Zimbabwe: The Blame Game

25. There Is No Xenophobia in South Africa

169 25 There Is No Xenophobia in South Africa ews of foreigners, in South Africa being killed by the South Africans, i.e., black South Africans killing black Africans, which some writer referred to as Negrophobia for better terminology, started filtering through to Zimbabwe where I had returned to on 11 May 2008 to process my travel documents. They were especially killing the Zimbabweans, Zambians, Malawians, Mozambicans, Somalis and Nigerians, whom they accused of among others; theft, corruption, stealing their jobs, the economic downturn, stealing their wives, children…, even at that, allegations which up until now haven’t been proven. I have always known, in fact a lot of Africans know that South Africans are xenophobic, rabidly so. Most of the South Africans believe that they inhabit their own Africa, even during liberation wars that were the feelings within the African body politic and writing at that time; a sort of Diasporas Africa and that the rest of the continent is all about wars, savagery, backwardness, smelling to quote some South Africans’ beliefs. But these South Africans suffer total amnesia to the fact that during apartheid South Africa, they bunked out of their country and were treated well by these same nationalities they were now killing. A very good example is Mbeki himself who stayed in Zimbabwe. I remember there was a South African student at my A-level school, Marist Nyanga high school, in 1992-1993. In May 2008, we also read in the newspapers, of foreigners being chased out of the township suburbs, of foreigners being told to “go back” to their countries, of foreigners being raped, killed, maimed, and burned alive. Even the black South Africans of foreign origins were also killed. You only had to know the name of an elbow in Zulu for you to be spared of this. It took the South African (ANC leadership rather than the government of Mbeki) 3 weeks to decide to deploy the soldiers into N 170 the streets to quell this violence, which had left 63 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. The army is now off the streets, but only a week ago, I read in the newspapers of a Ugandan national being killed in xenophobic anger after returning back to his township home, thinking that this negrophobia anger had abetted. You read in the newspapers of the government forcing these victims of xenophobia to be repatriated into their communities or face deportations, even so when the government knows that it is not safe in those townships. That, they would be killed if they return back into those communities, and to top it all, there is naked dislike and harassment of foreigners by the government itself, especially Zimbabweans. The police and home affairs officials are now more arrogant than their apartheid counterparts; are increasingly brutalizing the vulnerable with impunity, especially foreigners. A couple of days ago (on 26 July 2008) my older brother, his wife and their friends were having a private party in Hillbrow, a Johannesburg eastern suburb predominantly occupied by foreigners when the police abruptly disrupted their party, and arrested everyone at that bar (over 50 people) for drinking in a public place when they were rightly drinking in a bar, which doesn’t in any way, constitute public drinking for that matter. The crux of the matter was that they had been arrested because they were Zimbabweans, and that being Zimbabweans that they were, and that most of their fellow nationals having had refused to be repatriated or deported in the earlier case of xenophobia violence victims, so they were now being punished for the sins of the other group. They had to bribe these police officers in order to be released out of police custody. One can’t help asking what wrong Zimbabweans did to deserve this inhuman treatment. There is no safe place for Zimbabweans other than in Limpopo River, which is infested with crocodiles because on both sides of the Limpopo River they are being killed with reckless abandon. Nobody seems to care in South Africa, not even the president himself. Mbeki could go to the extent of refusing to recognise that South Africans were xenophobic, on the memorial day of the victims. But the murder of 31 Somalis in the Cape, in September 2006, and how 171 the whole thing was bungled by the officials set precedent to this xenophobia. Yet Mbeki out rightly rejected this notion...