Left of What’s Right
By Marlan Padayachee
Marlan Padayachee is a freelance journalist and a media communications strategist and he writes in his personal capacity.
Xenophobia has been on your doorstep.
It’s been living near you for a long time, just that we may have been colour-blind about it and could have been wearing blinkers to the needs, aspirations, hopes and human dignity of people who have endured a similar brand of post-colonial-apartheid racial prejudices, oppression, dictatorship and economic elbowing in the work and marketplaces.
So, finally the dreaded X-word reared its ugly head. Since South Africa galloped into a new era of democracy 14 years ago, xenophobia has been on our step, alive and kicking and hitting us in the eyes.
Maybe, our post-apartheid hangover (babalaas) may have consumed us into a perpetual sense of revelry, so much so we may have become insensitive to the influx of foreigners, first in batches of hundreds of thousands, fleeing from the ravages of poverty, unemployment, economic oppression and the one-party style oligarchy leadership.
Almost five-million foreigners from neighbouring African states, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Eastern-bloc countries have made Mandela’s Country their adopted home.
And as early as the 1990s, non-governmental organisations were discussing the rise of xenophobia and the racial profiling of “illegal immigrants” as amakwerekwere as hordes of Mozambicans, Congolese, Somalis, Nigerians and Malawians engaged in economic activity as car guards to high-rolling drug traffickers. The attack on Somali businesses was just another news sound bite.
Closer to home, the proliferation of Nigerians had turned Durban’s Point Road waterfront (now renamed in memory of peace apostle Mahatma Gandhi) into Africa’s Bogota, the Latin world’s drug capital. Prostitution and job-stealing are other negative streaks that have been irritating jobless locals.
On the positive side, almost 2 000 foreign national students and lecturers are part of the campus community at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and thousands more are sharing their skills and culture at other campuses, institutions and organizations.
What’s xenophobia?
The words that come to mind are chauvinism, racial intolerance, racism and dislike of foreigners.
But then again what about our own painful and poignant history of having been people without a country during the past 50 years before the ushering of uhuru in 1994?
While I was studying in London, home of the world’s communities, including countless exiles from SA, Sri Lanka to the Sudan, British skinheads threw xenophobic curved balls at all and sundry, and still vent anger at industrious Indians by hurling a generic “Pakis” abuse at people wishing for a better quality of life and freedom of movement.
Asians who fled Idi Amin’s xenophobic attacks still store bitter memories of how they were unceremoniously uprooted from the African Dream.
So let’s not have short memories. The foreigners, their parents and forebears had provided shelters for hundreds of thousands of exiles who fled the horrendous mechanism of the apartheid administration of voiceless people during the post-Sharpeville/Soweto massacres.
Even Gandhi was a victim of xenophobia. White racists pelted him with stones when he stepped ashore in Durban in the 1890s. And when India was being torn apart by xenophobia, resulting in partition and the birth of Pakistan and later Bangladesh, his statesmanlike trademark and peace philosophy went to work among the feuding Hindus and Muslims.
Surely, President Thabo Mbeki could have followed the Mahatma’s footsteps by leaving his comfort zone and embracing the frightened foreigners who were fighting for their lives and the elements of the onset of winter.
Like scientists who climb on the shoulders of other scientists, making exciting new discoveries, South Africa, too, stood on the pillars of African people under leaders like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Robert Mugabe, and anti-apartheid supporters of all races and political persuasions, to achieve a peaceful transition from scourge of racism to become the darling of democracy.
Maybe it’s payback time and that’s why the foreigners have flooded past our borders. We need to be reminded about the hospitality and warmth of these foreigners who fed, housed and educated penniless ANC and PAC exiles. How about setting some re-education camps and putting the commissars to work on our youth?
So, the xenophobic violence that struck into the hearts and minds of foreigners was an unfortunate and tragic blight on our history.
To this day, elderly Indians still harbour fear of the 1949 xenophobic attack on the community, ostensibly said to have been sparked by the white racism that fuelled Zulu hatred of hard-working Indians. In the 1980s, the black-on-violence turned its wrath on Indians in Phoenix.
Xenophobia cannot therefore sit comfortably in our non-racial family, where our cultural diversity is our best PR since Mandela, and bearing in mind that all race groups paid dearly for a new environment of freedom, social justice and human rights.
London Road interlinks the opulent avenues of Sandton into Alexandra, Johannesburg’s labour market and sprawling communal, where compatriots and foreigners were living cheek by jowl until the dreaded X-campaign unleashed its terror as rampaging mobs left our liberation struggle hands stained in blood.
A few months ago, I was told not use to London Road - for obvious reasons in a crime-infested SA. But recently, I travelled through London Road and I can understand why Alex was sitting on a social time-bomb and how it exploded in a rage of mob violence against the foreigners. Not even the economic myth of the 2010 World Cup will change the lifestyle or landscape of poverty-stricken Alex.
Back at home, I was greeted by street posters with the Big X branding for the 10th anniversary of the African Renaissance Celebrations, a project Premier S’bu Ndebele had nurtured to link African-American camaraderie and cooperation to Africans.
So on celebration night, musicians from Malini to Johnny Clegg sang anti-xenophobia themes from the same hymn book to ensure that the X-man never cometh again to wreak shame and disgrace on a nation founded on a bitter struggle against racism.
And at the same ICC in November 2007, Sepp Blatter told his FIFA family of football nations: “Africa is the theatre, South Africa is the stage”, with Mbeki adding: “Ke Nako, Celebrate Africa’s Humanity”.
How can we then say “come home to 2010” for an all-Africa football festivities when we have already unleashed the first salvo of our simmering resentment to anyone foreign who cannot utter the word Ubuntu in isiZulu or isiXhosa.
London Road is a long walk to racial tolerance and peaceful social, political and economic co-existence.
Xenophobia is on your doorstep, if you care to stop and say hello to the foreigners in their street-level squatter huts, tip the waiter at Mandela Square or give the French-speaking car guard a few rands for his service at the Pavilion.
Until next week, let’s remember Gandhi’s wisdom: “If we all believe in an eye for an eye, the whole world will be blind.” Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica – God Bless Africa.
LEFT OF WHAT’S RIGHT is a syndicated column written by Marlan Padayacheein South Africa and the United States and is subject to copyright.
Durban Dateline: Published in the Tabloid Newspaper Group newspapers with a readership base of almost 2-million in Greater Durban in June 2008 Marlan.padayachee@gmail.com/ mapmedia@telkomsa.net/
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