Let’s weep for the Black man

This was the text message which a reader sent to me two days ago. It is this message that stopped me from my plan this week to pour my rage and outrage on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) President Isa Hayatou who recently engineered an amendment to the CAF rules to pave way for […]

This was the text message which a reader sent to me two days ago. It is this message that stopped me from my plan this week to pour my rage and outrage on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) President Isa Hayatou who recently engineered an amendment to the CAF rules to pave way for him to again ‘contest’ and ‘win’ re-election and perhaps become life president of CAF. The amendment removed the age barrier which stood against Hayatou’s tarzache ambition. You know the man has become a naturalised indigene of CAF for so long that he cannot simply imagine life as a non-CAF president.
I had wanted to just tell Hayatou, not so politely, that when his time which God allots to every man to stay on earth comes, he should try and go up there and bribe, threaten and cajole some angels including the fearsome Angel of Death, to extend his visa so he can remain here to be CAF president for eternity. So angry am I at the almost casual manner acts of impunity are committed by African leaders, not just political ones now but football ones too; and no one raises his voice in vehement condemnation. We Africans seem to have learnt to live with impunity and tolerate every kind of rubbish heaped on us.
Here is a man who has not made any innovative contri-bution to the development of soccer in Africa which anyone can remember for all the uncountable years he has been CAF president. Here is a man who is known to have a health challenge. When he sits in the VIP stand in a stadium watching a football match, he sits like an Egyptian mummy, expressionless. He cuts a picture of a man devoid of emotions. He neither cheers nor smiles and you cannot help but conclude that he must have some issues with his health. This is the same man who wants to be CAF president for eternity so he can be FIFA Executive Vice-President also for eternity. My prayer for Hayatou is that may he remain on earth for eternity also. Amen.
But before my page is used up on an issue I had decided to give up, let us just dismiss Hayatou’s unconscionable manipulation of the CAF Constitution to pave way for him and the willingness of others to assist him have his way as one of those foolish things that always come out from Africa. Please hold unto this phrase ‘’From Africa always comes something stupid’’ as we go back to the situation in South Africa where hungry, angry and frustrated Black hordes are killing fellow Black brothers who they alleged, are taking over the jobs they as indigenes of the Republic of South Africa are supposed to have. Some call it xenophobic attacks. My take is that that description is a misnomer. Xenophobia is the fear and hatred of foreigners.
And if this is the correct definition of xenophobia then what is happening cannot be properly described as xenophobic attacks. It must be called something else and the perpetrators of the violence should be called something else too. I think it was Helen Keeler who once said that the blindness of the mind is more terrible than that of the eyes. I think those who are perpetrating the brothers-on-brothers violence on the streets of Durban suffer from both maladies.
If it were not so, no sensible man can make sense of why a Black South African man kills a Black Nigerian, Mozambican, Ghanaian, etc man who looks every inch like him and calls him a foreigner when he spares a white man who looks in every way different from him and the brothers he is killing! Most of these Black men are shopkeepers and traders and not some employees doing menial jobs that indigenes would claim should be their just entitlement. If you kill or drive away a foreign Black shopkeeper or loot his shop, you are not going to inherit anything and become a shop keeper or trader.
To be a trader or shopkeeper, you must have some business acumen and this business sense is not acquired from the South African government at the detriment of others. You develop it and put it to use for your benefit and the benefit of the South African economy. Those angry hordes on the streets of South Africa therefore ought to see the Black brothers they are killing as benefactors of their country than parasites which they the South African poor truly are. No ‘foreign Blacks’ created the situation that has led to their destitution.
What is happening is misplaced aggression. You vent your frustration on the weakest man available not at the real rich, powerful and oppressive persons your aggression should have appropriately been directed at. It is like armed robbers and other criminals. They usually live in the poorest neighbourhoods in all towns and cities and know all the rich neighbourhoods where the wealthy, powerful and prosperous persons live. But because they know the affluent neighbourhoods are better defended, they do not go there to rob. They would rather pounce on his poor brethren two doors away who are barely surviving and dispossess them of the little they have or even take away their entire wretched lives. Their robbery is therefore not an ideological statement. They are just pure criminals who cannot carry out their evil enterprise where they can gain the greatest dividends. They carefully choose less risky and defenceless victims.
That is why I do not agree with those intellectuals of the Marxian Sociology School who say the pure criminals in Durban are making a loud statement about their destitution and are economic patriots who are saying that the economic dividends of South African freedom should be left for the poor of South Africa and not enjoyed by some foreign brothers. If they were really some economic nationalists why did they not choose as targets the real foreign exploiters in their midst who engage in capital flight and other acts that are really ruinous to the economy of RSA and leave alone poor African brothers who in actual fact are contributing to the growth and development of their adopted country?
No. Do not call what is happening in South Africa xenophobia. Rather, call it cannibalism. The cannibal instinct in man to hurt his like seems to be more pronounced in the African.