The news
CAPE TOWN — Beauty pageant contestant Chidimma Adetshina officially withdrew from the Miss South Africa pageant on Thursday, 48 hours before the event was set to begin, following a storm of controversy and public outrage over her citizenship.
Since announcing her place in the competition in May, the 23-year-old law student has been the victim of brutal cyberbullying and xenophobic abuse, with online trolls claiming she is “not South African enough” to enter.
Adetshina was born in Soweto, the historic township of Johannesburg. She had previously said that her father is Nigerian and her mother is South African with Mozambican roots. South African law states that citizenship can be obtained if you are born in the country and at least one of your parents is a citizen or permanent resident.
The trolls focused on her Nigerian heritage, but the dispute over her mother’s nationality was the last straw. Following a request from the contest organizers, an investigation by the Ministry of the Interior found Early indications that Adetshina’s mother committed fraud and identity theft in 2001 suggested that she may not have been a South African citizen.
The view from Marché
The wave of vitriol directed at Adetshina highlights a very specific form of intolerance in South Africa: Afrophobia.
The outcry began long before the investigation into her mother began, and it really took off after a video of Adetshina celebrating her finals appearance with her Nigerian relatives went viral.
Nigerian nationals living in South Africa have long been used as scapegoats by local politicians to cover up their own failures. The prevailing myth propagated by various right-wing parties is that Nigerians are drug traffickers who bring crime into the country.
This dangerous rhetoric has led to waves of xenophobic attacks, most notably in 2008, when violence against African migrants was perpetrated across the country. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, these hostilities have displaced more than 100,000 people and killed hundreds according to Xenowatch.
Three decades after the birth of the so-called “Rainbow Nation,” some leaders in the Government of National Unity (GNU) continue to spread Afrophobic messages.
Minority parties such as the Patriotic Alliance (PA) and ActionSA (which held nine and six parliamentary seats respectively) ran election campaigns with an anti-immigration theme, with the PA specifically promising mass deportations if it came to power.
These parties, once on the fringes of South African politics, are conservative and populist in both ideology and practice. They have a track record of weaponizing poverty and the legitimate struggles of millions of the country’s citizens to fuel their rise to power.
The fact that shameless bigots now have decision-making power within the GNU is terrifying and could very likely worsen the plague that has the country in a stranglehold.
The Miss South Africa fiasco is not about the law. It is about the deep-seated disdain for African foreigners and the politicians who use it to their advantage.
The view from NIGERIA
There has been an outpouring of anger on Nigerian social media over the treatment of Chidimma Adetshina. It is a particularly sensitive topic given that there have been multiple reports of xenophobic attacks and discrimination against Nigerians in South Africa for years.
In response to the news of her withdrawal from the Miss South Africa pageant, the organizers of Miss Universe Nigeria invited her to take part in their competition. “This is an opportunity to represent your father’s birth country on an international stage, and we believe you would be an excellent contender,” national director Guy Murray-Bruce said in a statement.
