A motley crew of chess players from the African continent can be seen playing at a restaurant just a stone’s throw away from Yeoville’s park, where nearly a decade-and-a-half ago Ronnie Kasrils sat on a bench, watching to see whether he was being tailed by apartheid goons during Operation Vula.
While sitting on the bench, Kasrils began reminiscing about his “childhood stomping ground”, he writes in his biography Armed and Dangerous. Any visitor strolling through Yeoville now will notice how dramatically it has changed from Kasrils’s childhood days. Nigerians can be seen in bars, forcefully arguing their points of view.
Congolese men use the streets as a catwalk, displaying the latest Afro-chic couture — trousers belted up to their navels, white shirts sporting ties hanging just below the chest with a huge knot at the neck. In butcheries along Raleigh Street, svelte coffee-cream-skinned Ethiopian girls gaily chatter in their native Amharic as they wait for customers to arrive for the morning trade.
Such is the new African presence in Yeoville that mini-capitals of Harare, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Accra and Lagos have sprung up as restaurants, telephone kiosks, cosmetic stores, grocery shops and places of worship to respective gods.
But five years ago, this pan-African rainbow was yet to arch over Yeoville (and other streets in central Johannesburg) as local hawkers fought pitched battles against their foreign competitors, whom they accused of stealing their jobs. And it seemed there was nothing locals wouldn’t do to get their jobs back — even if it meant committing murder. Remember the incident of the Mozambican who was killed when he was thrown out of a moving train by a baying mob heading back to Johannesburg after protesting for jobs in Pretoria? And let’s not forget the two Senegalese men on the same train who, rather than face the same fate, tried to escape by climbing on top of the train, only to be braaied by overhead electricity cables.
My local friends advise me to study the dynamics in place in South Africa’s socio-political arena so that I don’t fall victim to “xenophobia”. I am a Nigerian resident in South Africa.
The first dynamic that struck me was in the late Nineties, when I was sitting in the audience of the Felicia Showt. I digested the words of one Makaziwe Mandela. In a high-pitched whine she said, to the cheers and applause of the local component of the studio audience, that it was the people who stayed in South Africa during apartheid who liberated this country, while those in exile had returned and “taken over” the country.
This resentment between those who stayed in the country and the exilers who returned home to rule was adroitly expressed by John Kani in the play Nothing But the Truth.
Kani plays Sipho Makhaya, a cantankerous old man who sees his ambition to become the first black chief librarian thwarted when an exiler waltzes into the post. Kani cracks a joke in the play wondering what the exiles will take over next.
What has the struggle between those who stayed and the former exiles got to do with xenophobia, you might ask? Simply put, black foreigners are perceived to be “taking over” places like Yeoville and are the lightning rod that is struck by locals who feel powerless. But it is one thing to be a lightning rod and it is quite another to be the conductor on a house into which you were not invited.
One always perceives a sense of wariness when meeting a black local for the first time. Because the question forming in their mind is: “What the hell is this foreigner going to do in my country?”
Let’s face it, the record of the last set of (white) foreigners who arrived on the three sailing ships Drommedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop in Table Bay to collect victuals in 1652 isn’t particularly great.
It would be ludicrous to suggest that today’s black foreign arrivals have any intention to colonise South Africa, let alone on the scale that Jan van Riebeeck and his successors did.
But what gets up the noses of locals and indeed fuels the resentment that leads to “xenophobic” rage is the behaviour of bad elements from the black foreign communities.
Stories abound of Zimbabwean syndicates controlling cash-in-transit heists, or their less-talented compatriots shooting locals dead for cellphones (which they sell for a measly R50). Neither can the actions of Nigerians — with their drug dealing and 419 scams — help change negative perceptions.
The question locals no doubt ask is: “Did we liberate this country for such nonsense to take root?” Perhaps what grates them even more is the fact that Africans from failed states have swarmed into the country like avaricious locusts to feed on the green shoots of South Africa’s democracy — and have become economically prosperous as a result.
The question raised is: What are the loyalties of these foreigners? Will they accept this country, warts and all, and help build it to be Africa’s and the world’s economic and industrial powerhouse? Or will they up and leave when the going gets tough, or quit when things improve at home?
Are South Africans xenophobic? I respond with a resounding “No”!
In Leon Schuster’s Oh, Shucks, I’m Gatvol, a “Rambo-nation” understanding of South Africa’s socio-political dynamics certainly helps avert a necklacing. That’s a lesson missed by petty thieves from Zimbabwe and their families, who paid dearly with their lives in Zandspruit informal settlement on the West Rand in October 2001.