Emeka Nwandiko
First Person
Recently my journalistic colleague and friend Angella Johnson penned a piece for a United Kingdom newspaper expressing disappointment at the xenophobic attitudes of black South Africans, which forced her to quit the country.
Johnson wrote: “In the three years I lived and worked in post-apartheid South Africa, hardly a week passed by without someone reminding me I was a foreigner. I was little more than an economic refugee.”
Safely in the land of the country that invented the concentration camp, Johnson says that, thanks to racism from her own race, South Africa validated her Englishness.
As a devolved Britain approaches the millennium, it is still coming to terms with having “ethnic minorities” (those of a darker hue) living on its doorstep. The racist murder and subsequently botched police investigation into teenager Stephen Lawrence’s death still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of blacks in the UK. The nail- bombings carried out against “minorities” in London by an alleged member of a far-right group have shredded perceived notions blacks have of Englishness. Johnson meanwhile confidently asserts that being a beneficiary of English “education and cultural experience helps define where [her] loyalties lie”.
I had the same sense of self-assuredness that prompted a Togolese friend, from my varsity days, to gave me the moniker “British nigger”. With a misplaced sense of pride I bore the name.
It was not until I had spent two years reporting in and around South Africa that I realised the true meaning of what my friend had said. It also got me thinking where the true loyalties of fellow blacks of the diaspora lie. It was quite a shock to experience and see how black Americans and British blacks treated “Africans” as no better than beasts of burden.
I recall with horror how the black American owner of a trendy nightspot in Rosebank, aping a Texas redneck, ordered me to let revellers into the club. I stood speechless as the nightclub-owner, born during the 1960s campaign for civil rights, barked his command more than once. I had been in the country for less than 48 hours.
One working-class British nigger, in whose hostel I stayed while on assignment in Swaziland, did not bother to learn the name of his Mozambican assistant. The cockney speaker treated Seputane, for that was his name, as if he was his man Friday.
It should come as no surprise that the attitude of black South Africans borders on the xenophobic when supercilious super- niggers (for that was what my friend was hinting at) from the West act no better than the colonialists from under whose boot and whip they are struggling (mentally) to escape.
Nor should one expect a people who have been told for half a century that the world is flat to believe in the space of a week that it is round. Sitting in the audience of Felicia Mabuza-Suttle’s talk show last March, my ears burned as I listened to the high-pitched whine of Dr Maki Mandela: “Just as you [black Americans] were told you were the best of the blacks in the West, so we were told that we were the best blacks in Africa.”
It is rather: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
This is certainly the case of a former news editor of a Johannesburg daily. He wrote an article defending a mob that killed a Mozambican hawker by throwing him off a moving train. Two Senegalese men tried to escape by climbing on to the roof of the train: they were electrocuted. The mob, returning from a jobs rally in Pretoria, was of the mistaken belief that the hawkers were pinching their jobs.
I do not know if the news editor, a fellow Chiefs supporter, is aware that to be good in sport means competing with other teams, be they from Orlando or from Nigeria – just as any successful economy must have in its ingredients a disciplined management of its resources, entrepeneurs, a free flow of information and, of course, the rule of law so competition can thrive. Sadly, I don’t think he does. He is of the brigade that believes no foreigner should play for local teams.
I introduce myself to black South Africans as a makwerekwere – a generic term for foreign languages that sound like chirping crickets. Surprisingly, this self-deprecating approach bears results. It enables me to break through the carapace of xenophobia. It taught me something else: a bit of humility goes a long way, something that super-niggers are in very short supply of.
I have been offered a position to write for this newspaper. I accepted the offer not because I am an economic refugee, but because I want to take part in shaping a country and a continent held back by unnecessary tribal conflicts.
Ultimately, the chaps in home affairs will decide. Meanwhile, I listen to Busi Mhlongo’s Urbanzulu. Track number one, Yehlisanmoya ma-Afrika (African Nation Calm), keeps the hope alive that my absence is only temporary.