Johannesburg’s scenes of blood and gore, of roads strewn with broken glass and burned shacks; police stations and community halls that overnight have become refugee camps — these scenes are striking for one reason.
And it’s not the xenophobia. Africans on the continent have never liked one another. Rather it’s the vehemence with which the ”go home” message is being put across and the brutality that has accompanied it.
Ever since Europe’s powers sat down in Berlin in 1884 to divide Africa among themselves, Africans have internalised the differences the Europeans foisted on them in their quest for empire and wealth.
When these powers deliberated, significant portions went to the French and the British. Smaller chunks went to the Portuguese, the Germans and the Spanish. It was arbitrary, never taking into account the differences and the similarities of the conquered. They were divided by new borders and new languages.
Even though Europe has now nominally left Africa, these differences fester on, and a free Africa remains acutely conscious of the boundaries that the colonial powers drew. Across the continent and, long after independence, these differences are replicated.
Robert Mugabe, referring to farm workers of Malawian and Zambian origin, railed against ”totemless aliens” who were said to be supporting the Movement for Democratic Change. That was a bit sophisticated. Ordinary Zimbabweans had, for a long time, derisively called Malawians ”mabrandaya” — a corruption of the name of Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre — or simply ”mabwidi”, a particularly nasty word for foreigners that means an uncouth and uncultured person from Mozambique, Malawi or Zambia.
In Botswana, Tswanas have long discriminated against the Kalangas, a tribe that has roots in Zimbabwe, and against other foreigners, who are derisively called ”motswaka”.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, boasting more than 200 tribes and, having the kind of diversity and numbers, one wants to believe, to better appreciate other nations. But there xenophobia reached its peak in 1983 when about a million foreigners were expelled and many lost their personal belongings. Perhaps the Nigerians were imitating Ugandan president Idi Amin who, in the early Seventies, expelled 80 000 Indians and seized their businesses. Most were given less than a day to leave and many lost their property.
This madness was not limited to the buffoonish Amin. In Zambia, a somewhat more sober Frederick Chiluba enacted a law stripping the country’s founding leader Kenneth Kaunda of his citizenship because his father was Malawian-born. His grip on power weakening, Chiluba wanted to stop Kaunda from running for the presidency and even tried to have him deported.
Similarly in Côte d’Ivoire the much-lauded Ivorian philosophy saw the country broken apart between the north and the south. Although being Ivorian had been a celebration of the common heritage of all who lived in Côte d’Ivoire, it soon became a vehicle for xenophobia, mainly directed at ”foreigners” of Malian and Burkinan origin. Before the elections in 2000, a law was enacted that disqualified Allasane Outtara, a northerner, from running as president because his parents had not been born in Côte d’Ivoire.
These examples from the rest of the continent are egregious because of the state’s hand in persecuting foreigners, something the South African government, to its credit, has not done. But, the fact that the state has not taken part in the persecution of foreigners shouldn’t be comforting, because the effect has been the same, if not worse: initially the state agencies that should maintain law and order were quite powerless as xenophobic mobs rampaged and pillaged.
One imagined that the people of Johannesburg, of all places, would know better. For decades motley crowds from Lilongwe, Lagos, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere have come and gone. Each of us, in our own way, have come and added a brick to this building and fetched mortar for that building. Something the hate-mongering mobs are determined to stop.