WHEN King Goodwill Zwelithini of the Zulus made a statement recently ordering all foreigners to pack their bags and leave South Africa, he torched a storm whose ferocity against foreigners will take long to subside.
Suddenly, Africans from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, DRC etc find themselves being regarded as enemies!
Some have lost their homes because of this, some had their business premises torched, some have lost their properties, some their jobs and quite a number, including children, have lost their lives as well!
All non-South Africans who happen to be black are regarded as targets for ethnic cleansing because they are perceived as taking over jobs and economic opportunities which should belong to locals.
In sharp contrast all foreigners who happen to be non-black have been left in peace as if to say foreigners are only those blacks who hail from Africa, not those from the European Union (EU) or from the West in general, provided they are not black.
Such discrimination speaks volumes not only about South Africa’s past, but also about what has not been done to consolidate the achievements of 1994!
The tragic story of the Afro-phobia that is unfolding in South Africa is a direct threat to something bigger than South Africa itself!
It is a narrative whose toxic content is so corrosive that it begins to subvert the bigger collective dream and vision of achieving both regional and continental unity Africa has been working on.
South Africa hosts the second largest economy in Africa so that what happens in South Africa is of interest to the rest of the continent.
What then has gone wrong since 1994?
To what extent are those entrusted by South Africans to govern the country doing it well?
Are the periodic social implosions a passing cloud, something that is containable and unavoidable if a more inclusive South Africa is to be born?
One of the mistakes which South Africans made soon after the release of Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment was to portray the struggle for the liberation of South Africa as having been done almost single-handedly by Mandela himself.
The success of the South African struggle was touted as a miracle, conjured up by ‘Madiba’, with the concurrence of the gods as it were!
The local whites and their kith-and-kin in the West soon elevated Mandela to a cult figure at the expense of the historical side of the liberation itself, at the expense of those who participated in it, those who bore the brunt of it both at home and in neighbouring countries.
Instead reconciliation between blacks and whites was raised from being a policy into an ideology, with little attention being paid to how Africa was central to the liberation struggle of South Africa.
While it is true that Mandela is an African hero who did wonders in leading South Africans from the apartheid era to that of democracy, it is also true that the South Africans themselves in their collective will did much more, both inside and outside South Africa.
Instead the tendency has been to focus mainly on Mandela and the constitutional negotiations which took place at Kempton Park and the constitution that came out of those negotiations!
There has been far less attention paid to the military struggles waged by MK combatants, the struggles which required the assistance of most African countries, more so the assistance of frontline states.
Very few South Africans one meets are able to narrate the military, diplomatic and political struggles which the ANC had to shoulder for long with the assistance of African countries.
Complicit in this lopsided narration of South Africa’s liberation struggle is the white-owned media in South Africa as well as the so-called global media which did much to dish out a more or less sanitised and preferred self-interested version of that struggle at the expense of the central role played by African countries.
It is not surprising therefore that ordinary South Africans tend to regard Africans who come to South Africa as unexpected and intrusive visitors and opportunists keen to reap where they did not sow!
The lesson here is: There should be a balanced narrative of the liberation struggle which includes the central role played by other African countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique — all countries which got punished by the Boers for supporting the ANC and the PAC.
And whether South Africans like it or not, many independent African countries including Nigeria with its diplomatic and big-market clout, played critical roles in the founding of a democratic South Africa!
Mozambique even lost its founding president, Samora Machel, at the hands of South African Boers because he supported the military operations of the ANC.
Apartheid South Africa supported a rebel movement RENAMO militarily in Mozambique for years, in the process reducing its economic infrastructure to rubble and has not yet fully recovered from this.
Angola suffered the same fate to a point of almost losing Luanda, the capital, to Boers of South Africa!
The question is: How much does the South African media talk about all this? How much does the South African education system focus on Africa’s role in the liberation of their country?
For all its claimed weaknesses, in Zimbabwe it is almost impossible to talk about the liberation of the country without also talking about the role played by Zambia, Tanzania , Mozambique etc.
In brief, the liberation struggle of South Africa was an arduous and messy affair fought on battlegrounds located both inside and outside South Africa itself, often on African territories!
Officially, the struggle was a continental project of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), a pan-African project whose outcomes became visible in 1994.
This project involved South African blacks first and foremost and the rest of Africa!
The West which seems to pre-occupy much of South Africa’s attention today stood for long crudely opposed to the liberation of blacks in South Africa!
In fact, the West is in the mafikizolo category, the opportunistic gate crushers to the liberation celebration party of South Africans!
It is the liberation movements of South Africa and the African continent itself which galvanised world opinion against the Apartheid system.
And the success of 1994 happened not because the whites who benefitted most in apartheid South Africa worked hard for that success, but because they faced a stark choice!
Either to negotiate in the hope of retaining ill-gotten wealth and privileges or to face the prospect of losing everything through a prolonged and bloody war of liberation!
They chose to take the route of negotiations not because they suddenly fell in love with ‘Madiba’, but because their backs were up against the wall!