Peter Kagwanja
1 June 2008
Nairobi — The attacks, displacement and killings of poor African refugees and migrants in South Africa by black xenophobic mobs has drawn attention to the insecurity of foreigners in South Africa and the risk to the country's stability.
What has happened is not just attacks on African immigrants, but a tragic tale of how victims of more than three centuries of colonialism, apartheid and post-colonial underdevelopment became xenophobic killers.
In its aftermath, the wave of xenophobic terror is a drawback to African unity, especially the role of South Africa as a peacemaker and President Thabo Mbeki's legacy of 'African Renaissance'.
The orgy of attacks started in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg on May 11, spreading to the outskirts of Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town and Eastern Cape.
By Africa Day on May 25, the violence had left 50 dead, nearly 30,000 displaced and 500 arrested.
The victims are from as diverse African countries as Angola, Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Worst brutality
The recent wave of xenophobia is the worst brutality South Africa has witnessed since the high noon of apartheid violence that paved the way for the historic transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, widely viewed as "one of the most extra-ordinary political transformations of the 20th century".
This 'miracle' of transition moved former United States Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, to declare in 1996 that: "[there are] few countries with greater potential to shape the 21st century than the new South Africa".
With its huge wealth, political and military muscle, South Africa was expected to take an active role in resolving Africa's festering conflicts.
Tragically, the photograph of a hapless migrant up in flames and smouldering to death in Reiger Park Township, Johannesburg, not only shocked the world, but has increasingly eclipsed South Africa's 'miracle' and image as a stable exporter of peace.
Successfully ending xenophobic attacks and addressing its root causes to defuse further tensions remain central to reducing the potential of instability within South Africa, and ensuring its moral leadership in Africa and the world.
The recent xenophobic terror on African migrants by black South Africans is ingrained in apartheid's psyche.
Frantz Fanon, writing about the psychological legacy of French rule on the colonised subjects, lamented that the most oppressed internalises oppression and psychologically yearns for a chance to oppress others.
In light of this, Mamphele Ramphele warned in 2007 that "we should not underestimate the psychological impact of three centuries of colonial rule followed by apartheid."
One of the impacts of apartheid is the trend by the victims of its oppression to view the world, including themselves, through the eyes of their oppressor.
The results are dire: socially induced inferiority complex, self-hatred, low self-esteem, racial/ethnic hatred and jealousy, suppressed aggression and a form of "nativism" or defence of identity and rights in ways that seeks to exclude the 'other'.
Clearly, the violence by black South Africans against fellow Africans is not a racial or colour-line problem as all of them are black.
Indeed, the attacks proceeded as if there are no non-black migrants in South Africa, even from the neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola.
The violence cannot also pass as a purely "economic xenophobia" as some have characterised it.
The violence is by poor South Africans against their poor kith and kin from the continent. Unlike violence aimed to dispossess the rich, this kind of violence can hardly alter the plight of South Africa's poor in any fundamental sense.
Sadly, the attacks are reminiscent of the ill-famed "black-on-black" violence in the closing years of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Nativism
Trying to make sense of this violence, bureaucrats like Deputy Foreign Minister, Aziz Pahad, see xenophobia as an assault on the "kindness, compassion and spirit of Ubuntu" believed to form the fabric of South Africa's society.
It has also reversed the gains of "democratic revolution." This cultural rendition of Black hatred of foreigners is important.
It reveals glaring similarities in the underlying ideology and psyche between anti-African xenophobia in South Africa and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Kenya and other parts of Africa and Eastern Europe.
The attacks are driven by the ideology of "nativism", which has fuelled hatred of the racial or ethnic "other" and fostered exclusive notions of citizenship across the world.
In many parts of Africa, nativism has taken the form of "playing the communal card" where rival elite camps exploit latent, and often legitimate, economic grievances to instigate hatred and violence of rival groups for political gains.
In the case of South Africa, attacks on black migrants was perpetrated by marauding "ethnic" youths wielding both modern and traditional weapons like axes, golf sticks, clubs, metal bars, knobkerries and guns.
Superiority Complex
One of the most stubborn legacies of apartheid's social engineering is a belief by black South Africans that they are superior to their kith and kin North of River Limpopo.
In one of his weekly letters, Mr Mbeki lamented that South Africa has not been able to free itself from "the chains of bigotry".
Mob attackers who razed down shops and shacks owned by poor African migrants chanted Hambani makwerekwere ("foreigners, get out").
The pejorative term makwerekwere also connotes the inferior other.
The construction of the "inferior" African in the psyche of black South Africans reflects the impact of the Bantu education which never taught black South Africans about other parts of Africa.
It is very common to hear a Black South African university researcher saying: "I am going to Africa", meaning visiting an African capital.
Isolation of South Africans from other Africans was part of apartheid's security architecture and strategy.
It was reinforced by physical separation and enforced through strict boundaries that prevented one homeland from interacting with another.
More importantly, the principle was upheld in regard to homelands and the rest of Africa.
Unfortunately, the isolation of South Africa globally helped break the back of apartheid, but also contributed to the identity gap between Blacks in South Africa and those from other parts of the continent.
As such, black South Africans were not ready for the encounters with their kith and kin engendered by refugee and labour and other migrations after independence in 1994.
Surveys by the Southern African Migration Project in 1997 and 2006 showed that South Africa was among the least tolerant nations toward migrants, with one-quarter of South Africans voting for a ban on foreign migrants and about 22 per cent for their forcible return home.
This intense phobia for the Amakwerekwere (African immigrants) fuelled violent clashes between locals and migrants in Johannesburg in 1997.
It also explains why apartheid-era migration policy and strategy was retained almost intact after 1994.
Anti-migrant legistlations include the notorious Aliens Control Act (amended in 1995 and 1996) and the Immigration Act (2002), which the ANC state has enforced.
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