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Afrophobia attacks an apartheid legacy

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HUMILIATING attacks against fellow Africans and other foreign nationals including looting shops, displacing refugees and asylum seekers, destroying public properties and the most unfortunate loss of lives, has become South Africans’ way of life.
Since 2008, SA has been characterised by Afrophobic attacks.
Much has been said about the root causes of the attacks.
Some have blamed it on the ruling African National Congress (ANC) Government’s inability to deal with high crime, poverty and unemployment, while others are pointing the finger at apartheid.
However, mental slavery was the most poisonous seed planted by colonialists.
Afrophobia and all forms of discrimination are a direct assault on African hunhu/ubuntu philosophy.
The Nazi propagandist, Dr Goebbels, asserted that if you repeat a lie often enough, people would eventually believe it.
Tragically, South Africans have begun to believe the often repeated lies that their fellow Africans are stealing their jobs and perpetuating crime and that to move on, Africans need white supervision and tutelage.
It becomes relevant, as Africans grapple with Afrophobia in SA to remind South Africans that for them to enjoy what they call freedom today, it was Africa’s collective effort.
Just two weeks after he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela departed on an 18-day foreign tour to thank Frontline States that had helped the liberation movement to end apartheid.
The Frontline States, as they were known, included Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, Angola, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania.
They played a vital role in supporting the ANC when it was banned, as well as the many members and other political activists who were forced into exile.
“It became crucial to cultivate and maintain overseas sanctuary, support and funding,” wrote author Professor Padraig O’Malley who specialises on divided societies.
“But it was equally crucial to have the co-operation of independent African states closer to home. These could provide sites for military training; they could also become launching pads from which to infiltrate SA and impose other pressures on the apartheid Government.”
After going into exile in 1961, ANC president Oliver Tambo established anti-apartheid missions across the continent, basing the movement in Tanzania.
Northern Rhodesia, now called Zambia, was a critical transit point for South Africans on their way to Tanzania to be trained as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres.
They travelled on the ‘Freedom Ferry’ from Botswana across the Zambezi River.
Following the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21 1960, Frene Ginwala went to Tanzania to establish an office in Dar es Salaam.
While there, she worked as a journalist and received ANC members as they came into the country.
She helped the party’s top brass, among them Tambo, Yusuf Dadoo and Nelson Mandela, who met that country’s president, Julius Nyerere.
Many other young activists fled into Lesotho whose Government made provisions for all young South African exiles to receive an education and offered 25 percent of its state scholarships to exiled South Africans.
While it was banned at home, in 1969, Zambia became the ANC’s headquarters.
“It was from Lusaka that the ANC operated and co-ordinated the activities of MK in various parts of southern Africa,” South African History Online.
Recruits who left SA via Lesotho or Mozambique ended up in Lusaka before they were sent for military training.” 
The ANC’s underground radio station, Radio Freedom, eventually broadcast from Zambia, following stints in Madagascar, Tanzania and Ethiopia.
The American quarterly journal, The Appendix, noted that the radio station helped to recruit members to the ANC and MK training camps.
It also broadcast the news at a time when the airwaves in SA shared very limited information.
Zambian soldiers also protected the ANC from South African attacks in 1985, during the party’s national conference.
“There was a real danger of attack; SA was training Zambian dissidents to destabilise the Zambian Government and mounted a series of bomb attacks on ANC members in Lusaka,” wrote Kevin Ritchie in the South African newspaper, the Sunday Independent.
“But President Kenneth Kaunda stood firm.”
In addition, soon after Angola gained independence from Portugal, its colonial ruler, the ANC started negotiations in 1976 to set up bases in that country for military training; by the end of that same year, the first base was established.
Mzwandile Piliso was appointed the person in charge of all the camps in Angola.
Along with the camps, the party also set up housing facilities for its leadership, cadres and a warehouse to store supplies such as food and clothes.
Because of its geographical location, Botswana became the preferred conduit for the ANC to get its members into and out of the country clandestinely.
The Botswana route for the ANC was established with the efforts of Fish Keitsing, a citizen of Botswana who left his country to work in SA.
He later joined the African Mineworkers Union (AMU) and the ANC in 1949, becoming a branch leader for the Newclare Branch.
There were also a number of ANC safe houses and operational MK bases in the suburb of Matola in Maputo.
As a result, it became a target for the South African Defence Forces, which launched several raids into the country.
A raid in January 1981 turned out to be one of the more devastating attacks where 16 South Africans were killed.
On February 14 of the same year, Tambo, in the company of Mozambican president Samora Machel, addressed mourners at the funeral of those who were killed and the day was declared the Day of Friendship between South African and Mozambique.
Zimbabwe was no exception either as also in 1981, a senior ANC official, Joe Gquabi was assassinated when a safehouse in Harare was bombed.
The same house, in Ashdown Park suburb, was reduced to a rubble in 1986.
Not only the lives of South Africans were lost in these and many other attacks but also that of Zimbabweans.
Furthermore Zimbabwe shared more than a border with SA: it too struggled against white minority rule.
In a case of parallels, the apartheid South African Government supported the Rhodesian Front led by Ian Smith.
Given that racial discrimination and the denial of political rights to the black majority were common elements in SA and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the ANC and Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) had a strong sense that they were fighting a common enemy.
ZAPU helped MK recruits to cross the border to reach their camps further north, in Tanzania and Zambia.
Military co-operation between ZAPU and the ANC became so enmeshed, a joint High Command was formed.
Human rights advocate Archbishop Desmond Tutu recognised the collective effort it took to end apartheid.
“In SA, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world,” he wrote on Huffington Post, the American news site, “who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime.”
Yet today, the same people who helped them two decades ago, who sacrificed their lives, South Africans are necklacing, burning alive and looting their shops.
Ethiopians, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, among other Africans, have suffered, and are still suffering at the hands of South Africans.
But SA is what it is today because of these fellow Africans.
Hence the maiming and killing of fellow Africans and other foreign nationals in South Africa or elsewhere in the world is an insult to pan-Africanism.
South Africans instead, should confront, unlearn and uproot legacies of apartheid colonialism.

1 COMMENT

  1. The African is his own worst enemy. We continued to allow ourselves to be colonized both physically and mentally. Religion is certainly the latest tool being used in the absence of the white man to control our fellow Africans. When is the African ever going to become thoughtful and challenge the way things are. We aspire to be like white people. Shame on us! Look at the way we continue to think being light skinned is better…and what of the many debts we must incur pretending that we have what we do not have. It is not surprising that wherever we go we will be treated like scum always. This form of discrimination is happening within our own country never mind neighboring SA. We must deal with TRIBOPHOBIA before we even start to understand Afrophobia latter alone Xenophobia. My heart truly bleeds!

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