The wars are hotting up all over the African continent. Brotherly love is going out of style. Cain is killing Abel, Jacob is ripping off Esau and Sarah is usurping Rachel without batting an eyelid. It looks like hell up north.
On the other hand, South Africans should not be too confident that they are not going to get dragged into the fray. We are Africans too now, and Africa isn’t about to let us forget it.
I was flying back from Ouagadougou with film- maker Ramadan Suleman the other day. We were having a very interesting conversation about origins, exile and the world of African film.
It is amazing that you can know a person for a long time (we first met in London in 1986, when he was still a film student and I was still a thespian) but only get to really know them when you’re flung together in unlikely circumstances.
We were just getting to the interesting bit, about how fate had brought Suleman’s people to the shores of South Africa in 1860, or thereabouts, when we had to break off to prepare for landing at our transit stop of Abidjan.
Never mind, we said, we’ll have plenty of time to pick up this conversation during our nine-hour stopover in this cosmopolitan commercial capital of Cte d’Ivoire – a town we both know well. We’d breeze through the airport, do a bit of shopping in the richly scented market place and carry on talking over a leisurely dinner.
Little did we anticipate what was to come.
It was fine until we handed over our passports. An official took them from us and disappeared to a distant part of the airport. We never saw her again.
Instead, a man with shoulders like Table Mountain suddenly appeared and told us unsmilingly to follow him. Off we went, up stairs and down grimy corridors, till we were shown into a small office that smelled like the charge room at John Vorster Square. The uniformed officer behind the charge desk curtly told us to sit down. And then we waited.
For more than an hour we watched as one hapless African traveller after another was pushed into the charge room to join us.
”What are you keeping me here for?” one of our braver companions yelled after a while.
The female sergeant behind the desk jerked a thumb over her shoulder towards a closed door. ”You’ll hear from the captain,” she said, and continued to scowl into her paperwork.
The captain finally came swaggering out of his office in a jazzy dashiki. He ignored all of us and chatted to his subordinates about the big party that was going to be happening over the weekend.
Then, in twos, threes and sixes a bedraggled stream of women started to emerge from his office. They were adjusting their scanty clothing as they came, and smoothing down their startled hair pieces.
Suleman and I exchanged a look of consternation. It looked like the captain was employing a time-honoured system of issuing visas. What would we be subjected to?
And yet none of the women was being allowed to leave. They stood in the middle of the charge office like confused chickens, unable to understand the language that was being hurled in their direction.
Then two red-eyed men came tumbling out of the same door, pursued by kicks and punches. One of them was screaming that he was going to be killed if he was sent back to his own country. The other was yelling accusations of theft against the police. The captain laughed in his face.
We were seriously alarmed by this time. Suleman leapt to his feet and started yelling about his rights, and I jumped to my own feet right behind him, yelling almost as loud.
For the first time the captain looked at us. He was taken aback that we were able to express ourselves in French. He suddenly became courteous. ”Gentlemen, what’s the problem?”
”Why are we here? Why are we being treated like criminals?” we shouted.
”You don’t have visas,” he replied.
”We just came through here last week and we were let through without visas,” we said.
”That was last week,” he retorted. ”Your government has changed the rules since then.”
It turned out that our own immigration department had suddenly imposed visa requirements on the citizens of a number of other African countries. As a result, some Ivoirien nationals had recently been manhandled back on to the aircraft that brought them to Johannesburg, and sent back.
That news, combined with multiplying stories about the murder of foreign Africans by xenophobic South African mobs, had burst the bubble of resentment that had been festering around the continent. We were being made to suffer as a result.
We protested that we abhorred such treatment of fellow Africans as much as the captain did, but the damage had already been done several thousand kilometres away.
What a shame. Africa has so much to offer to Africa. Yet instead of coming closer, we are drifting further apart.