WHEN renowned former slave American Booker T. Washington was called to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, he was asked what could be done to improve the lives of blacks across America.
Washington asked that the black man coming out of slavery be taught how to use a fork and knife, etiquette as well as industrial skills like carpentry thus Tuskegee institution was formed.
He went on to tell the former slaves that African-Americans should not agitate for social and political equality in return for the opportunity to acquire vocational training.
After this discussion in the ‘White House’, Roosevelt, like all other whites across the world, must have thought ‘black people are easy to please’.
The black man aims to only rise to be just above his peers, this must have been the thoughts running through the Apartheid planners as they organised Bantu Education.
There was an invisible ceiling.
We see the effects of this today in South Africa.
South Africa has become a hot topic.
No one in Africa can afford to ignore it.
Last week I wrote about how misplaced the South Africans’ anger was.
How they were still groping in the dark as to who the enemy was.
They will loot Mr Ethiopian man’s general dealer running past the open doors of Shoprite and Checkers.
In fact I can almost bet that they will not go into the leafy suburbs of South Africa where many other foreigners live.
Why?
Because the foreigner is working at a desk job in some big firm is not their target.
They do not want his job.
Instead they want the one the Malawian living next door in Khayelitsha who comes home tired after digging pits for some telecommunication company.
They want the job of the Congolese who has swollen ankles each day from braiding hair.
They want the job of the fatigued Zimbabwean cleaning tables at Nandos.
The attacks are highlighting a very disturbing African.
For all his pride about being the best African, the African we are seeing in South Africa leaves a lot to be desired.
If he truly desired ‘his’ job, the one ‘taken’ from him then he would be targeting more people than he is brutally going after.
Many of the university lecturers in the country are foreign, directors and chief executive officers of institutions that are enabling South Africans to have a relatively and somewhat comfortable life are outsiders.
And these are not being targeted, but the hapless Ethiopian, Zimbabwean and Malawian doing menial jobs.
The South Africans perpetrating violence have no confidence in themselves as they cannot demand space and opportunities in the thriving corporate sector.
It all goes back to education.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history and themselves.
The murderous lot baying for blood on the street sincerely believes that once they have the Ethiopian’s shop then they will fill it up with groceries and become thriving businessmen overnight.
The foreigners they are attacking have nothing that will significantly improve the lives of the perpetrators of this senseless violence.
It is the colonial education that has taught him to hate his very own self, thus he goes to kill the very thing that looks like him.
The Afrophobia will keep recurring until the South African understands that he hates and curses himself and he must stop.
The South African who is forgetting his brother and sister who sheltered him as he fought apartheid has been made to feel superior and look down upon fellow Africans not by Unhu/Ubuntu, but by imperialist forces.
These acts of xenophobia are not of his creation, but have been constructed to focus him away from the real issues.
The ‘enemy’ exists and continues to exist, but that enemy is not black.