The extent of political ambivalence in our top echelons does nothing to demystify the prevailing myths about Africans from other countries on the continent, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.
Johannesburg - Why don’t we all converge on a village hill somewhere, there to proclaim, once and for all, that the stoning, hacking and killing of fellow human beings, in our name, in our country, on account of their being of foreign nationality and the looting of their small businesses, is not xenophobia?
In 2008, former president Thabo Mbeki said: “Everything I know about my people tells me that these heirs to the teachings of Tiyo Soga, JG Xaba and Pixley Seme, the masses who have consistently responded positively to the Pan-African messages of the oldest liberation movement on our continent, the African National Congress, are not xenophobic.”
The Mbeki speech was a most beautifully crafted statement of denial. He went on to argue that those who used the word “xenophobia” to describe the murderous events of May 2008 were themselves guilty of “inciting xenophobia by trying to explain naked criminal activity by cloaking it in the garb of xenophobia”.
Government reaction to the current wave of xenophobic attacks has demonstrated little new thinking, staying rather close to the seven-year-old Mbeki line. Police Minister Nathi Nhleko has suggested that these attacks are illustrative of “Afrophobic kinds of activities and attacks”.
The Afrophobia or Negrophobia diagnosis serves several functions – good, bad and ugly functions. It has been used to highlight the Fanonian “nervous condition” of black people. It evokes Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek’s heart-rending cry, “Mother, mother, why was I born black?” and the subsequent neurotic dissociation from and violence against self and everyone black.
According to Andile Mngxitama, writing in 2008, the middle classes – black and white – stick their noses up in disdain of xenophobia because they would like to believe that they are not like the uncivilised masses who loot, maim and kill. For the same reason, mainstream European and North American media relish the “reassurance” they feel every time they report on “barbaric” xenophobic attacks in “darkest Africa”.
They wouldn’t want to recognise that they owe their “civilisation” to the dispossession and looting of the resources of the same “uncivilised” masses.
They would not admit to their role as beneficiaries in the growing problem of inequality locally and globally. Nor would they see the link between their wealth and the abject poverty of the masses.
A more frightening thought is the possibility that in the mind of some who glibly insist on substituting Afrophobia for xenophobia may lie the unspoken and inadvertent suggestion that hatred between blacks and violence between blacks – sometimes pejoratively called black-on-black violence – is of a lower order of significance. For that reason, it is not really xenophobia, it is merely some “throw-away people” doing nasty things to one another.
Therefore, let us not alarm the “civilised world” by using a word that might actually implicate them – namely the word xenophobia.
We don’t want rating agencies to further downgrade our economic ratings, do we? We do not wish to frighten away loaded tourists from Europe, North America and China, do we?
Let us just say that what we have here is not xenophobia but only a small domestic violence problem. As if those killed in Afrophobic attacks die a different type of death from those killed in xenophobic attacks!
In his supposed anti-xenophobia speech, read in Parliament on Thursday, President Jacob Zuma took with the left hand what he had given with his right hand.
First he said: “No amount of frustration or anger can ever justify the attacks on foreign nationals and the looting of their shops.”
Later in the same speech he said: “While we strongly condemn the attacks, we are aware of, and are sympathetic to, some of the issues that have been raised by affected South African citizens.” He ought to tell us exactly what issues and behaviours he has sympathy for.
This kind of political ambivalence at the highest level does nothing to challenge, let alone dislodge, deep-seated and dangerous myths about foreigners circulating in South African society.
These include the suggestion that black foreign nationals are drug-dealing criminals in the main, that most of them are in South Africa illegally; that they have no real languages, which is why when they speak they make only kwere-kwere-kwere sounds; that they are a burden to the economy, intent on hijacking the economy and while they are at it, these “Shangaans” will take all “our women”.
Like Mbeki before him, Zuma reiterated that “South Africans are generally not xenophobic. If they were, we would not have such a high number of foreign nationals who have been successfully integrated into communities.”
But if foreign nationals were successfully integrated we would not have xenophobic attacks, would we? If they were successfully integrated they would be sending money home and not corpses.
Immigration and economic displacement are not unique to South Africa. They are global realities, symptoms of, among other things, unjust economic arrangements. Nor is xenophobia uniquely South African. South Africa need not be ashamed to admit it has the problem of xenophobia. Though they are loath to admit it openly, many European and North American countries actually have the same problem. In those countries, Africans and Muslims are targeted in frequent, albeit under-reported xenophobic attacks. Unless we admit to the problem, we will not seek genuine solutions to it.
I thank the ancestors that the inimitable author Dambudzo Marechera fled persecution from his native Zimbabwe during a different era and did not end up in the South Africa of today. He might not have written a single book. My other favourite writers, Elizabeth Zandile Tshele aka NoViolet Bulawayo, Zimbabwean author of We Need New Names, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun, better stay away from South Africa. I can’t wait to read their next novels.
Albert Luthuli, the former ANC president, the first person of African descent to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Had he been alive today, our generation might have lynched him, Ernesto Nhamuave style.
* Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria and writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent
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