INDEPENDENT MEDIA The writer says that until we can find ways to heal the wounds of the past, some South Africans will continue to project their pain onto others. Picture: Boxer Ngwenya
South Africa needs a dedicated project to heal the wounds of apartheid, says Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Durban - Many explanations have been given for the explosion of violence against foreigners in the past couple of weeks.
I have found one of the most unhelpful to be that those involved in the violence do not fully appreciate the role of Africa in hosting and funding the liberation movement.
I believe that foreigners have been made scapegoats for our government’s policy decisions on a range of issues, including immigration policy, pan-African relations and macro-economic choices.
Many countries make decisions similar to South Africa’s without creating conditions for the attack of those who arrive from other countries in search of better prospects than they had in their native lands.
This has made me wonder why what religious ministers, marriage counsellors, psychologists, criminologists keep telling us, especially in cases involving crimes against children – hurting people hurt others – has not been part of the mix to explain the barbarism we have seen.
Sunday Times photographer James Oatway’s picture of a group of men stabbing a Mozambican man in Alexandra, Johannesburg, brought home the horror and brutality of the attacks.
It will be folly not to acknowledge that the barbarity, as we have witnessed, can only be carried out by people with deep-seated issues.
It is important to spell out clearly that there is a difference between understanding why an action, however deplorable, is carried out – and in justifying it.
South Africa is a hurting nation brutalised by many years of institutionalised violence against the body and the spirit. The sooner we acknowledge this, the better our chances of not only preventing future xenophobic attacks, but also to deal with the excessive and sometimes gratuitous use of violence, even in crimes where the victims offered no resistance.
While we unfortunately accept the economic benefits for the criminals who rob us of our belongings in our own homes, there is no justification for putting a hot iron on the face of a person who is bound, hand and foot, or for the house robbers to add rape to their crime.
South African communities need less political education, but greater empathy for the trauma they have gone through. We must, for a start, use language that captures and names the horrors of apartheid by their real name.
Black South Africans were not “disadvantaged”. They were oppressed and brutalised.
Apartheid was not a mismanagement of human resources or an unfair allocation of opportunities, it was a dehumanising project. To say this is not to ask for a special pass, as some like to think.
It is an honest place to start dealing with our reality.
The people at the forefront of the new influx control against Africans from other countries were themselves victims of an influx control act, first introduced by the Jan Smuts government as the Native (Black) Urban Areas Act No 21 of 1923 to regulate black people’s movement to towns and even then only to serve white labour needs.
The act was abolished in 1986.
Having internalised a multi-generational message that the “native” is a lazy, thieving, good for nothing, sex-crazed subhuman, black South Africans are now projecting the same image on foreigners, hence the common refrain that they are “stealing our jobs and our women”.
Repealing laws that enabled apartheid was important, but healing the nation and restoring its humanity is critical and must be ongoing. South Africa does not just need economic empowerment and better employment equity projects. It needs a dedicated project to heal the wounds of apartheid.
Do not get me wrong. Economic empowerment and employment equity are necessary. We need a creation and distribution of wealth. Individuals need to feel they are using their talents to the full and fulfilling their inborn potential. In fact, growing poverty and inequality only make people feel worse about themselves than at any other time and, therefore, make them easy converts to all sorts of anti-social projects, such as attacking those who they believe are beneath them, like foreigners, or signing up for extremists projects such as Boko Haram-like outfits.
It is by healing the wounds and engaging with the trauma of our past (if we can even call that a past) that our people will realise that you cannot fix yourself by breaking others, regardless of whether they are foreigners or are wealthier than you.
It is by being sincere about the psychological scars of white supremacist rule that black South Africans will realise they no longer need to satisfy the urge to feel positively unique by finding those they too can hurt and make feel less human.
No South African, regardless of their skin colour, can afford to sit back and spew out judgemental platitudes. We are in this together. We can either all find ways in our own little spaces to help the nation heal or we can write eloquent articles about the barbarity of others. As they say about HIV, we are all infected or affected by the psychological trauma South Africa is going though.
* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is editor of The Mercury. Follow him on Twitter @fikelelom
The Mercury
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