‘Apartheid’s work is not done yet’
In a week in which South Africa dominated the news for the wrong reasons and convulsed the rest of Africa in trauma and pain, perhaps the most poignant remark came from a friend. Maybe, he said, apartheid’s work is not done yet.
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It is a loaded remark; loaded with both hope and despair. It is frightening to think that years after apartheid formally ended it could still be blamed directly or indirectly for the extremely violent misbehavior of black youth in the streets of Durban and elsewhere in South Africa. But perhaps it is a relief to blame something for what has come to be termed “Afrophobia”.
Of course, Afrophobia is coined from xenophobia which is generally defined as an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange. “Afrophobia” has been coined to describe the situation in South Africa in which thousands of mostly black South Africans youth attacked other Africans, their shops and properties.
Afrophobia is a dirty word; a word that all Africa must work hard to extinguish before it joins the lexicon of hatred and division on the continent.
Xenophobia, the mother of this ugly African derivative, is even dirtier but can it explain what is going on in South Africa? Media reports about fatalities are not straightforward as many deaths may not have been reported yet.
Thousands of Africans have taken shelter wherever they can; some are in shelters provided by the government but hundreds of thousands have simply imprisoned themselves in their own homes, too frightened to go out.
Intriguingly, no one seems to know how exactly the trouble started. Some people say that inflammatory remarks by the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, started the violence, although he strongly denied this at a rally last Monday. Others say that the upheavals were an escalation of a labour dispute between some African migrants and their South African counterparts. Whatever the immediate spark, xenophobic violence has a long history in South Africa.
Hostility towards foreigners from other African countries existed before the end of apartheid but it was not a major talking point mostly because it was usually specific and targeted mostly people from Mozambique and other Southern African countries.
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In any case, the institutionalised racism of apartheid which was an official policy created a much bigger agenda of hatred between different people. Ironically, attacks on African migrants have increased since the formal ending of apartheid in 1994.
Assaults against African migrants have been well documented. According to a 1998 Human Rights Watch report, immigrants from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique living in the Alexandra township were "physically assaulted over a period of several weeks in January 1995, as armed gangs identified suspected undocumented migrants and marched them to the police station in an attempt to 'clean' the township of foreigners.
According to the report, the hostile campaign known as "Buyelekhaya" (go back home), blamed foreigners for crime, unemployment and sexual attacks.
In September 1998 a Mozambican and two Senegalese were thrown out of a train. The assault was carried out by a group returning from a rally that blamed foreigners for unemployment, crime and spreading AIDS.
In 2000 seven foreigners were killed on the Cape Flats over a five-week period in what police described as xenophobic murders possibly motivated by the fear that outsiders would claim property belonging to locals.
By far the biggest xenophobic campaign occurred in 2008. On May 12, 2008 a series of riots started in the township of Alexandra (in the north-eastern part of Johannesburg) when locals attacked migrants from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing two people and injuring 40 others.
In the following weeks the violence spread, first to other settlements in the Gauteng Province, then to the coastal cities of Durban and Cape Town.
What fuels such hostility towards other Africans in South Africa? A report by the South African organisation, Human Sciences Research Council, identifies four broad causes for the violence:
• Relative deprivation, specifically intense competition for jobs, commodities and housing;
• group processes, including psychological categorisation processes that are nationalistic rather than superordinate
• South African exceptionalism, or a feeling of superiority in relation to other Africans;
• Exclusive citizenship or a form of nationalism that excludes others.
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In other words, according to the report, the hostility stems from poverty and the competition for jobs or a feeling of superiority among South Africans who believe that African immigrants have no business in their country.
These are not feelings reserved for only South Africans. Most people have some kind of exceptionalism about their country; this is the notion that their country is special and not like any other. Some people in the USA describe theirs as God’s Own Country.
What has dismayed the rest of Africa is initial inaction by the government and reports that the Zulu King and the son of President Zuma were actively fueling the hostility. This is what has led to calls for boycotts of South African businesses in several African countries.
While advocates of the boycotts have pointed to the potency of the method in the fight against apartheid, many people have expressed opposition to the idea. To the latter group, a mass boycott of South African goods and services will only play into the hands of European, American and Asian businesses from whom South Africa has taken some African trade in the past two decades.
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The latter group could even make a stronger case. What is happening in South Africa is a symptom of a bigger African malaise. Ghana’s Minister of Trade and Industry Ekow Spio-Garbrah made a good point when he called for education about the role the rest of Africa played in the liberation war against apartheid. I would argue that a form of African Studies curriculum for schools must be developed for all schools in Africa from primary to tertiary levels.
The lack of education and awareness about Africa among young Africans is a major tragedy of our time. The case has been made that when South Africans travel to say, Ghana or Kenya, they declare that they are travelling to Africa just as people from other continents do. On the other hand, even people from other African countries do not know much about South Africa, especially now that the glamorous pull of Mandela has gone.
We should view what is happening in South Africa as an African problem which needs an Africa-wide solution. Beneath the surface, there is resentment at the way South Africa appears to view the rest of Africa only as a market with no effort on the part of that country to integrate seriously in the continent, especially after the exit of the rather cerebral Thabo Mbeki who had a clear African pan-African agenda. Instead of boycotts and further division, the African Union and other African institutions including the pan-African Parliament based in South Africa must now get active in the business of reconciling Africa to itself.
We have to understand that the unity and integration of Africa will hit many barriers on the way but self-awareness of this fact will be the foundation of our collective resilience. This is why we need to know where we are coming from in order to better understand the course we are charting.
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We have to understand that like colonialism, apartheid’s influence, especially in the hateful classification of human beings into categories of superiority and inferiority, it will be a few generation before its final embers turn into coldest ashes. Clearly, apartheid’s work is not done yet.
gapenteng@outlook.com