized, and the discourse around her presence became a reflection of the broader cultural anxieties about nationality and belonging.
THE NEW FACE OF THE NIGERIA-SOUTH AFRICA CULTURAL ‘WAR’
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.
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WHO CAN REPRESENT SOUTH AFRICA?
What, however, can be said about Nigerian women in South African society? On what basis do they assert their claims to belonging, and in this case, to beauty? Personally, I find it difficult to reflect on this statement. In a personal capacity, I cannot separate my reflections on Adetshina from the fact that I believe that beauty pageants are outdated. I also believe that the Miss South Africa pageant has outlived its relevance and has relied on controversy to maintain viewership in recent seasons. Nevertheless, I think this pageant has made a clear statement about what is considered South African, what is considered ‘other’, and who can legitimately claim to represent South Africans. For instance, consider Udeme Okon (who is of Nigerian heritage), who, also in August this year, won a gold medal for South Africa in the 400-meter race at the World Athletics Championships in Peru. He was celebrated for his achievements and did not face the same online vitriol and xenophobia as Adetshina. Interestingly, Okon was even celebrated by South Africa’s Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Gayton Mackenzie, who led the xenophobic witch hunt against Adetshina.
Did Okon cease to be Nigerian when he won a gold medal for South Africa, or did Adetshina become Nigerian when she stepped out of the invisibility that many immigrant women are subjected to in South Africa by entering a pageant? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Okon was not seen as depriving any South African of the award—in this case, the gold medal. Yet this explanation remains unsatisfactory.
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A CASE AGAINST SOUTH AFRICA’S BEAUTY STANDARDS?
Cairo Mathebula’s 2019 op-ed, ‘The Torment of Being a “Questionable” South African’, addresses the fraught experience of Tsonga and Venda people navigating their identity within South Africa’s complex racial and ethnic landscape. Mathebula highlights the precariousness faced by individuals with darker skin, whose South African identity is often questioned, along with the socio-political implications of this treatment. However, I am uncertain how to argue that the prejudice Adetshina faced was due to her dark skin or her not meeting South Africa’s beauty standards when, by definition, a pageant is a celebration of beauty.
The rejection of Adetshina by the South African public perhaps reflects a complex post-apartheid conception of Blackness—and more specifically, Black womanhood—that is rigid and unaccommodating to those who differ, whether by ethnicity or nationality. This rejection resonates personally with me and many of my friends, as our cultural and linguistic upbringings have not provided us with the cultural capital needed to fit into the dominant idea of what it means to be Black in South Africa, or rather, what it means to be a Black South African.
In the end, the online bullying of Adetshina led to an investigation into the validity of her citizenship. Many argued that the findings—the fact that the department of home affairs found that Adetshina’s mother may have engaged in identity theft and fraud—were significant. This humiliation was not inflicted on any of the other contestants, not even the Chinese-South African participant. For many xenophobes, this was all the vindication they needed to claim that Nigerians are untrustworthy and deserve more scrutiny. I saw very few people spare a thought for Adetshina—a young woman who had always believed she was South African, born and raised; a fact she reiterated in a BBC Pidgin interview months after being crowned Miss Universe Nigeria 2024.
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NO REAL WINNERS
The backlash over the Adetshina incident has ignited growing tensions between Nigerians and South Africans, both online and offline. In a strange twist, this friction escalated into an ‘Uber and Bolt war’, where people from each country book rides in the other’s nation with no intention of going anywhere, simply to frustrate drivers. This peculiar cultural clash, in the end, has left no real winners.
I have also seen a TikTok trend where people of mixed heritage celebrate their Nigerian-South African identity—south-gerian heritage—by creating short videos with quirky comments and jokes about their unique experiences. On a personal level, it is enough to lean on the words of Afrobeats singer Odeal and declare, ‘Naija with the southa combi o, my type that’s a perfect combi o,’ as a musical defiance against the backlash faced by those who are multicultural. Regarding the socio-political relations between the two countries, I don’t believe that the fraught relationship between Nigeria and South Africa can be mended by beauty queens or Afrobeats lyrics. Instead, it requires a more meaningful conversation about migration and identity⎈
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