We the Foreigners

Cetshwayo Mabhena

IT was in 1943 that Hannah Arendt published her timeless classic essay: “We Refugees.” In that essay Arendt used her powerful philosophical and journalistic prose to chide Europe for hypocrisy regarding human rights. She started by critiquing the name “refugee” itself which suggests that those that have become stateless and nationless are actually that garbage of the nations and states that must be given refuge by charitable and civilised nation-states of the world. When, in actuality nation-states are the ones that create and produce refugees.

There is even a suggestion of criminality and notoriety in the name “refugee.” A “refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held” but Arendt and other Jews had not done that. Their crime was just being Jews in an anti-Semitic world.

Nationality as an identity can be a crime in a world that puts territory, power and privilege ahead of human dignity. Belonging or not belonging to a nation or a country can decide whether one is recognised or not as another human being with legitimate rights to exist and live.

Drawing from her very personal experience Arendt noted how being a refugee meant not only loss of home and place but also loss of “familiarity of daily life, language, occupation, and self-confidence” in a world where pride and dignity matter most.

After fleeing a concentration camp in Germany and finding herself in a refugee camp in France Arendt described the refugee as “the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”

Living in a camp; whether a concentration camp or a refugee camp, actually dramatised that one had lost a home and become a stranger in a world that values home, nation, country and landedness.

This short article is another of my celebration of a thinking girl, the journalist and philosopher, Hannah Arendt that from deep inside Europe and America had enough will and intellectual stamina to rebuke the coloniality of the modern world system.

I use the meditations of Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost philosophers of “the Human Condition” to understand the discrimination and abuse of those Africans in South Africa that cannot speak a single South African language or identify with any local culture and are treated like true refugees.

I enjoy the privilege that, while other Africans have to argue that they are also Africans and one with South Africans, I frequently find myself arguing to convince people that actually I am originally not South African, and that does not blind me to the sin of racism that is xenophobia. The struggle is not in assimilating into other countries and nations but it is in human beings being themselves anywhere under the sun.

The Foreigners as Refugees

Concerning the problematic of foreign nationals and criminality in the Republic of South Africa there is a lot of intellectual telling of lies and political claiming of easy victories that the political philosopher, Amilcar Cabral, warned us about.

First, there is the naïve naturalisation and normalisation of criminality and notoriety to foreign nationals. Next, there is the essentialisation of colonial borders by black Africans that should naturally be opposed to everything colonial. And then there is the monumental myth that there is any country in the world that can cleanse itself of foreign nationals and then remain behind to be happy ever after.

Also alarming is the ignorance of the history that makes South Africa, like the United States of America, a country of immigrants. The mines, farms, factories, roads and railway lines that the Boers built in South Africa are actually structures that were built with immigrant labour.

Immigrants from all the many different countries of Africa went to apartheid South Africa, eWenela, to work, to seek and find fortune. It is no exaggeration that among some of the South Africans that froth in the mouth about foreign nationals are children of Malawians, Mozambicans and Zimbabweans that were marauding bachelors that worked in the mines and farms of Kimberly and Johannesburg some decades ago.

The existential dilemmas and traumas of Jewish refugees that Arendt canonically described are the same as those that find themselves called foreigners in Trump’s America and Ramaphosa’s South Africa today. Colonial borders, national populations and country territories of the present world system are the causalities of the problem of refugees and foreigners.

Borders of any kind produce insiders and outsiders, locals and foreigners and the problem is not the foreigners but the borders that made them outsiders and aliens. Blaming foreigners for crimes, diseases and poverty did not start in South Africa.

Deep inside Europe and America, people from outside borders and other territories become easy scapegoats for any problems from drug abuse to sex crimes and terrorism. There are some South African politicians, journalists and some scholars that naively think that the explanation of South Africa’s political and economic troubles is found in the presence of the foreign other.

The naïve thinking is that once the Republic has been fumigated of foreigners the country will become a pure paradise of milk and lots of honey. But, the way in which the world is structured with many maps, borders, nations, countries and other divisions every living person is a foreigner somewhere and foreigners, biblically speaking, will always be with us.

The Meditations of Hannah

In the modern world system, refugees are the tortured baggage of humanity, “they don’t want ghost-stories anymore; it is their real experiences that makes their flesh creep.” They, one may add to Arendt, don’t need to watch horror movies because their lives are the true horror reality.

“Refugees have gotten used to wishing death to friends or relatives; if somebody dies; we cheerfully imagine all the trouble he has been saved,” because when daily life has become deathly, death becomes an escape and a relief from long suffering and pain.

It is for that reason that many Jewish refugees escaped death in concentration camps only to commit suicide in the refugee camps of France and elsewhere. Under the circumstances of the foreigner and the refugee of the world system “perhaps the philosophers are right to teach that suicide is the last supreme guarantee of human freedom; not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we nevertheless are free to throw life away and to leave the world.”

Like the colonised and the enslaved of the modern world system, refugees “for them suicide, like murder, means a blasphemous attack on creation as a whole.” They become those people that have nothing to lose but their misery and suffering.

The liberals and Good Samaritan organisations and individuals that embrace foreigners and refugees and that clamour for their rights do so as charity and pity, not justice and human rights, that is why as refugees “if we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded,” the same as if we were attacked and insulted.

The Fiction of the Foreign Other

In actuality everyone is a foreigner somewhere in the world and for that reason there are no foreigners. All nations, wherever they are located, arrived on those locations at some time from somewhere else.

The foreigner as an identity and positionality is a fiction and a construct of the modern colonial and slavish world system that feeds on classifying and categorising people according to race, ethnicity, gender and nationality.

Human rights and the Rights of Man that the Euro-American Empire prides itself with remain a myth and a fiction when belonging and not belonging to any country is used to take away the dignity and being of some human beings.

I join Giorgio Agamben not only in celebrating the mind of Hannah Arendt, but also in observing that the problem of the world is not refugees and foreigners but the nation-states that Empire has imposed on every part of the Globe.

Nation-states are a breeding site for racisms, xenophobias, tribalisms, sexisms and other toxic ideologies of othering in the present world system.