The Resilience of Apartheid and Xenophobia: From a Glimpse on the Ethnicity and Citizenship in ‘Uber’ Business in South Africa

This paper inspired from a glimpse on the ‘uber’ driver business in Cape Town attempts to describe some aspects of the interrelated issue concerning to ethnicity, citizenship, apartheid and recent xenophobic violence in South Africa. In post-apartheid South Africa, the existence of social and psychological barriers to cultural others remains an issue. Foreign workers tend to gather due to convenience, patron-client relationship, security reasons and economic factors, it clearly has contributed to the formation and maintenance of a characteristic ethnoscape with clear boundaries with others. Stereotyped categories with the ethnoscape tend to function as a wall between the two, and once slipping into a negative image, form an environment that serves as a template for conflict and violence is conserved. This paper tries to show the structure describing here corroborate the analysis by HSRC (the Human Sciences Research Council) on 2008 violence and still carries the risk for future