John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
It is true, as some readers have commented in this week’s Letters and Crossfire sections, that we have an uncomfortable problem of xenophobia in South Africa. As is pointed out, it is a xenophobia that is particularly nasty because it generally seems to be an intolerance exercised by black South Africans towards black people from elsewhere in the continent.
Thousands of non-blacks have also swarmed into this country, the rate increasing into the 1990s as all sorts of restrictions began to fall away. Tens of thousands of Russians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs and other East Europeans flocked to South Africa as the socialist regimes that controlled their countries disappeared, and the haywire free-market economies that have replaced them (not to mention civil wars) put intolerable strain on their lives. Not all of these immigrants are in legal or responsible forms of employment. But you don’t hear about xenophobic mob lynchings being carried out against them. Nor are they rounded up in random police swoops on the streets of Hillbrow and downtown Johannesburg and threatened with deportation.
Let us be clear from the beginning, then, and say it is not an issue of “South Africans against foreigners”, but a feeling of resentment by some black South Africans against black Africans who are legally or illegally resident in South Africa. Who can tell how many black South Africans feel this way? It is surely not all of us, but the numbers are enough to make life very uncomfortable for a lot of black people from this vast and fascinating continent that we are part of.
The worst cases hit the headlines, as is usual with news reporting, and disappear unresolved soon after. The fate of the three West African traders who were hounded off a moving train between Pretoria and Johannesburg, to be electrocuted as they scrambled for safety on the roof, or fall to their deaths as they leaped (or were pushed) to their doom is a case in point. Whatever happened to that story?
The grim thing about it (since I am trying to find the statistics of this kind of xenophobia) is that neither the police nor the reporters who tried to investigate could get any information from the many witnesses who sat passively in their seats while this outrage was played out before their very eyes. Is this complicity or just fear? After all, the same witnesses have probably sat transfixed in their seats on other suburban trains in the past, as politically inspired massacres were conducted at random, or even as criminal gangs carried out (as they still do) terror campaigns of robbery, rape and murder in those sealed and speeding carriages.
Does this mean that this particular kind of xenophobia is simply an extension of the violent acts of self-loathing that have been generated out of the degrading conditions of township life and disempowerment that black people have been consigned to? I am sure that this is an important part of it. But there is more.
I lived away from South Africa for 32 years. Exile, even when it is described as “voluntary”, is always involuntary. Who enjoys having no access to one’s place of birth? On my return, I was filled with such a flood of desire to make up for lost time, to create a space for myself in this complex and unknown country, and to get to know my own people that I have to confess to moments of resentment that thousands of others who had no roots here should be competing for the same space.
But there was a parallel problem. Many of the millions who had stayed behind also expressed a resentment against me and my fellow exiles for swanning in with our big heads and funny accents and seemingly trying to take over. As far as we were concerned, we were simply trying to normalise our lives as quickly and as painlessly as possible, but it didn’t seem like that to many of the “inziles”. They, too, were trying to reclaim a space that had been denied to them for as many generations as anyone could remember. We were all rushing to make up for lost time, and all getting in each other’s way. There was no United Nations relief programme to help us sort the whole thing out. It was a free-for-all, and the so-called makwerekweres from the north just had to take their chances like the rest of us.
We exiles spent a lot of time living in some of the makwerekwere countries. In some cases, there was resentment from the citizens of those newly independent states, also trying to find their identity after decades of colonisation. Exiles from Southern Africa, however, were never murdered just because they were foreigners. On the contrary, for the most part we received the kindest hospitality, and our host countries sometimes suffered terrible military reprisals for offering it.
Were we always good guests? I’m afraid not. In many cases, we brought our dangerous township energy with us.
Julius Nyerere is once said to have pointed out that the difference between a Tanzanian and a South African was that if you put an untrained Tanzanian in a helicopter, he or she would take one look at the complicated mess of dials and levers and walk away, defeated. A South African, on the other hand, would tinker around for a bit and finally get the hang of the thing. “The problem is,” said Mwalimu, “the South African would then fly the helicopter to the nearest shebeen and leave it there.”
There is in that comment a mixture of the fear, respect and contempt that (black) South Africans have always engendered on this continent. Those complicated emotions still inform the uncomfortable relationship that exists between ourselves and our siblings from the north.