The xenophobic attacks on immigrants in South Africa are terrible, but they are not surprising.

As so many commentators have pointed out, they are an outcome of extreme levels of poverty and of political failure on the part of the ANC government on an unexpected scale. This wasn’t the dream, was it?

Well, admittedly. Who could possibly have lived up to the weight of expectations that the whole world put on the Rainbow Nation? The end of apartheid, followed by Mandela’s brief presidency, set the bar incredibly high. And it was a triumph that the rest of Africa felt a part of, intimately.

We learned to toyi-toyi, embraced Mandela shirts and most importantly, we pretended that we didn’t understand what “kwerekwere” meant, even though that word has been around a long time.

Besides, the continent needs its success stories rather badly. South Africa was meant to lead the way, perhaps even drag the southern end of the continent along the development path in the wake of its muscular economy.

Certainly it wasn’t supposed to succumb to the chaos, the kleptocracy, the tribalism, the presidents-for-life, the long list of ailments that have ravaged so many African countries. If we knew that this was asking for a lot, we were careful not to voice doubts anywhere where they could be heard.

Talking truthfully would have meant pointing out from the get go that South Africa is just as challenged as the rest of this continent is. Fraught, complicated, poor, politically poisoned by patriarchy and murder and pain and now on top of it, a ruling party that has gone rogue on them.

With a dollop of a broken education system and deeply rooted anger to sauce the whole endeavour. The handbook of contemporary African politics does suggest that those revolutionary, liberating parties tend to be a bad idea once in government.

This xenophobia isn’t about stolen jobs, a term that is hard to accept because jobs can’t exactly be wrestled from a person.
This here is about Nkandla. It is about the failure of that affirmative action programme South Africa tried to enact. It is about citizens feeling insecure in their own citizenship.

It is about the way we let this “South Africa isn’t really Africa” thing go too far, the dark side of exceptionalism. It is about taking all that frustration out on the most vulnerable group of all: The other.

This sentiment of keeping the threatening other out is happening across the continent. Tanzania is becoming a country where mobs of angry young men wielding weapons are an expression of our many, many broken social contracts.

We regularly sweep up so-called illegal immigrants, keeping our practices of citizenship and immigration so fast and loose that nobody is ever outside the reach of the government’s ability to render one stateless. Kenya is considering a wall to keep illegal movements of people between itself and Somalia to a minimum, for security reasons.

And so on.

Neighbourliness is a very scarce commodity in 2015. Some people have raised the idea of pan-Africanism. I think that they are optimistic, and that it is an ideology that cannot address the root challenges in its current form.

Maybe a window of opportunity was missed during the wave of Independence, and it is doubtful if it can be recreated now. We have sunk into our borders and our leaders have created fiefdoms for themselves and we have embraced one of the worst aspects of the modern nation state: That of keeping people out in the hopes of concentrating resources inside.

And pan-Africanism, like all good communitarian ideologies, is no match for the capitalist economic system. It makes for wonderful African Union speeches, though. Usually delivered by the same statesmen who have created the conditions under which we labour to kill each other for “stealing jobs” and other such nebulous offences.

Which is another aspect of pan-Africanism that puts it in conflict with its pacific intent.

It doesn’t say much about disagreeing respectfully, but completely, with your elders and your leaders. Especially when doing so may just save what you have left of your soul by keeping a machete out of your hand. What is happening in South Africa is happening everywhere at a different scale. What we get to do about that is mystifying.

How does one balance between the ballot and the machete?

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com.

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