Portrait of a xenophobic nation: Why S. Africans are an angry lot

Mr President, we remember you in Maputo in the 1980s, from that time when you were a political refugee. Often I imagine the fears that you must have felt, as a person persecuted by the apartheid regime.

But I don’t remember seeing you with a bodyguard. In fact it was we Mozambicans who acted as your bodyguards. For years we gave you more than a refuge. We offered you a house and we gave you security at the cost of our security. You could not possibly have forgotten this generosity.

These are the words of award-winning Mozambican author Mia Couto in a letter to South African President Jacob Zuma following the fatal stabbing in broad daylight of Emmanuel Sithole, a Mozambican, in Alexandra, Johannesburg, last Saturday.

The killing, whose gory pictures were shared all over the world, took the spate of xenophobic attacks sweeping through South Africa to a new level.

At least seven foreigners have been killed in cold blood, 5,000 left homeless and many foreign-owned shops looted in the port city of Durban and the commercial hub Johannesburg in the last three weeks.

South Africa has an official unemployment rate of 25 per ent with many citizens accusing foreigners of taking their jobs.

Couto went on in the letter published in South African press and on social media: “Mozambique paid a high price for the support we gave to the liberation of South Africa. The fragile Mozambican economy was wrecked ... Mozambicans died in defence of their brothers on the other side of the border.”

Indeed, Couto spoke for all the Frontline States, some not sharing a border with South Africa, whose pan Africanist leaders such as like Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere sacrificed their meagre resources — a sacrifice from which they have never quite recovered.

This is a sacrifice immortalised by the Nelson Mandela Foundation but which, nevertheless, clearly doesn’t ring true to all South Africans anymore.

“We salute the Frontline States of southern Africa and the rest of our continent for their enormous contribution to the struggle against apartheid…  Without your support, our struggle would not have reached this advanced stage. The sacrifice will be remembered by South Africans forever,” the foundation quotes Mandela as saying on his release from prison in February 1990 after 27 years.

I was in South Africa this week and I put these questions to some locals. Didn’t these people help them in their time of need? Why were they paying them back in this manner?

“Yes, we were in those countries, but in concentration camps. I was in Angola as a refugee and we lived as such. We never took over their countries,” a retired teacher from North Western Cape told me.

She had been a young member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the guerrilla army that attacked white establishments, helping to weaken the pillars of apartheid.

“My daughter works and pays taxes which fund amenities enjoyed by these foreigners,” the bitter farmer told me.

She was referring to an ambitious housing programme the post-apartheid government embarked on in 1994 under which the poor are built low-cost houses supplied with water and electricity.

“Shouldn’t the government then bear most of the blame? I mean, they are in charge of immigration, housing and all this,” I interjected.

“It should, of course, but they are far away in Pretoria and Cape Town,” she said, referring to the administrative and parliamentary capitals, “but our neighbours are here in the townships and we vent our frustrations on them,” she said.

“The problem is our porous borders. Our officials are not very keen,” chipped in David Mogophi, a 62-year-old agricultural extension veteran I met in Limpopo, a frontier province that has suffered an influx of Zimbabweans since the economic meltdown in Harare beg in the late 1990s.

He said the problem is that “these people come in through our daughters and sisters whom they befriend. They get papers by claiming to be married to them.”

But the immigration boom is not all gloom for Mogophi, whose work entails mentoring youth in agriculture. “Most of these outsiders have more skills than our people. Where I stay, there is a teacher whose speciality is maths and physics. Now, it is rare to get science teachers in this area.”

One of Mogophi’s successful agricultural students is Maria Swele, 30, who has taken advantage of government grants and technology to grow cotton, soya beans and groundnuts.

The government offers land, money and free inputs to youth who want to engage in agriculture.

I had travelled to South Africa with Kenyan farmers, policy makers, seed traders and researchers under the auspices of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation and AfricaBio, not-for-profit organisations that facilitate safe and appropriate use of biotechnology to increase yields.

And while tension was still high in the poor townships of Johannesburg and Durban, as well as some suburbs of Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, no fresh xenophobic attacks were reported by the time of publishing.

Analysts attribute this to tough action by the authorities who have deployed helicopters in hotspots like Alexandra, social media campaigns and diplomatic pressure which has seen President Zuma and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, whose utterances calling for the deportation of foreigners are widely blamed for the attacks, denounce the violence.