This week Africa celebrates the adoption of the African Charter on Human Rights and People’s Rights, but it seems South Africa is regarded by its neighbours as rapacious, imperialist and xenophobic
Carlos Cardoso: The treatment inflicted by the South African state and many South African citizens on Mozambicans is unacceptable.
Every Thursday a train carrying Mozambican deportees from South Africa arrives at the border town of Ressano Garcia. Illegal immigrants, South Africa tells us.
To be sure, many of them entered South Africa illegally. And, most of them will be back on South African soil the next day, brought in by the same authorities that expelled them. And so the business goes on.
But many are not illegal. They just didn’t happen to have on them the proper piece of paper when they were stopped by police on some Pretoria street. And even if they are illegal immigrants, the police have no right to beat them, keep them in a concentration camp prior to deportation and steal all their belongings.
These are injustices as naked and shameful as those of the apartheid state. Every time a Mozambican is beaten up or insulted in South Africa for being a Mozambican it is as if Samora Machel is being slain all over again. This is not what the anti-apartheid struggle was all about.
Having clearly stated my protest, I must add that we in Mozambique must try to understand the feeling that many South Africans have that their country is being flooded by outsiders.
Xenophobia, however, is not the answer. The answer, quite simply, is a regional environment of healthy national economies that will undo the feeling of claustrophobia which is pushing Southern Africans, and not just South Africans, towards enmity between neighbours.
So why does President Thabo Mbeki preach regional integration on the one hand, while, on the other, Spoornet sabotages Mozambican harbours and railways through its price dumping on Malawian and Zimbabwean goods?
Why does a Maputo resident have to make a payment at a Nelspruit-based travel agency if he or she wants to spend a few days at a beach resort in Inhambane province?
Why do the Mozambique and other Southern African Development Community (SADC) airlines complain about being treated with contempt by the board of South African Airways? Are we talking African National Congress regional integration practising PW Botha’s constellation?
Translated into human rights: why does South Africa complain of being invaded by Mozambicans and, at the same time, undermine the chances for jobs inside Mozambique?
To correct the impression that I may have only a one-sided view of our relationship, let me hasten to say that your big-brother complex is only the other side of our small-brother syndrome.
The National Party-like aspiration of regional domination that may haunt certain sectors of the ANC finds encouragement in the chronic klepto- mendacity of much of the Maputo elite.
The combination of both is producing samples of monumental short-sightedness such as the Maputo corridor development project. Why so much money on that road? Why not a decent road from Maputo to the Rovuma River so as to make the production of the southern end of the region as price competitive in northern Mozambique and Tanzania as all the stuff coming in from Dubai?
Southern Africa has been for the better part of a century what one might truly call a region. Integration is a reality, not an objective. Ask General Magnus Malan where he and his security colleagues lost their grip on political power. It was thousands of kilometres to the north, in Cuito Cuanavale.
Ask the region what happened, back in 1975, when the militarist wing of Afrikanerdom decided it was time for BJ Vorster to go.
So, some people in the ANC may dream of South Africa being the United States of the SADC. Theirs is a useless and expensive illusion, for South Africa right now is at best marking time.
In more sombre moments, when I consider South Africa’s crime rate, growing corruption, capital flight and general citizen depression, I ask myself whether South Africa will be the region’s locomotive or a heavy burden on the SADC’s snail-paced train.
Am I being too pessimistic here? I certainly hope so. – Carlos Cardoso is editor of Metical, a Maputo daily fax newspaper
Zimbabwe
Iden Wetherell: South Africa is a deep disappointment to Zimbabwe’s political aristocracy. They had confidently anticipated the post-apartheid state would be shaped in their own image with an overweening ruling party, an imperious presidency and a Constitution that counted for little.
The last thing they expected was a noisy democracy protecting the rights of all and entertaining different shades of opinion, including some Zimbabwe’s rulers would rather not contemplate.
When President Robert Mugabe visited his newly liberated neighbour in 1995 he hoped to be received as a conquering hero – the man who delivered to South Africans their freedom. Instead he was besieged at Johannesburg airport by demonstrators protesting his gay-bashing pogrom. South African newspapers published cartoons mercilessly excoriating the Zimbabwean leader as a bigot. It wasn’t what he had in mind.
Indeed, the way South Africa’s post-1994 transformation has produced a paradigm of African governance sharply divergent from the narrow nationalist model fashioned by Zimbabwe’s rulers in the 1980s is a source of endless irritation to Mugabe’s mandarins. The emergence of a powerful South African civil society has encouraged and reinforced Zimbabwe’s nascent civic sector. And democratic practice south of the border has provided an impetus to constitutional reform in Harare, long resisted by Mugabe and his cabal.
Mugabe’s impatience with what he sees as democratic licence, trade imperialism and regional ambitions that rival his own came to a head last year when he exchanged sharp words with then president Nelson Mandela over Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Following the succession of Mbeki, there is optimism that relations across the Limpopo can be ”de-personalised”. But tensions remain.
South Africa’s dogged refusal to accord Harare most-favoured-nation trade status while flooding its market with exports remains a sore point. So does the unceremonious deportation of Zimbabweans who fail to get through the immigration net. Stories abound of mistreatment by South African police.
Resentment of South Africa is mirrored in reports in the official media which regularly characterise South African cities as the most dangerous places on Earth. The recent murder of a Zimbabwean diplomat in Johannesburg underlined perceptions of South Africa as a lawless society that appears unable – or indeed unwilling – to adopt the ruthless measures applied by the authorities in Zimbabwe, where murderers rarely escape the hangman’s noose.
Despite this, for many Zimbabweans the streets of South African cities offer opportunities for informal trading that do not exist at home. In a period of severe economic hardship these openings keep many families fed. But they are poor compensation for the loss of Mozambique.
After nearly 10 years of defending the Frelimo government against South African- sponsored insurgents before 1992, Zimbabwe has seen South Africa’s rapacious exporters turn Mozambique into a captive market. Equally galling, South African travel agents are now marketing the Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe’s primary tourist draw, as a South African destination!
Like Canada and the US, and New Zealand and Australia, Zimbabwe’s relationship with its much larger neighbour reflects the complexities of intimacy tinged with envy, fear and resentment.
At the political level, the incumbent class declines to accept South Africa’s pretensions to regional leadership – a role Zimbabwe played until 1994. Trade union activists want the benefits of South African democracy but not its quotas on textiles.
Business people denounce a tariff regime they see as designed to unfairly limit competition. And ordinary Zimbabweans – particularly those from marginalised Matabeleland – see the country as the only job provider they know.
It’s not a healthy formula for a relationship. But so long as the Limpopo remains a barrier between two contrasting political cultures and the terms of trade continue to be heavily skewed in South Africa’s favour, the problems look set to persist. – Iden Wetherell is deputy editor of the Zimbabwe Independent
Zambia
Anthony Kunda: To many Zambians, the mention of South Africa stirs up feelings of admiration and aversion, almost in equal proportion.
On the one hand, there are people who praise South Africa as a magnanimous economic powerhouse trying to spread economic benefits to backward Zambians.
Such people point to the changing infrastructure, especially in the capital, Lusaka, and other major towns, that has come about as a direct result South African investment.
Others say South African investors are helping to set higher standards in business, and fostering a new work culture. Frydah Katebe, a sociologist, thinks it is good for Zambians, economically and socially.
”These people are changing local attitudes towards work. You see in the past, we have been used to malingering. But now people are learning to sweat it out for their money,” Katebe explains.
Mulenga Chiwama, a chartered accountant, says South Africa is dominating the Southern African economies because of ”their different work culture. Things have not changed the way things changed in many African countries after independence.”
Although some people decry South Africa’s growing economic dominance in Zambia, Chiwama argues that ”in the long run, it will benefit, because some of those work ethics and profitability will rub on our economy”.
She narrates how she bought an expensive, high-class garment from Marks & Spencer, only to discover ”when I got home that it was made in South Africa. I was impressed, I mean it shows how well they are doing things.”
But Major Wezi Kaunda, a politician in the opposition United National Independence Party, says South Africa’s economic influence is creating resentment among some sections of the Zambian community, especially among industrialists and farmers.
Kaunda said people are beginning to perceive South Africa’s economic domination as an attempt, albeit unintentionally, to create regional ”economic bantustans, where they can dump their finished products.”
His contentions are not groundless as some South African chain stores in Zambia, such as Shoprite, import most of their merchandise from South Africa, even those that can be obtained locally.
Not surprisingly, there is ”growing resentment that South African businesspeople are killing local jobs to create jobs in their country”, Kaunda says. ”It is even more ridiculous when Zambians are asked to import things like meat pies from Johannesburg.”
It is difficult to determine the levels of resentment. However, Kaunda says: ”What is saddening is that the South African government does not seem aware of this growing resentment towards this kind of domination. Ultimately, this will work against them and Zambians alike.”
Some argue that Zambians could come to hate South Africans the same way they hated the apartheid regime.
Disappointingly, though, with all its economic muscle, South Africa does not seem to be playing as influential a role in politics. Both Mbeki and his predecessor Mandela have largely shied away from commenting seriously on conflicts and misunderstandings in countries like Zambia, in the name of non-interventionism.
Nevertheless, in terms of setting standards in democratic governance and observance of human rights, South Africa is highly commended by many Zambians.
George Kunda, chair of the Law Association of Zambia, says: ”Nobody can take away from South Africa’s achievements in this regard.” The Constitution, Kunda said, is singularly worthy of emulation by many African countries for its broad-based, liberal and unifying characteristics. ”We could learn a lot, we who have had contentious and divisive constitutions,” he says.
Alfred Zulu, a human rights activist, similarly points out that it is ”hard to find a more liberal Constitution, even by Western standards, that grants rights to virtually every citizen”.
Probably because of several years of isolation from the rest of the continent, there has been a tendency among some South Africans to think of themselves as not being part of Africa, and they will talk down at Africans in other countries almost in the white colonial-master style.
There are stories of South African firms where Zambian employees are paid much less than their South African colleagues, something reminiscent of colonial times, under British rule.
It is not uncommon to hear a South African, black or white, talking to Zambians in terms of ”you guys in Africa must learn to do things differently .”. Such people clearly think South Africa is not part of the continent. – Anthony Kunda is a freelance journalist based in Lusaka
Namibia
Tangeni Amupadhi: Although Namibia became independent 10 years ago, the nation remains economically and culturally a colony of South Africa – and most ordinary Namibians like it that way.
Namibia was colonised by white South Africa after World War I, and until 1990 was ruled as a province of its southern neighbour. While South Africa has relinquished political control over Namibia, economic and cultural dominance is increasing.
Most Namibians envy South Africa and believe they can get better opportunities for personal development there than in their own country. Take Audrey Madison, a young receptionist in Windhoek, who says: ”If I get the opportunity I’ll be on my way there to work and study.”
Madison says South Africa offers huge opportunities for personal upliftment, and that she has always been treated ”nicely” during her numerous visits to various parts of South Africa.
But more enlightened Namibians view South Africa’s popularity with ordinary Namibians as neo-imperialism and arrogance. ”South Africans who come here [to Namibia] think they come from a superior country . that anything from South Africa is better,” says Zoe Titus, a journalist who writes about entertainment and books. But she admits South Africa ”dominates us in just every aspect”.
”Of all the shows that have taken place here, Namibians have supported South African acts more than their own,” says Titus. Where the music scene was once dominated by American artists, South Africa has taken control, particularly with kwaito music.
Namibians, like most South Africans, look down on other Africans. Although the anti- immigrant sentiments have not been translated into violent attacks, University of Namibia students, for example, are demanding that only Namibians compete in the university’s beauty pageant after the crown was taken by a Zambian.
Strangely, South Africans do not get the same xenophobic reception that the majority of Namibians dish out to other Africans.
On the economic front, trade unionist Ranga Haikali says South Africa has failed to ”stick to its commitment for regional integration” and has played a ”dominant role that undermines regional economic integration”.
”Their personal economic benefits are greater than regional benefits,” says Haikali, ”and that’s not good for stability.” Haikali believes South Africa should rein in its multi-national conglomerates, which at times cause massive unemployment by abandoning one country for another in the Southern African region in search for cheap labour.
To counter the dominance, the Namibian government has for years refused to grant South African Breweries permission to set up a brewing plant. The government says it is protecting Namibian beer and jobs which could be lost as a result of competition from a bigger company.
Namibia has also complained that the Southern African Customs Union – the free trade agreement involving Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland – is benefiting South Africa more than other members. The majority of the Namibian economy is in the hands of South African businesses and, as part of the common monetary area, the Namibian dollar is pegged to the rand.
Namibia’s pan-Africanists believe South Africa is out of touch with the rest of the continent.
”My experience with them [South Africans] is that they are very much ignorant of what is happening in the rest of Africa,” says Benjamin Ugwanga, secretary of the Pan Africanist Centre in Namibia. ”They don’t know about Kwame Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere, they don’t celebrate OAU [Organisation for African Unity] day. They talk about us in South Africa and them in Africa.”
Ugwanga says Mbeki’s ”African renaissance” concept is ”centred on neo- liberal ideas because it embraces globalisation and free market systems” which, if accepted without caution, could destroy small economies.
”South Africa should throw away the ‘African renaissance’ and get themselves involved with something stronger, which is Pan Africanism,” says Ugwanga. ”My reservation [with the ‘African renaissance’] comes in when South Africa wants to undermine the economic and political ability of other African countries. They want to take economical, political and intellectual leadership.”
He says the ”African renaissance” has the backing of Western countries and business but lacks the support of Africans. ”They [South Africans] have an image problem, they are playing superpower,” Ugwanga says. – Tangeni Amupadhi is a reporter at The Namibian newspaper