This book is a vivid history of racism in post-apartheid South Africa focusing on how
colonialism still haunts black intraracial relationships. In 2008 sixty-four people died in a
wave of anti-immigrant violence in the Alexandra township of Johannesburg in the aftermath
Hashi Kenneth Tafira went to Alexandra and undertook an ethnographic study of why this violence
occurred. Presented here his findings reframe xenophobia as a form of black-on-black racism
unraveling the long history of colonial dehumanization and self-abnegation that continues to
shape South African black subjectivities. Studying vernacular popular stereotypes gender and
sexual politics Tafira investigates the dynamics of love relationships between black South
African women and black immigrant men and pervasive myths about male sexuality economic
competition and immigrants. Pioneering and timely this book presents a cohesive picture of
the new face of racism in the twenty-first century.
