South Africa: Barking Up the Wrong Tree

For some years, It has been a macabre indulgence of SouthAfrican poor blacks to visit their anger and frustration on the so-called 'strangers' in their midst. The reason for attacks on other Africans living in South Africa have been instigated by the misspoken words of local potentates who unfortunately have become a common rallying point of pointless anachronism and threatened violence in African countries. Attacks have also been because of misplaced xenophobia exploited by frustrated locals.

From the apartheid days [unfortunately there is still apartheid] in south Africa blacks have always been treated with the utmost disdain and the homelands were nothing other than large slave camps to support the white-led government in its continued domination of the country.  The incident of the Marikana miners was a sad reminder that apartheid tactics are still very possible in the 'new' South Africa. Apartheid officially 'ended' about twenty years ago and yet the average black person still lives as if the system was still in place.  Any right-thinking person would agree that apartheid only changed its tactics by putting up a black front while retaining most of its benefits and privileges. It is these benefits and privileges; especially economic ones, that have precluded the majority of black SouthAfricans from full participation as equals in the 'new' South Africa. The whites in South Africa hold the rights to most of the best agricultural lands, leaving blacks alienated and dispossessed. Because the natives have not really organized themselves to fight back, they fight themselves or foreigners in their midst that appear to compete with them for the crumbs falling off the oppressor’s [both black and white elite] table. One thing we always fail to get is that white supremacy would begin to crumble the day we stop fighting amongst each other. Our confusion and internalised self-hatred are the bane of black empowerment and progress. There is plenty to go round if only we can organize without rancour while keeping real enemies at bay.

Mandela was a great individual who sacrificed a great deal of his freedom for his beliefs.  But the freed Mandela was different from the one that was incarcerated for nearly thirty years. The release of Mandela was years in the making with political horse-trading and compromises that eventually short-changed the black majority in South Africa. When Mandela became the first black President of South Africa it was with the tacit understanding that white socio-political and economic structures would be left largely intact. The real meaning of this was that South Africans would have their symbolic Madiba but with white-skewed national economic equilibrium.  Mandela surprised some close watchers by instituting the so-called peace and reconciliation committee where members of the public who were wronged by the apartheid regime met with some of their oppressors and publically ‘reconciled’. In a synchronized display of public reconciliation, aggrieved, mainly black, South Africans forgave murderers and criminals, and ‘forgot grievances and injustices’ as if they never happened.  But to the impartial observer, peace and reconciliation without justice cannot solve South Africa’s deep divisions and uneven economic opportunities. The ‘peace and reconciliation’ only positioned the whites and black elites to continue their overlordship, bolstered by a vague sense of forgiven guilt. South Africa has had black leadership for more than twenty years and yet the economic emancipation of the majority of its people appears a distant prospect.

The only conclusion that can be drawn is that South Africa is not yet fully liberated.  There has only been a transfer of power from white supremacists to their black surrogates. These surrogates suffer an apparent amnesia of years of oppressive apartheid because they sit on the master's tainted throne. Blacks in South Africa see each other and other Africans as enemies than they see the white man because it is easier to vent on fellow oppressed. Self-hatred is evident in most of Africa’s conflicts where pogroms and genocides between tribes happen in order to avenge ancient crimes or ‘solve’ land disputes. In all these disputes, white oppression and colonial designs were the precursors or enhancer of such conflicts.

 Xenophobic attacks on so-called foreigners who are victims of the same slave master by indigenous black South Africans is pathetic and should be condemned in the strongest terms. South Africans should be fair and strong enough to throw off the yokes of white supremacy, whether it is white Boers or the new black elite that are now insulated from the struggles of the ordinary people that are ensconced in homelands that look very much like prisons. All Africans, or at least most of them, stood by South Africa during its most depressing times as a nation; it is therefore unconscionable for it to play the xenophobic card, whether the whistle is blown by an overzealous tribal bigot or an acquiescent central government that to all intents and purposes is not really in power or has been swallowed by it.

Joseph can be reached at jrotimibgood@gmail.com