I am ashamed of being a South African right now. This is indeed South Africa’s darkest hour. My heart – and I am sure hearts of many of my family members and friends – bleeds at the death of innocent Africans killed by our own brothers and sisters – in KwaZulu Natal (KZN). This, while our leaders – perched softly in leather couches, air-conditioned offices and posh cars – debate whether this is xenophobia, Afrophobia or acts of criminality. Semantics really – what remains is that we have wounded Africa deeply. Whether it is only 5 people or 50 or 500 is immaterial.
This is not supposed to happen at all. South Africans need healing and Mandela’s democracy and reconciliation is falling apart. You cannot – whether you are Desmond Tutu or a Mandela – force people to reconcile, to accept other nations and to just move on. A lot has to happened. For example, not many South Africans know anything about the stay of our liberation heros in different parts of Africa. No one has made this narrative important enough to tell and retell it to fellow South Africans. Black South Africans do not travel – at least not as much as they should. So they are not exposed to other ways of being, to other kinds of hospitality and to other cultures. You do find adults from Gauteng who say that Free State is in Bloemfontein. Or those ignorant ones who say that Lesotho should be South Africa’s 10th province – when in actual fact Moshoeshoe’s land covered all of now Free State, parts of KZN and parts of Eastern Cape. Neither Moshoeshoe nor any African nation leader were part of the colonial and white powers that divided our lands. You find South Africans who will say “Orlando Pirates is going to play some other team from Africa!” as if we are in another continent. It is this othering of ourselves that is pervasive and poisonous to South Africans of average stock. Today, we are killing our own brothers simply because they come from Leopold’s Congo or Rhodes’ Zimbabwe or Livingstone’s Tanganyika. White people – those who divided our lands – co-exist in peace, while we fight like primitive idiots in a cave. We are proving the architects of apartheid right that we “cannot govern ourselves”.
I recently came back from a 3-month stint in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigeria is the truest cultural melting pot of Africa – from the hawkers on the street, to the high-end boutique shop-owners in the various Lagos Islands, to the dizzying heights of corporate Nigeria – you find Ghanaians, Beninians, Togolese, Cameroonians, Lebanese, South Africans, Botswana, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Indians even Basotho and other Africans. The two super-powers of West Africa – Nigeria and Ghana – co-exist in harmony. You find a lot of Ghanaians in Nigeria and a lot of Nigerians in Ghana. In fact, some people are so Nigerian they even forgot that they come from Ghana and the reverse is true for Nigerians.
When I got back – 3 to 4 weeks ago – there were scant reports of xenophobic resurgence in KZN. Then, it happened. The worst happened. A king spoke – something to the effect of foreigners taking their bags and going. This unnamed monarch spoke off his neck and a naïve, angry people followed. This led me to ask myself, my family and my colleagues a few questions? Surely this obscure monarch does not wield so much power that he can incite so much hatred, so spontaneously! So where does this hatred come from? Who is behind this? I mean really – KZN is known for warlords (remember what happened in 1990 – 1993 in Kwa-Mpumuza, Ntuzuma, Kwa-Mashu and other townships in the province. The violence and blood-thirst of these war-mongers was soon transplanted to Thokoza, Katlehong and in no time in Boipatong). Where does this blood-thirst come from? Who taught us to “root out” foreigners? And what if this happened to me in Nigeria?
My heart is heavy. I saw a photo of a young man with his forehead split and his skull leaking out his brains. He wore a business-like golf shirt and he had wonderful brown shoes. I will never forget this picture. And this is the power and the detrimental effect of social media. I will never erase that image off my mind.
Another image was that of a couple – with a man holding a baby in a pink bodysuit and a woman looking back at an angry mob wielding machetes, axes and pick-handles. Social media was flooded with these images. The perversion of looking and marveling – whether in awe or in shock – at these pictures makes me sick, literally and physically. I know why I could not become a doctor. The blood, the gore, the guts, the muck and the puss of the engine that makes the human body function has a sorry emotion to it. And I could not handle it. I saw these images and I sobbed like a child. I cried loud uncaring whether my neighbours hear me or not. Long minutes later, my son came into the room and asked: “Daddy, why are you crying?” I mustered all my strength, faked a smile and looked at him and said: “Daddy is crying because I do not know what to do. These are not my people. We were not raised this way. But Daddy is crying because he loves you so much my boy!” I said, pressing him hard to my chest to hide more tears. It sounds like fiction and he said “You love me even when I am naughty”. The innocence of this child reminded me of the innocence of the child carried by that terrified father who was running away from a mob that wanted his family’s blood simply because he is from elsewhere other than South Africa. The image of a man clutching at his child and woman hoping to get away from an angry mob, sticks to my mind.
The same night, I dreamt of guitars and pianos – in a huge stadium. Some or other group was supposed to perform, but Kumbelo, Mackson (my classmates from design college) and I took over the microphones, the instruments and we started making our own music. Then a big burly man wearing dreadlocks, speaking in a strange accent taught me a melody and he showed me where/how to play it on the guitar. As I was learning the melody – it was a beautiful melody actually – I announced on the PA system that we are “Phekuma” (acronyms for our names – Phehello, Kumbelo and Mackson) and we are about to play! I was getting in the groove. Just as I started getting used to my notes/melody – the crowd started closing in on us, chanting, singing a war-cry and carrying all kinds of weapons, clanging them against each other. They chanted, singing “ingomane” and “mokorotlo”. The war cry was silent, but well-pronounced under their breaths. They stank of death. The air was thick and tense – it stank of blood. The sky went red and the crowd closed in. They were above me when I sprung to life, awake. I brushed the sweat off my brow. I started humming my melody instead.
Song, art, culture and sport always united us in times of instability. The silence of South African artistes is not only deafening, it is annoying. Sankomota sang “Stop the War”, Chicco Twala composed the “Peace Song” and Blondie Makhene sang ANC struggle songs openly in the 80s and 90s. They did this when white people were killing black South Africans with impunity. Today when Africans turn on Africans, even the artistes are silent! What did these poor people do to us? Are we that emotionally-scarred as a people that we will do to anyone what apartheid and colonialism did to us?
Right now, none of us can be proud to call themselves South African. The attacks of any kind against anyone in South Africa now and in the future do not represent us. They are not who we are. No man is born with hatred in his heart. Hatred is learnt. Prejudice is acquired and the skill – let alone the brevity to strike someone until they die is an acquired perversion. We – my family, friends, colleagues and I – officially distance ourselves from this base and primitive act of killing innocent Africans for any reason whatsoever.
South Africa is on a slippery road. When the “foreigners” and “makwerekwere” are gone and the same problems still face us, who are we going to kill next? Basotho from Lesotho? AmaSwati from Swaziland? And how are we going to differentiate those from Basotho or amaSwati from South Africa? What will it take for us to realise that by hurting a “Zimbabwean” we are hurting a piece of ourselves? By killing a Malawian who owned a shop and hired two locals and fed a whole street of households that we are killing ourselves? How many people will it take for us – for our “leaders” and the obscure, broke monarch to get off his high horse and ask his subjects to put their shovels, stones, pick-handles, machetes down?
The leadership vacuum in South Africa is an indication of a nation in decline. We just do not have leaders. Instead of raising concerns about businesses that are raking billions a year yet they pay their employees peanuts, instead of crying to a president that builds palatial selfish compounds, instead of complaining about the system that teaches us to be employees and not to overcome the cycle of being labourers, we target the vulnerable and equally-struggling Africans who are here to share the little that they have.
Africans are an accommodating people, a hospitable people. In Sesotho we say “sejo senyane ha se fete molomo” – loosely translated it means “no matter how little the food, we will always share” … And this is what the Angolans did for the liberation movement in the 70s and 80s. We also say that “ motho ke motho ka batho” – a person is a person because of other persons. And the training camps of ANC and PAC and other liberation efforts in Morogoro, in Cuito Canavale, in Kenya, in Lusaka, in Harare, in Maseru, in Gaborone – or the anti-apartheid fees that scholars of Nigeria were made to pay even before paying their school fees – were all meant to advance this ideal of ubuntu.
My father always said that “you cannot eat, when other children are not eating” and my mother always said that “I must go back and say thank you properly” to the people who helped me. And this is how we thank fellow Africans – by splitting their skulls, burning them with tyres, chasing them with pick-handles and pitch forks? Sesotho also says that you should not thank those who helped you with a dish of faeces. And this is exactly what we have done – thanked our brothers with a plate of defecation. Our languages abound with positive messages that show us that we are one – we are branches, tree leaves of the same tree called Africa. We might be growing in different directions but our purpose is singular. We should also be careful not to defecate at the well once we have had a stomach full of the refreshing water because we do not know what might drive us back to the same well in the near or far future.
As I write this, I wipe tears with the short end of my sleeve and I say a little prayer that my brother-in-law (the father of my lovely niece and husband to my sister) can survive this onslaught on people who are not from within our colonial borders. I libate and speak to my ancestors and ask for guidance and strength on how I can contribute to the betterment of myself and by extension of others. They say sometimes the gods, ancestors and spirits need blood to appease their blood-thirst/lust. But for that, nature gave us plenty of animals. For whatever we feel other African nationals have taken from us, there is dialogue, policy, legislation and common narrative to share, to show that there is nothing that makes us different from other Africans.
*Phehello Mofokeng is Publisher, film-maker and entrepreneur. He holds BA Hons Drama, Film and African Languages from the University of Witwatersand.
Phehello is a publisher at Geko Publishing and is a figure in literature and publishing. His publishing outfit has published 21 titles so far including the multi-awards winning Setswana novel Ga ke Modisa (2013) by the award-winning journalist Sabata-mpho Mokae. He wrote from Johannesburg
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