Why it’s hard to break cycle  of xenophobic attacks in SA

South Africa has been in the news of late for all the bad reasons. Its citizens are said to have desecrated Madiba’s spirit of Ubuntu. Commentators have argued endlessly that Desmond Tutu’s dream of a “Rainbow Nation” is no more.

Yet the critics ignore that the very body and soul of South Africa have been scarred by racism and xenophobia for hundreds of years. Apartheid was founded on racism – the spurious idea that human beings, simply by virtue of their skin colour, texture of their hair, size of their posterior, length of their nose etc are different; are of different races. Well, this argument, generally relying on prejudice, is applied all the time even here in Kenya.

So, xenophobia or racism isn’t a new thing. There is nothing new about foreigners being attacked, their shops being looted, their houses being burnt. It has happened before, many times. And unfortunately it will happen again. South Africa is no exception.

Across the border Kenyans have been refused opportunity to work and expelled from Tanzania simply because they are Kenyans; or simply because they tend to speak too often in English instead of Kiswahili.

What is important is to note that there is a short distance between stereotype or prejudice — the kind that Kenyans laugh at all the time in those unfortunate happenings on TV we call comedy — and pure hatred that leads to looting, raping, killing and mass evictions of other people.

When people want a reason to be xenophobic they often call other people strangers, foreigners or animals. I do not mean to excuse the behaviour of some South Africans who have become unfriendly towards foreigners — for millions of South Africans are good people. But many aliens have found no peace in South Africa. Jonny Steinberg reminds us of the horror that is xenophobia in his book A Man of Good Hope (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2014).

The book traces the story of Asad Abdulla, from Somalia to Kenya to Ethiopia back to Kenya, then through Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe to South Africa. Like many thousands before him, Asad was running from the post-Siad Barre war in Somalia.

He couldn’t settle well in Ethiopia because the Somali population of Ethiopia has always been restless. Kenya couldn’t afford him succor as well. So, he sought to try his luck in South Africa. Asad’s big dream is to relocate to America.

NUMEROUS SETBACKS

Asad doesn’t have it easy though when he arrives in South Africa. He is welcomed and hosted by his uncle, Abdicuur. He has hardly settled down when one evening he receives news one evening in April 2004 that his uncle has been shot dead in his spaza shop.

Eventually he settles in a rural town called Sterkstroom, where he establishes a shop, with his cousin Kaafi.

The shop does well. Then one day Kaafi is stabbed by locals and dies from the wounds.

Despite these setbacks, Asad moves on. He relocates to Cape Town. Cape Town is the ultimate symbol of the contradiction that is modern South Africa.

Stuck at the southern most tip of the continent, the Mother City, as it is known in South Africa, exudes opulence, offers incredibly hospitable weather, has some of the most charming people in South Africa, has a good share of racist South Africans, but remains as cosmopolitan as any modern, global city.

But here is where Asad is faced with his most trying moments. Indeed when we meet him and Steinberg in 2010, at the beginning of the story of A Man of Good Hope, it is in Cape Town.

Asad had ended up in Blikkiesdorp, Afrikaans for Tin Can Town, one day.

Steinberg describes Blikkiesdorp as, “Cape Town’s asshole, the muscle through which the city shits out the parts that it doesn’t want… More than thirty kilometres from the centre of Cape Town, it is separated from the city’s economic heartland by a long and expensive taxi ride. It is the ultimate ghetto, its residents hemmed in by distance, poverty and by their personal histories.”

GHETTO LIFE

But how and why? Because he has been placed there by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, among other refugees, to reintegrate into South Africa after violence had forced them in May 2008 to flee their homes and businesses. Previously he had opened a spaza shop in Khayelitsha with another business partner, Hassan.

They work hard, like all immigrants do. This “industry” is what creates envy in the locals.

Steinberg describes foreign shopkeepers this way, “They learn never to run out of what you most want to buy. And they are always cheaper than their South African rivals. There is something magical, something insidious and relentless, about this moneymaking. Something less than human.”

Steinberg partly explains why foreigners are less human – because even when they are killed, the police are reluctant or unable to arrest and charge their killers. Often the police run their own extortion racket that robs the foreigners of their hard earned money.

Xenophobia is about who belongs and who doesn’t, as defined by one group. Strangers, because they are always in the minority, end up victims of those with prejudiced eyes, as is happening in South Africa today.

Black South Africans can’t look at President Zuma and his party and tell them that matunda ya Uhuru haven’t reached the countryside and the ghettos on the peripheries of modern South African cities. The alien is an easy target and so xenophobia continues, unfortunately.