adminMoris Mtisi
ONE of the many things I hate most about politics, especially in my wildest imagination of becoming a political leader, is when the behaviour of those you lead is judged as the mirror of who you are and a measure of your political achievements or failures.
The recent spate of xenophobic attacks on foreigners in South Africa tarnishes the image of all South Africans including those who are not xenophobic.
The first acts of barbarism were vandalising of statues under the pretext of a legitimate call for transformation in institutions of higher learning after 20 years of democracy.
After failing to control these educated barbarians, seemingly seeking attention, the barbarism was modified or reduced to an academic debate until statues were removed. It took the barbarism to literally come to human excrement before debate deteriorated to a total defeat of sense by nonsense, political authority bowing down to intellectual masturbation.
If the South African democracy failed to firmly stop the statue barbarism, which it did, it would be interesting to see how the rainbow nation will stop xenophobia and remain democratic-faced.
It was very interesting to observe how students slowly took the upper hand in the statue discourse and how authority feared to say ‘‘NO’’ to nonsense but agreed to agree with them on the statues nobody had seen anything wrong with for 20 good years of democracy.
One fails to understand how South African rainbow politics failed to stop the students’ hidden transformation agendas and stick to the Mandela legacy or philosophy of a nation built on painful history impossible to forget.
So long as the good winners do not celebrate the history of the bad losers recorded in books or symbolised on their statues, what would be the reason to continue to be offended?
Why did the students first think of defecating on Rhodes statue before refusing his scholarship which is dirty money, perhaps even dirtier than his statue?
Zimbabweans quickly changed the name of their country because it would continue to nauseate them, but they did not excavate his bones at Matopos, a place the infidel chose to die and be buried.
In South Africa, why confront the statues before the names and money of the racists?
If you rename the university Zuma University or Ramaphosa University, or Blade Nzimande Varsity, what will those who got degrees from Rhodes University 50 years ago say they got them from when they tell their grandchildren? History, good or bad, desirable or not, is indelible. It is not statues that make history, but deeds.
We in Zimbabwe celebrate the independence of Zimbabwe and will until the last day of time, but will not pretend that we don’t know it was this wicked expansionist racist who re-named our motherland Southern Rhodesia and Zambia, Northern Rhodesia, after his name.
Now Chapter 2 in South Africa after statues is xenophobia. All foreign businessmen must not only close shop or leave but die.
And before all this happens the South Africans must loot their shops, eat all the food from these shops, sit or sleep on the foreigners’ furniture and use the electric gadgets looted from their shops.
What a ridiculous sense of xenophobia! You hate the foreigners but enjoy eating their food and using what belonged to them?
Let no South African imagine that once this madness is over and done with, the world will forget that in 2008 in Alexandra, foreigners were killed by barbarians in xenophobic attacks and in 2015 in Durban KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng, seven foreigners were killed and thousands forced to flee back to their countries or seek shelter in make-shift camps.
This is history and the statues that will be erected to remember these fallen victims of xenophobia on South African soil will speak forever no matter someone then decides to destroy or remove them.
South African youths have forgotten or don’t know how their struggling fathers and mothers found sanctuary in different countries of Africa and how some of those countries trained them to fight apartheid.
And many of them paid the price of apartheid attacks and air bombardments!
Now that there are civil wars and economic woes in those countries and these people come to South Africa as political or economic refugees, does it matter what, South African citizens have the audacity to loot their shops and kill them.
Whatever the reasons for these spates of xenophobic attacks against foreigners, organised or spontaneous, as the Dalai Lama said, “The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and individual analysis.”
People have brains in their heads…hopefully. They have feet in their shoes, not shoes in their feet.
They can always steer their feet and choose which direction to go. Your shoes will never tell you where to go.
South Africans have murdered civilisation.
Things have fallen apart — the centre can no longer hold. And cry the beloved country!
South Africans understandably will hate apartheid to their graves, but sane people wonder why they allow it to continue reversing their political gains, compromising the admiration the world and the African continent once gave them?
Is this what a rainbow nation stands for and what 20 years of democracy does to a people?
These acts of xenophobia are an ironical consequence of an apartheid system which denied South African children a sound education; a sound education to make them understand the dynamism of geo-politics and the honour and reality of interdependence in modern socio-political economics as opposed to the glory of independence.
Civilised communities worldwide celebrate sovereign independencies but refuse to be blinded by them. Instead they quickly accept the reality of the need for interdependence.
It is a global economic trend. No nation succeeds in a vacuum and isolation. That is why all civilised nations without exception hate the economic barbarity of sanctions.
Apartheid denied the majority of South African youths an education. That is known and undeniable.
Today these youths, uneducated and unemployed and or unemployable are angry with themselves.
They vent their suppressed anger on the employable and foreigners who have learnt the secrets and tricks of self-employment and reliance for survival.
Their only form of expression and response to life challenges is toy-toying and crime.
South Africa will bear the brunt of these unemployable criminals for a long time to come. It did not invest in education for all to fill in the gap of apartheid segregation.
Was it Benjamin Franklin who said, “An investment in knowledge (education) always pays the best interest”? Maybe these South African criminals who make every South African look like them would have known that it was not God who partitioned Africa and confined social groups within geometrically drawn boundaries.
It was shameless and stone-hearted colonialists, imperialists, land thieves who separated brothers and sisters and forced enemies to live together against their wishes and choices.
No wonder today in Africa there are so many civil wars and terrorist attacks of men, women and children by their own who have been alienated by these boundaries and imperialist religious dogmas. Millions die in terrorist attacks they neither cause nor understand.
Maybe these South African looters and xenophobic terrorists would understand that the geographical boundaries demarcating their countries from others are not engraved on their skins and hearts.
They are artificial boundaries made centuries ago by white colonial land-grabbers whose sense of greed taught them to devise a divide-and-rule tactic which today they mischievously continue to use to alienate Africans against other Africans throughout the continent.
Maybe these senseless xenophobic gangs would understand who exactly is responsible for their plight and misery and that whoever it is or they are, it is not foreigners from the DRC, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe or Malawi. The source of the problem is certainly in South Africa which is failing to answer questions about the soil denuded by history.
Maybe these criminals would realise the wisdom and sense in Mandela’s words, “Education is the best tool with which to fight ignorance and poverty.”
The answer is never going to be in crime, wanton destruction of statues and xenophobia. Not in a thousand years!
Maybe the rowdy gangs of xenophobic elements would on their own realise that it is the Madiba-bug that is now acutely missing in their lives and those who are supposed to rejuvenate it to solve problems in South Africa are not only too busy or too arrogant to keep his legacy alive, but deliberately reluctant to use it to address complex challenges, fearing doing so will continue to dwarf their own political names and statures.
If South Africa fails to do something now about its extreme democracy and flippantly continue to talk about a good story to tell, it is forever going to miss Mandela and civilisation is going to continue to drift to a sad end in that country.
Online Reporter