Manufacturing Black-on-Black Violence in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective on Mfecane and Afrophobia/Xenophobia in South Africa

The phenomenon of “black-on-black” violence among the people of Africa has, ever since the advent of modernity/coloniality, been articulated in such a way that it presents victims as perpetrators. Thus, from the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era to the xenophobic/Afrophobic violence of the “post-colonial” era in Africa, incidents of black-on-black violence have always attracted explanations that cast doubt on the humanity of the black subject, through the colonial strategy of inventing and inverting causation. This colonial strategy entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of rupture instead of continuity, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently violent. I argue in this article that black-on-black violence is a product of coloniality—a racist global power structure that makes incidents of “non-revolutionary violence” among the oppressed black subject inevitable. Thus, I deploy the case of the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era in southern Africa, and the Afro-phobic attacks on foreign nationals in “post-apartheid” South Africa to unmask the longue durée of coloniality, and its role of manufacturing blackon-black violence among the black people of Africa.