Advertisement

South Africa has no monopoly of ‘negrophobia’ in Africa

Saturday April 18 2015

South Africa is in the news again, and again for the wrong reasons. There is a great deal of good news coming out of Nelson Mandela’s country. There is, however, also a lot of not-so-good news and, every now and then, torrents of bad news.

But bad news can also sometimes be rather entertaining. Consider the video clips on social media depicting the country’s president being harangued at length in parliament, or muggers plying their trade with breathtaking audacity in broad daylight, even when there is a risk that their images will be captured on camera.

This time the bad news is bad, through and through, whichever way one chooses to look at it. The latest mass attacks by ordinary South Africans on “foreign” Africans living and working in their midst have caused shock across the globe and drawn much ire from across the continent.

Anger is particularly high in countries whose nationals have been identified as the main targets, and those where locals feel that somehow South Africans owe them a debt of gratitude for offering their exiles and freedom fighters sanctuary when they needed it.

The general tendency has been, and rightly so, to condemn the South African government for not preventing the attacks, and South Africans for their xenophobia.

There is something not quite right about the perennial reference by other Africans to the assistance they rendered to South Africans running away from oppression under the apartheid government. It seems to suggest that the assistance was rendered in the expectation that once the exiles took power, their former hosts would be at liberty to come and go as they wished, and do pretty much whatever they wished.

Advertisement

The denunciations of South Africa and South Africans are, generally speaking, justified. They are also hypocritical in some cases. In our own Great Lakes region where some of the loudest criticism of South Africans can be heard, we are not short of examples of governments evicting foreign Africans at short notice, and of locals setting upon them with the same ferocity television images have been conveying to us from South Africa.

Not too long ago, DRC nationals were thrown out of Congo-Brazzaville like dogs, most with only the clothes they were wearing, some having been subjected to physical violence.

DRC nationals are themselves hardly innocent. Some of the localised episodes of armed violence have to do with attempts to evict “foreigners” and send them to wherever they are said to belong.

And then there was Burundi expelling “illegal” Rwandans shortly after Tanzania had expelled Malawians, Burundians and Congolese, and then evicted violently thousands of Kinyarwanda-speaking “Rwandans” and, some say, Tanzanians whose forebears had left Rwanda more than a half a century previously.

The only difference is that we have not heard much about the details of these events because the media chose not to dwell on them.

Non-blacks ignored

Moreover, as in South Africa, in these countries too, non-African (non-black) illegal immigrants, among them Europeans, Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, Lebanese and Arabs of various descriptions, are for the most part ignored. So what is now being popularised as afrophobia or negrophobia is as African as it is South African. And South Africans are just as welcoming of foreign Africans as the rest of us if they choose to be so.

I lived and worked there for some years, with the only time I was ever reminded of my foreignness being when I found myself in the midst of poor and illiterate Shangaan villagers in the northeast, whose motivation for calling me kwerekwere, albeit jokingly, must have been the desire to assert their supposed superiority as “South Africans” to the “African” who couldn’t speak their language. In more polished sections of South African society, hardly anyone seemed to remember that I was “African.”

So, it’s not surprising that the violence has been in those areas of KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere, where local South Africans are mainly poor, ill-educated, and unemployed, and therefore frustrated with their lives, and desperate for attention from a government seen as uncaring. And it is among these desperate people that African immigrants arriving with nothing except their determination to overcome adversity, install themselves and go on to become successful and jealousy-inducing informal sector operators.

Analysts have been quick to accuse the South African state of responsibility for the violence. Apparently, poor controls, inattention, and corruption have meant that genuine and bogus refugees as well as illegal immigrants without means of livelihood can enter and insert themselves into communities where competition for livelihood opportunities is already cutthroat and, through sheer hard work and the will to survive, crowd out the locals.

The formulation may not explain everything, but it points to how state weakness can impact society in unexpected ways and even kill.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs.

E-mail: [email protected]

Advertisement