A tech solution to fires in informal settlements comes with insurance that pays out the victims of these blazes
By comparison with 2008, say, we got off lightly during this year’s first mass looting of foreign-owned stores. Only about a half dozen people were killed, after all, and only a few tens of thousands of people were displaced.
By South African standards – where as many foreigners are killed and as many of their families displaced over any given three months – that is hardly noteworthy. And, indeed, if the looting in Soweto and surrounds had been spread around the country as usual, few would have noticed.
Through one of those uniquely South African quirks of interpretation, the 2008 xenophobic attacks have become a barometer. Six years ago we watched in horror as people were murdered for the crime of being from elsewhere.
We briefly mourned them, spent a bit of time searching our collective souls, and then moved on. Ever since, as people continue to lose their lives and livelihoods, our response has been: well, at least it wasn’t as bad as 2008.
We have become a nation that measures its xenophobia by the number of body bags filled. How far we have come, and how low we have fallen, since 1994.
South Africa used to be a country with a vivid memory of the help we received from our African neighbours during the struggle for freedom. For all the ills cadre deployment has brought us since, it ensured that every level of government had returned exiles, or at least people who had to thank the ranks of Angolans, Mozambicans, Zambians, Tanzanians and Russians, among others, who had supported the fight for liberation for their success.
During the administration of Thabo Mbeki, fraught though it was in other respects, we turned our collective gaze northwards, and sought to elevate the entire continent. There were poetic words about a common destiny, on the one hand, and an unseemly rush to cash in on new markets on the other. But we saw ourselves as African, and our destiny as intertwined with those of our neighbours.
It went awry as often as it went right. Our approach to Zimbabwe’s political turmoil was shameful, and our reputation as economic neo-colonialists will be hard to undo. But we sent our soldiers to die for peace and we sent our envoys to work towards better ties, and we aspired to be closer to our fellow Africans.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, something went horribly wrong.
Our government officials become contortionists in their efforts to avoid the word “xenophobia”, but they evade and explain in vain. Sophistry aside, there is no other explanation for why we so easily turn on immigrants and refugees.
There is no underlying economic reason – as the current flavour-of-the-month explanation has it – and we don’t randomly stumble into foreigners while we happen to be in a criminal frenzy.
We hate and fear foreigners, it sometimes seems, because we find them hateful and to be feared.
But hopefully it is not quite that simple or there would be no cure for us, and we would become a country capable of turning its back on the suffering of our compatriots in their homelands wracked by war and disaster – and isolated from the money and skills and determination and innovation they can bring us, to our great detriment.
If we are to find our way again, we must believe that the xenophobes are in the minority, and that the failing of the rest of us is in letting them run rampant. There will always be extremists, and there will always be those who hate. But they can only succeed when the good people do nothing.
That hypothesis stands proven if we look to the government as the representatives of the good people. Since May 2008 the government has done, on a net basis, nothing about xenophobia.
The fine words are more than cancelled out by the lack of action, and what little progress was made is negated by the increasingly regular and increasingly anti-foreigner sentiment expressed, without censure, from Cabinet level down.
Apparently the lessons of our national Aids denialism did not quite sink in. Again the government is desperate to believe something that flies in the face of all the facts, and again people are dying as a result. Again we bring shame on ourselves.
That must change, and it will. South Africa has too much compassion to allow this stasis to continue indefinitely. The only question is whether it will change in time. There is solid evidence that xenophobia is fanned by local political disputes, when populists realise how easy a button it is to push.
The 2016 local government elections will be more tightly fought than any before it. That some will turn to hate speech against foreigners is a certainty. If we do not act before then, and decisively, we may still break our 2008 body bag record.