Adrian Muphemhi, also known as ”Appleseed”, has been arrested for contravening the Aliens Control Act. After his trial he will be put in detention at Lindelani, then deported over the border, with hundreds of other men and woman, their faces between their knees, their hands behind their heads. Who knows what careers, lovers, and dreams they leave? They are no longer individuals but dirt to be swept out of the country.
In the immigrant community in South Africa, the most urgent question is: If even Appleseed, a member of Bongo Maffin the revolutionary kwaito band that has helped allay the vacuum in the lives of township youth after struggle politics ended can be arrested for where he comes from, what about us? Who then will protect the mechanics, the doctors, the farm labourers, the husbands and wives of South Africans, who belong in this country but don’t have the elusive rubber stamp to be here?
Of course, the Department of Home Affairs is acting to protect us from the cockroaches pushing against our borders, the insects hungry for our jobs, our land. But the language of the Act should be familiar: it is the language of apartheid, the legal language of hate.
The department and the ruling party has yet to acknowledge an important finding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: more gross violations of human rights were committed outside and on our borders than inside South Africa.
If Zimbabweans, Namibians, Angolans and Mozambicans suffered equally for our freedom, why may only we taste its fruits? How did we end up rejecting colonialism but accepting the convenient borders drawn by the colonial masters we hated? Henk Rossouw, Cape Town