Paper short abstract:

How and why has South Africa failed to realise its immediate post-apartheid reconciliatory goals of mutuality and what has given rise to a new essentialism in the country? How has that influenced contemporary South African anthropology?

Paper long abstract:

Two decades ago, South Africa was hailed as the 'rainbow nation' that had broken the essentialist paradigm that underpinned apartheid ideology and policy. The country and its people were understood to be on the road to reconciliation and to developing a substantive mutuality that would accommodate all. Yet about a decade later, xenophobia, in relation especially to African immigrants and refugees, revealed a deep-seated persistence of an 'othering' impulse that manifested (and continues to manifest) in violent attacks - some leading to deaths. More recently, in the context of the post-apartheid state having permitted inequality to grow beyond what it was during the late apartheid era (or having been unable to prevent that from occurring), and with a new generation of post-apartheid 'free-borners' clamouring to have their constitutionally promised rights realised, that same impulse is manifesting in strident expressions of a kind of Black nationalism that reflects, as in so many other parts of the contemporary world, a return to essentialist thinking and exclusivist practices that would appear to permit only some to enjoy convivial relations. The paper documents the context of that rise of a new essentialism; it provides examples of how it manifests; and it considers how it is influencing and being reflected in contemporary anthropology in the country - an anthropology where there is also a new emphasis on conviviality that is understood to encourage substantive mutuality.