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Fungi Kwaramba-Political Editor
IN South Africa, the continental economic powerhouse and no doubt an attractive destination for those seeking greener pastures, Afrophobia has yet again reared its ugly head, sadly claiming the life of a Zimbabwean, Elvis Nyathi, a father of four.
The death of Nyathi, who worked as a gardener and lived in Diepsloot, a working-class township in northern Johannesburg, makes sad reading.
What is worse is that the horror atrocity was committed by fellow black people with whom a few years ago we were fighting along in the struggle for independence.
Even worse is that some politicians, for political expediency, have stocked tensions, electing to scapegoat, all the while seeking to lure votes to their diminishing power base that is facing challenges from the far-right movement in South Africa, and their sponsors, the monopoly capitalists.
Populist agitators like ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba offer fodder to vigilante groups that have stoked up tensions in South Africa because of their anti-Zimbabwe rhetoric which was one of the pillars of his recent campaign.
But is he the lone voice? Is he the stand-out politician seeking to harvest votes from an apparently disillusioned country that carries the unflattering tag of being the most unequal country on the planet?
A bit of perspective, in South Africa, 84 percent of the land is still in the hands of the beneficiaries of apartheid, with only 13 percent controlled by the South African government on behalf of the black majority whose population is close to 60 million, and 1 percent is not accounted for.
A recent report by the World Bank recognised South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, meaning that the Southern African powerhouse’s economy does not equally benefit all its citizens.
According to the report, the richest 20 percent in South Africa, largely representing white monopoly capital, controls almost 70 percent of the country’s resources.
Another recent report by Oxfam established that the average white executive earns the same as 461 black women combined.
Michael Fargher, a South African, avers that the glaring inequality in the country, “has not arisen as the result of chance. Instead, we can identify the unjust acts under apartheid and colonisation that specifically engineered the repression and robbery of black people in our society.”
But how does that explain the xenophobia that the so-called Rainbow Nation has experienced for most of its independence years?
Some commentaries on the attacks situate the events in the “Rainbow Nation’s” socio-economic experiment, which has failed to redistribute wealth to the economically dispossessed and alienated the black majority.
Therefore, eking a living on societal margins, it is clear that competition for resources in townships is frenzied, frustration and the pent up anger find tone and expression towards fellow helpless blacks, in this case Nyathi a migrant worker, as the colonial construct of natives against aliens is expressed, albeit by its victims.
It is trite that due to colonialism, Africans were classified, ethnicised, and divided through artificial borders that unpityingly separated brothers and sisters, once bound together by Ubuntu, the African philosophy of love and loyalty.
Now it has been shredded, sacrificed on the altar of expediency, not only by some South African politicians, but by their cousins in Zimbabwe, who shamelessly seek to score cheap political goals through senseless assertions.
While South Africa has got its Mashabas, and leaders of vigilante groups like Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini, who leads the vigilante group that has ransacked homes of foreigners in the name of justice through an Operation code-named Dudula (drive out illegal migrants), we also have our Chin’onos and Chamisas who seek to find the Zimbabwe Government at fault, when it is not.
The genesis of the recent violence in South Africa can be traced to people like Dlamini, Mashaba, and even some within the ruling party, the African National Congress, who have not helped matters through statements meant to appease the vigilante groups.
Rightfully or wrongfully, Operation Dudula is a campaign ostensibly driven by the burden placed on public health services, job opportunities and social grants due to an influx of illegal immigrants, but should people take the law into their hands in a country where the rule of law should be supreme?
Some commentators accuse opportunistic politicians in South Africa of stoking anti-African immigrant sentiment (Hanekom & Webster Reference Hanekom and Webster 2009).
“The contention is that such politicians seek to exculpate themselves from the failures of the post-apartheid government and to secure or retain power by appealing to a crude, misplaced economic nationalism that avoids the structural racial and class inequalities inherent in South African society,” wrote Mr Moses Ochonu, in his essay “South African Afrophobia in local and continental contexts”.
“This is the conventional interpretation of the nexus of politics and xenophobia. It is not entirely wrong, but a more compelling argument might be that it is in fact political actors who have been excluded from, or feel themselves to have been politically disadvantaged by the ANC’s domination of the political space that have latched onto Afrophobia to rebuild their political following.”
As of now, hundreds of foreigners, Zimbabweans included, are living under lock and key scared to go out of their adopted homes because of the marauding vigilante groups that are being driven by hate of fellow Africans, driven by politicians seeking self-aggrandisement.
It is encouraging that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned the brutal murder of Elvis Nyathi, and hopefully his message that South Africa is home to everybody will find resonance in the country.
Now, perhaps is the time to invoke the spirit of our founding fathers who espoused the spirit of Ubuntu, those who fought together, the comrades from Zipra and Umkhonto WeSizwe, who fought shoulder to shoulder in the Hwange, Nyatuwe battles in the then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Now is the time for sober heads, not political vultures who speak of “forced migration” when it is plain to see that the violence in South Africa is Afrophobia, driven by historical complexities that present generations must now erase.
Now is the time to realise that the objective of the erstwhile coloniser was to starve solidarity among Africans and ensure malleability through carrot and stick tactics that created natives and aliens, foreigners and locals, identities that have unfortunately persisted to present day and which are attributive to the unfolding violence in South Africa.
Now is the time for those who are behind the violence in South Africa to face the full wrath of the law, regardless of their political station.
Now is the time for walking the talk on ending endemic violence, the bane of a post-apartheid South Africa. Of course, the white people gleefully watch as blacks turn on blacks, themselves the architects of the artificial boundaries that have an enduring power which present African governments reinforce sometimes with reckless abandon.
In the name of Elvis Nyathi, we pray for sobriety, decency and morality.
Online Reporter