By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE continued misnaming of South African Afrophobic attacks on workers from neighbouring countries as ‘xenophobia’ is an indication of the failure of the African liberation movement to remain the teaching movement it was from the beginning.
Madzimbahwe may remember that at the height of the fast track African land reclamation and resettlement revolution in this country there were concerted efforts by white settler-farmers, their Anglo-Saxon sympathisers and opposition parties to scuttle the land revolution by alleging that it was motivated by native Zimbabweans’ hatred of labourers from Malawi and Mozambique who constituted the majority of workers on white estates.
That strategy was defeated for three reasons.
Families of Malawians who had been in Zimbabwe for generations were well-integrated into African society; the war veterans spear-heading the land revolution had great respect for our neighbouring African countries who had hosted them as exiles during the war of liberation; the Government of Zimbabwe guaranteed that descendants of African migrants in Zimbabwe would be treated as Zimbabweans and would be eligible for resettlement together with the landless majority of Zimbabweans; and the liberation movement in ZANU PF at that time remained strong in its teaching of solidarity based on the legacy of the Frontline States which became SADC and the Organsation of African Unity which became the African Union.
But in order for these facts and values to be understood and accepted by the majority of Zimbabweans, they had to be taught.
And indeed they were taught during the armed struggle through the pungwe system which emerged as a revolutionary curriculum displacing the colonial propaganda in the newly liberated zones.
While this legacy and practice is being weakened in Zimbabwe, in South Africa it never took root beyond the ranks of the movement itself.
There were no significant liberated zones, no pungwes and no African land reclamation and land redistribution revolution.
Whereas Zimbabwe was a frontline African country to be shared with other Africans, at least in theory, in SA, even the theory was hardly propagated.
SA even had separate agreements with the EU and the US which did not only undermine and by-pass SADC and the AU, but in which the country continued to be defined as outside of and apart from the rest of Africa.
The criminal attacks on Africans by Africans which have been misnamed xenophobic attacks in South Africa require more than rethinking African majority politics.
They require re-organisation of public education, public information and national security institutions.
Above all, they require humility on the part of African leaders and African intellectuals.
What has happened in Libya and South Africa is the enactment of African deflective self-hatred.
It cannot be called xenophobia because it is the least foreign people who are being targeted.
We see the hatred of ourselves as Africans being rationalised as hatred of foreigners.
Deflective self-hatred targets those who look exactly like one-self because it is based on internalised self-hatred and feelings of inferiority.
In 2011 leaders of South Africa, Gabon and Nigeria were pushed by their white-created perceptions of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi into ignoring Africa’s position on Libya and voted instead for the economic and geostrategic interests of the US and its NATO allies.
The white economy continues to produce and reproduce both the lumpen proletariat and the comprador bourgeoisie which it needs to protect its interests and to make profits.
The unemployed and unemployable degradados of the former Bantustan and former Group Areas benefit from African deflective self-hatred because it enables them to loot the properties of ‘foreigners’ who are exactly like themselves.
The comprador elites and their white partners also benefit because the African expatriate workers, so targeted and threatened, protect themselves by cheapening their labour, by forfeiting the privileges which even less qualified expatriates from Europe and North America are easily afforded.
It is important to dig deeper.
First, it is not surprising that the bluntest expression of African deflective self-hatred came from King Goodwill Zwelithini of the unreconstructed apartheid Bantustan of KwaZulu-Natal which was one of the most effective counter-revolutionary instruments of the apartheid regime.
Zwelithini’s utterances were blunt and meant to incite the unemployed and unemployable lumpen against so-called foreigners.
The ideology and prejudices of the white corporate elite have been internalised by the ruling African elite in South Africa against the African revolution and its values.
Examples of the criminal defamation of the African revolution by South African elites include several court judgments in which white judges ruled that former Rhodesian farmers could attach Zimbabwean Embassy properties in that country to compensate themselves for the land which Zimbabwe redistributed to African peasants once dispossessed by the same white farmers.
In May 2012 Judge Hans Fabricius of the North Hauteng Court criminally defamed Zimbabweans when he ruled that the South African National Prosecuting Authority should enter Zimbabwe to investigate and arrest Zimbabwean officials allegedly involved in election violence in 2008.
The dithering approach of politicians and security services to the current African-on-African attacks arises from the compromised positions and attitudes of the same African leaders.
l The self-hatred among Africans reflects a continental failure of revolutionary and internationalist education and leadership. Therefore humility is needed to deal with this scourge.
l King Zwelithini represents the local lumpen; Lindiwe Zulu and others the local elite; and Barak Obama and others the Western elite dimensions of the same problem.
l The culture and opinion climate preceding the African-to-African self-hatred and attacks developed and were nurtured over a long time through a white-dominated economy, a white-dominated media, a white-dominated judiciary steeped in Roman Dutch law and Western-sponsored NGOs purporting to champion human rights. Therefore economic indigenisation has to be combined with revolutionary education and people-driven public information based on the pungwe model, if Africa is to overcome the causes of violence based on self-hatred.
l In the end, it should be clear that the peace and reconciliation pursued through South Africa’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission and through the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes was never meant to include peace and reconciliation among Africans as brothers and sisters. The peace and reconciliation was intended to be between whites and Africans.