Dialogues: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

Brotherphobia or sisterphobia is an ancient problem that should not be confused with xenophobia. Europeans attacked and killed fellow Europeans for centuries over who should get the lion's share of the colonization of Africa. The Semitic people are still at each other's throats even though they all claim to be the children of Abraham. Nigerians have been slaughtering fellow Nigerians like rams since the genocidal war orchestrated by the British against the Igbo. South Africans have been massacring one another in the struggle over crumbs from the table of apartheid colonizers since the reign of Shaka Zulu and especially during the confrontations between Inkhatha and ANC supporters. White farmers are fleeing in large numbers as they are targeted by those from whom they stole the land. Tanzanians and Swazis have been butchering each other to make money medicine or 'muti' just as Nigerians have been doing juju especially when cattle is used as a modern colonization scheme backed with weapons and charms of all sorts. Somalis and Rwandans are still at it just like Sudanese, Egyptians, Libayans and Algerians.

The solution is Pan Africanism and the erasure of the borders that colonialism imposed on Africans. South Africa and Nigeria could follow the lead of Ghana and Ethiopia and invite the African Diaspora to return and be give dual Africana citizenship. With the coming of the African passport and the policy of free trade and open borders, Africans can travel where they choose and settle, marry, study, work, trade or run for office in any part of Africa just as the Americans do in the US. Intellectuals and activists can help by thinking beyond their national consciousness as Fanon urged and realize that the people have voted with their feet in utter disregard for the artificial lines that colonizers drew on the sand to divide and weaken Africans as Azikiwe observed in his London 1959 speech on Pan Africanism.

The government has a role to play here by going beyond job creation towards the funding of cooperatives that would train Africans from wherever and grant them funding to start enterprises in partnership with fellow Africans. The Igbo have perfected this though their individual efforts in apprenticeship but with huge grants from the governments across Africa, there would be annual enterpreneureship grants to support emerging apprentices to set up their own shops in partnership with others to create wealth across Africa.

Toyin, can you forward to us the UNESCO proposal on a borderless world which was how the world existed when Africans discovered all other continents and populated them millions of years ago?

Biko

On Thursday, 5 September 2019, 11:34:57 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Ken:

How do nations construct nationalism, patriotism, identity, etc. if they are not nasty/hostile, etc. to foreigners?
How do you do the blame game if you cannot distribute resources or offer opportunities in any equitable manner? If all Nigerians were to be deported today from South Africa, all those angry folks will still not have jobs.
Who builds cultural capital? Whether in the US or South Africa, what you see are people with established cultural capital who walk into new spaces and able to function and succeed.

We have tried, in UNESCO, to sell the idea of a borderless world but no one has taken us seriously….rather, we were mocked several times.

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Harrow, Kenneth" <harrow@msu.edu>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 4:27 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

dear olayinka

thanks for this thoughtful answer. i will try to craft a response after thinking about what you said.

one point for now: the situation and solution you describe is very close to the situation that obtains around much of the world. different societies have met the influx--whatever its causes--in different ways. some have refused to let more immigrants in (this is EU policy now); some have welcomed in millions, partly as an ethical obligation or political pressure, etc et. think of jordan and turkey with millions. some like tanzania, with half a million burundians, not being in a position to easily refuse, partly for UN pressures, AU pressures, or political choices. there are very few countries around the center of africa without refugees. kenya and uganda have enormous numbers of somalis and sudanese, and so on.

it aint new in south africa.

how is it handled? you detail the ideal, which is important to hear. but in addition to your wise suggestions for managing the influx, beyond the practical suggestions and political considerations, there underlies all these situations: people migrating to another country, far from home and family, in some cases under desperate conditions, are human. they are you and me. they are my grandparents, my relatives, my fellowmen or women.

they are us.

that's the poem soyinka wrote "Death in the Dawn."

the traveler wipes his feet in the dew of the dawn, sets out. as it happens, a car hits someone; that person lies dead on the road. the traveler looks, sees his face.. it is his own.

it is us.

everything you mentioned has to come after that recognition of the fellow humanity in the other. the rest is secondary.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2019 6:18 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

Disclaimer: My response may not be popular nor populist

Ken.

Having read a cross- section of views on this thread I think there are two major issues: one is pure immigration matters and utopian expectations, the other is the dictates of democratic polity .

The visions of pan Africanism which underguarded the fall of Apartheid in South Africa led to expectation that the state birthed would belong to the African 'brotherhood' That is the utopian aspect of the situation. 'Come help me liberate my state' is not the same as 'come help liberate our state' In the hey days of liberation struggle South Africans deliberately appealed to socialism to secure the help needed from other African nations ( which makes the current attacks so poignant) If the ratio of immigrants to native rises sharply in a country you have the situation that led to BREXIT in the UK (with which the country is still battling as of today in the Commons) and the case of South Africa. The difference is there is an orderly withdrawal scheme in the UK and not attacks on foreigners and their businesses. After all South Africans are not constituting 80% of neighbourhoods of other African countries.

The second issue is the dictates of democracy. Democracy allows for appeal to lowest common denominator as Trump did and as the Deputy Police Minister in South Africa did.i.e. in order to court the votes of the lowest classes which incidentally are the most numerous for liberal capitalism to work as expected, political elites often pander to their whims even if such whims are illogical. Democracy thrives on satisfying the wishes of the majority or appearing to do so.

To be in the good books of these lot foreigners too must proactively court them in schemes established from proceeds and profits from their business and not just operate on the level of rights. These would be the foot soldiers of foreigners and their businesses championing their causes against their detractors.

Many of those on the lowest echelon should be employed by the foreign businesses and tax deductible schemes encouraged . I understand many are said to be unemployable due to drug use. Foreigners can establish drug rehabilitation centres promising to employ those who successfully participate. Government will be gushing with appreciation for those coming in to help solve problems that are overhangs of the brutalization of the Apartheid era. Moreover, they will use such projects to confront those baying for the blood of foreigners and ask such people not to bite the fingers that literally feed them. Jealousy is a human problem but there are measures that can be put in place to alleviate its depredations.

Government must then put in place an effective visa system to ensure only those legitimately needed are allowed in. If illegal immigrants open businesses channels must be put in place to ensure they are reported and are legitimately closed down by law enforcement agencies. Government must leave no one in doubt there will be no vigilante justice.

Until the charter of African Union is fully operational in a neo-Marxian way and national boundaries crumble, there will always be African countries and natives will determine the fate of foreign nationals.

OAA

Sent from Samsung tablet.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <harrow@msu.edu>

Date: 04/09/2019 19:33 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

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thanks to ibrahim, and especially moses for their interventions condemning attacks on fellow africans in s africa. more might be added here: the role of african labor pools drawn from the adjacent african states, going back many years, which created one body of african workers in low paying, under valued occasions--mine "boys" or ag workers--and others at home who moved up the social scale and educational ladder. more important for this posting, however, is the role of africans, especially nigerians, who came from further away, and not simply like the tswana or zimbabwean men and women, in subordinate house servant roles. nigerians came for commerce and trade, but alsoeducation, for schooling and especially like many intellectuals of omotoso's generation, to find something better than what the military regimes at home offered. they came for opportunity.

and they had children. settled in, became famous (thinking not only of kole omotoso but his talented children, filmmakers).

then we have that repulsive film District 9 that used racist tropes against nigerians as gangsters, aliens, monsters,...that hid behind the gauze of anti-apartheid rhetoric while confirming xenophobic imagery of nigerians.

i mention all this since the attack against makwerekwere, i.e. mostly nigerians, does not date from yesterday.

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdullah@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2019 9:58 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

What is happening in SA is not phobia; it's war against African nationals. Let us just call it by it's right name. We have come a long way—from alien compliance order to Ghana must go to the vicious attack against the so-called Moors in Senegal when the CFA was devalued.

Enough is enough—it's war against other Africans with official cover from above. And it takes us back to the umuganda of the genocidaire in Rwanda. And like Rwanda in 1994, it is frighteningly popular in contemporary SA.

Sent from my iPhone

On 4 Sep 2019, at 13:40, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Beyond the Street Attacks: The Deep, Capacious Lineage of Afrophobia in South Africa

By Moses E. Ochonu

Let no one tell you that the Afrophobic violence in South Africa is a recent or isolated phenomenon. It is not.

Makwerekwere, a term of contempt as dehumanizing and racist in its deployment as the use of "cockroach" to mark people out for slaughter during the Rwandan genocide, is not a recent invention. It was a staple of the South African xenophobic lexicon as early as the late 1990s and early 2000s when it was operationalized to demonize, devalue, and mark non-South African Africans for attack.

In 1996, when Mahmood Mamdani, a holder of an endowed chair and the director of the Center for African Studies, was pushed out of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and accused of trying to Africanize the core African studies curriculum, it wasn't just white faculty members who protested Mamdani's curricular reform. Some black South African academics also were uneasy that Mamdani was trying to move the curriculum away from a pedagogy rooted in the Bantu Apartheid education policy, in which the "tribe" was the unit of inquiry and scholarly engagement, towards an African epistemology defined in continental ontological terms.

The irony of course is that today South Africa is the epicenter of decolonial African epistemology, the incubator and preeminent arena of the most consequential debates around decolonizing the African university and its colonial legacies. It makes one wonder if there is a dissonance between what is expressed and published and what is believed.

But beyond speculation, what is certain is that the Mamdani affair, as it has come to be known, happened because many white and black South African academics opposed the effort of Mamdani to decolonize the African studies curriculum and integrate it into a decolonial African epistemological tradition with which academics in other African countries were already familiar, and which for decades had informed curriculums in the humanities and social sciences in African institutions.

In other words, some black South African intellectuals did not like the idea of redefining their country and its university African studies curriculum in pan-African terms as part of a broader Africa encompassing both north and south of the Limpopo River. Several black South African faculty did not want their view of "African studies," which defined South Africa as an exceptional sociopolitical and cultural formation outside of Africa, challenged. Nor did they want their students to be taught about, and in the context of, all of Africa. South African exceptionalism, originally posited by the ideologues of Apartheid as a divide-and-conquer strategy, was being carried forward by some black South African intellectuals.

Along the same lines, when I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, South Africa-based Kenyan literary scholar, Professor James Ogude, came to spend an academic year there around 1999/2000 and I remember him saying how his South African graduate students, when they were traveling to other African countries, would say "I'm going to Africa," and he would angrily correct them with the question, "and where the hell are you now'?

I never forgot that anecdote, for it revealed, even in that first decade of South Africa's post-Apartheid history, how many black South Africans resented the rest of the continent and wanted to preserve and further the ideological, racist decoupling of South Africa from the rest of Africa. They had wittingly or unwittingly become the handmaidens of this segregationist ideology.

Earlier this year, when I attended the annual Africa conference at the University of Texas, I had the opportunity of having drinks with several scholars in the hotel suite of the convener, Professor Toyin Falola. One of the scholars was a South African university administrator. I cannot recall the beginning or trajectory of the conversation but this administrator eloquently and passionately narrated the history of how Apartheid ideologues formulated a policy of ignoring South African academics to employ black academics from neighboring African countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, and others. He was compelling. He couched his narrative in the colonial logic of divide-and-rule. It all made sense. I was left with the impression that this was a great explication of yet another instance of how apartheid played African groups against each other.

Then I went back to my hotel room and played back the colleague's polemic, reflecting on its subtexts and unspoken underpinnings. It occurred to me that he had launched into that defensive narrative to justify the politics of excluding and resenting academics from other African countries on South African campuses. In other words, this was just a sophisticated academic rendition of the Afrophobic hate script being violently implemented on the streets of some of South Africa's major cities and suburbs.

This is a rather longwinded way of saying that South Africa's xenophobia/Afrophobia has a long and deep genealogy. It runs very deep. It is not just the province of the unlettered, uninformed underclass in poor townships and suburbs. It reaches all the way to the realm of high culture, high politics, and high academe.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) party, claims to be the liberal alternative to the ANC and controls the provincial government in Guateng, where most of the Afrophobic attacks and killings have occurred. A few years ago, it released a hardline immigration policy that legitimized and pandered to the Afrophobic sentiments of poor South Africans in and around Johannesburg, clearly opportunistically and callously exploiting African self-hate for political capital.

As for the ANC, much of the attention has been on Bongani Mkongi, the hateful, inciting Deputy Minister of Police, and on several other ANC officials who have peddled barely disguised Afrophobic rhetoric in various political settings. But the current South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, last year gestured favorably to the Afrophobic street warriors by condemning African immigrants whom he said were invading townships and establishing spazas or small shops, a statement that lent presidential authority and legitimacy to the hateful declarations percolating and circulating on the streets and on social media.

In official and officious public forums and in enlightened company, the practiced tactic is to deny and condemn xenophobia in as broad a language as possible or to invoke Apartheid as a defensive bulwark against what many South Africans see as unfair criticism of their right to isolationist, exclusionary policies and politics. But in political settings, the rhetoric can be quite raw and uncannily similar to the one articulated by the violent enforcers on the street. Moreover, the message from the top, whether it is disguised in academic and historical explanation and jargon or drenched in wonky policy speak, filters to the soldiers on the streets, the operative codes being quite legible to everyone.

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Thursday, September 5, 2019

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Beyond the Street Attacks in South Africa

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