I returned to a recording of Chris Abani's 2007 TED talk immediately after attending a workshop at which various Kenyan intellectuals made sense of the frightening post-election violence in that country. Musangi, to whom I had listened earlier, seemed to be in conversation with Abani. Abani spoke about the often dangerous ways in which language can be inflected to brutalise or to achieve its inverse and open up possibilities, adding that ‘language can only be understood in the context of story’. Musangi's attention was on the many ways in which Kenyan stories of ethnicity code tensions that cannot be easily explained. Here, past wrongs are recalled, imagined and reconfigured to tell a story that has relevance in the present.

This is not where the ‘conversation’ between Musangi and Abani ends, however. Over the next few days, as I try to produce this essay, I find myself returning to their words, and turning to their thoughts repeatedly. The outbreak of what the media and various South African publics have dubbed xenophobia has underscored the danger of narratives of hate. Insofar as I remain deeply unsatisfied by the vast majority of explanations offered by South African analysts and intellectuals, as during other times of great difficulty, I turn towards the words of writers whose words I deeply value. In this essay, this is the route I choose to make sense of what the ‘xenophobic’ attacks culminating in May 2008 meant. Abani's and Musangi's words are particularly useful because in the specific addresses I reference, they too attempt to make sense of the links between language and ‘unexpected’ violence.

Abani recalls a joke he heard often as a child about Tom, Dick and, finally, Harry, the brunt of the humour. Harry's inexplicable behaviour (‘untrustworthy’) is rendered as evidence of his (gendered) stupidity. This ‘joke’ takes on a poignant tone when Abani informs us that in the original 1980s Nigerian versions, Harry represented the Hausa ethnic group.