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A contestant in the Miss South Africa beauty pageant has had her eligibility questioned and received a flurry of online abuse because her father is Nigerian.

Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina, a 23-year-old law student and model, was born in the Johannesburg township of Soweto and lives in Cape Town, and her mother is South African.

She was announced on 1 July as one of 13 finalists competing to represent South Africa at the Miss Universe pageant, but has been subjected to a host of racist attacks online, with many questioning her nationality and some circulating a petition to have her removed from the pageant.

“At first I ignored it, but as I progressed in the competition, the criticism started growing. I thought to myself, I am representing a country, but I don’t feel the love from the people I’m representing. I even asked myself, is it worth it?” Adetshina said to Sowetan Live.

“To be honest, I just feel that all of this is Black-on-Black hate as I’m not the only one in this competition who has a surname that’s not South African.

“I just feel like the attention is on me because of my skin colour which I think is a disadvantage… it’s also been something I had to overcome growing up.”

The debate over Adetshina’s heritage has spilled over from online comments to the national discourse, with the country’s sports, art and culture minister Gayton McKenzie questioning whether she is truly South African.

Mr McKenzie said in an interview that he will have to “go and investigate,” and that “if she’s not South African we can’t have her represent us on the world stage”.

On X, he made a post saying: “We truly cannot have Nigerians compete in our Miss SA competition. I wanna get all facts before I comment but it gives funny vibes already.”

The abuse received by Adetshina stepped up a notch further after a video of her celebrating her finalist status with some of her Nigerian relatives started going viral.

The leader of the conservative ActionSA party, Herman Mashaba, waded into the controversy by posting on X: “This young woman is compromising herself by identifying with characters who are likely in South Africa illegally. Bad idea.”

Some left-leaning parties have stepped in to defend Adetshina. Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader Julius Malema addressed the matter during a podcast interview last week, saying: “Your citizenship is determined by where you were born, so if she was born here, she’s South African. It doesn’t matter.

“She’s not her parents, she’s herself. So why say she’s from Nigeria or Mozambique? She was born here.”

Labour federation SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) deputy general secretary Nontembeko Luzipo criticised McKenzie’s “funny vibes” statement saying “it strengthened the bullies, instead of giving courage to Chidimma”.

“Her contestation in the pageant is an affirmation that she is South African, because a non-negotiable eligibility criterion is citizenship,” he added.

Adetshina said she was struggling to come to terms with how her family history had become a source of national debate, refusing to denounce her Nigerian heritage and saying she hopes to be a symbol of “unity”.

“It’s just a matter of you trying so hard to represent a country, and you wear it with so much pride and so much grace, and the people that you’re representing are not even in support of you,” she said.

“I’m still finding my feet as to how do I go about [it]. Not taking away from the fact that I am South African, but also understanding that I am still proudly Nigerian and I am proudly South African and just being that symbol of peace and unity.”

Many on social media pointed to the fact that the country has had Miss South Africa contestants with foreign parents in the past, but that they did not face the same scrutiny – likely because they were white. These include Vanessa Carreira Coutroulis, who won Miss South Africa in 2001, and has Portuguese-Angolan parents. Sherry Wang, who is competing for the third time, has also been subjected to some backlash, but none on the same lines as Adetshina.

Actress and DJ Pearl Thusi questioned the xenophobic nature of the criticism directed at Adetshina, saying: “If she was a white girl and she was half French, half something else, you guys might have never even noticed, but because her name is what it is now it’s a big deal.

“But you guys have people in our cricket teams, in our parliament and different sectors of the South African ecosystem whose parents are not South African but they were born here, that you may know or may never know of, and this girl has to suffer because she is Black, and she’s female and it is a pageant?”

Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch said candidates had been deliberately stoking stoking xenophobic tensions ahead of the country’s May general election, with high unemployment and crime rates being blamed on immigrants.

“Politicians are using immigrants as pawns, without regard for their safety in an attempt to score votes ahead of the general elections,” said Nomathamsanqa Masiko-Mpaka, South Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“The Electoral Commission of South Africa, as an independent constitutional body which manages free and fair elections, should explicitly condemn the harmful rhetoric directed towards foreign nationals.”

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