By Sylvester Odion Akhaine

Good morning, Mr President. This is a continuation of the analysis of xenophobia in South Africa. In the first part of this piece, I have adduced two reasons to make sense of the situation. Today, I continue with the remaining points. The third point to dissect is the Platonic cave metaphor or the problem of South Africa’s geographical cul-de-sac. The migration pattern of the peoples of South Africa ended in the southern tip of the continent, where they ceased to encounter other peoples, blunting their sense of the other, unlike West Africans who developed trade relations through the Sahara to North Africa, thereby creating linguistic and cultural diffusion.

The fourth point is false consciousness. The majority of South Africans suffer from this scourge at two levels. One, believing that the end of apartheid would translate into economic freedom, and two, convinced that fellow Africans were depriving them of economic opportunities. This amounts to a wrong reading of the cause of their impoverishment. The latter is a product of the structural dynamics of the apartheid policy and its continuation post-apartheid. It inheres in the relations of production entrenched in institutional structures of its society.

Both Blade Nzimande, who was then General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, and Thivhilaeli Eric Makatu have underscored this structural problem. At the Struggles of Students (SOS) conference organised at the University of Witwatersrand around 1999, Nzimande rendered an anecdote. He told the audience that, at the end of apartheid, a master to a black South African servant travelled out and returned a few weeks after.

Upon return, he found that the servant had re-arranged everything in his house to suit his own fancy. The bemused master asked the servant what happened. The servant retorted: “Masa, I, masa, you, servant.” The average South African read black majority rule to mean a switch in fortunes. In a piece titled “Nation formation and Nation Building” in Constitutionalism and National Question, a book which I edited in 2000, Makatu underlined the point that apartheid dispossessed the indigenous people of their land and wealth, and reversing the entrenched economic disparity would be long. As at 2024, the unemployment rate stood at 33.5 per cent. Spread racially, it was 37.6 per cent among Blacks, 23.3 per cent for mixed race, and 7.9 percent for the white.

The fifth point is the false flag, a diversionary ploy, to divert attention from the roots of social inequality of the South Africans, a product of the apartheid relations of production. The false flag has three dimensions and can be spawned by any of the three. One is the economic forces, dominated by the white elite enamoured of their control of the national economy. Instead of a focus on redistribution of resources concentrated in the hands of the white minority, there is resort to scapegoating of other Africans as the cause of deprivation.

Second, the ruling party has been unable to solve the economic problem facing the society. Its leadership has routinely mouthed illegal migrants as a problem. Blaming fellow Africans serves as a useful respite from failure. It would be recalled that in the 1960s, the failure of post-independent African leaders to realise the promises of independence led to authoritarian deepening and the consequent cycles of coup detat.

And third, the violence against fellow Africans serves the sinister interest of external forces opposed to South Africa’s leadership role in drawing global attention to the carnage in Gaza. A mob asking aliens to leave their country serves as a bulwark to undermine South Africa’s moral leadership in the international arena.

Now the sixth point, last but not least, in our discussion of xenophobia is the failure of South Africa’s leadership. In the phrasing by the Vanguard news editorial: “These recurring attacks can no longer be dismissed as isolated criminality. They expose a profound failure of political leadership. More than three decades after Apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) has failed to eradicate a culture of intolerance that periodically erupts into violence. Xenophobia persists because perpetrators have learnt that outrage soon fades, prosecutions are rare and political consequences are almost non-existent”.
O
n November 9, 2015 in a piece titled “Xenophobia in Grahamstown: A historical view” published by The Daily Maverick, Paddy O’Halloran notes that “Xenophobia in South Africa has a history. It does not spring spontaneously from poverty but targets it and captures it. In Grahamstown, this history is as old as the town itself”.

Grahamstown in the Cape Colony illustrates colonial policy of creating locations for Africans counted as foreigners in their country, a xenophobic mindset “in which to be African was to live perpetually on the edge of criminality, to be “more African”, from the rural frontier, was even worse”. While the article underlined the metaphoric status of Grahamstown, it gave an insight into state complicity in the xenophobia following its outbreak in Durban in April of 2015.

While acknowledging the role of anti-xenophobia groups in South Africa, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo and Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM), he reveals how South African Police Service (SAPS) and army units were deployed in the “Operation Fiela” to combat crime by rounding up “foreigners” and other “illegal inhabitants”, including people who are part of land occupations around the country. Poor people, Africans from other countries, and Africans living in informal settlements are targeted, a throwback to the events of Grahamstown, where so-called illegal inhabitants were seen as foreigners and the unemployed seen as a problem and were subjected to several forms of hurtful politics and viciousness.

With the foregoing, I have essayed at establishing the historical roots of xenophobia; it is not only against other
Africans but also against poor South Africans. South Africans deserve empathy from other Africans because they are victim of a web of colonial policy that unsettled their humanistic values. As Abdu Rafiu has noted, “The sense of entitlement arising from memories of help by Front Line States when it was most needed—to dismantle apartheid–cannot suffice in the face of new circumstances.” South African leadership can seize the moment to craft a policy that would encourage inter-African exchange, particularly among the younger generations, to emphasise a shared history and common destiny in the global jungle.

It should take a cue from George Nene, its former High Commissioner to Nigeria, who had been ANC Representative in Nigeria during the apartheid era.  As a South African High Commissioner, he pioneered the Nigeria-South Africa Dialogue in early 2000. Anti-Apartheid struggles should be mainstreamed into its educational curriculum. A cocktail of other measures for growing pan-African solidarity for harmonious co-existence exists and should be exploited. Hopefully, some of the thoughts here should inform foreign policy approaches of African leaders incensed by the goings-on in South Africa. Azania shall be free.

Professor Akhaine lectures at the Lagos State University.