When a society tastes blood

Like many people all over Africa, I was shocked and horrified to watch a video clip of an interview that a BBC reporter had with some South African hoodlums. The three men brought to the interview, which took place beside a dumpsite, a short axe and a worn-out vehicle tyre. They said foreigners took away […]

Like many people all over Africa, I was shocked and horrified to watch a video clip of an interview that a BBC reporter had with some South African hoodlums. The three men brought to the interview, which took place beside a dumpsite, a short axe and a worn-out vehicle tyre. They said foreigners took away their jobs and that they also perpetrated criminal acts in their neighbourhoods. Menacingly brandishing the axe, they said they would kill the foreigners and, brandishing the tyre, they said they would set them ablaze.

These hoodlums’ definition of a foreigner came out starkly when the BBC reporter, a young white woman, asked them if they will attack her because she is also a foreigner, a Briton who is living and working in their country. Shaking their heads vigorously, the hoodlums assured her that she is not a target, though they did not say why. No wonder some writers say what is happening in South Africa is not xenophobia but Afro-phobia. I was wondering: an average South African’s definition of a foreigner is another black African but not a white person. This, after the country has been ruled for 25 years by the ANC, Africa’s oldest and once its most prestigious national liberation movement!

Even though I found the video clip of the hoodlums’ interview to be shocking, I have of course seen pictures and videos of people being hacked to death and set ablaze in South African streets during the latest as well as previous rounds of xenophobic attacks in the country. It was however not the first time that I had seen disturbing images from South Africa. In 1991 or so, a year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison and South Africa’s black and white leaders were engaged in the tortuous “talks about talks,” violence exploded in the streets between Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC members. I saw a television clip of the violence which made me unable to sleep for many days. A well-dressed man, possibly a banker, stepped out onto a Johannesburg street, just when Inkatha’s Zulu impis [warriors] jumped out of a bus nearby. They rushed into the street, each one of them brandishing an assegai, the notorious Zulu short spear that we became very familiar with during the Apartheid days.

An impi suddenly approached this man, who stopped in his tracks, adjusted his suit, turned his face away and raised his hands to cover his head. In a jiffy, the impi struck the man’s head with the assegai and his brains spilled on the pavement. For many days after seeing that film, I kept turning and tossing in bed. One of the questions I asked myself was, on what basis did he kill that man? How did he know that the man was an ANC supporter and, dressed as he was in a suit, how could he tell the man’s tribal affiliations?

Of course it was not the first time that Zulu impis did that, with the tacit support of the Apartheid authorities. At the height of the anti-apartheid struggle from the Soweto massacre of 1976 to 1990 when Mandela was released from prison, two wars in one were fought in South Africa. One was between ANC and the Apartheid regime; another was between ANC and Inkatha. Buthelezi, who was Chief Minister of KwaZulu, probably killed more ANC supporters than the White regime did. It was no small measure of Nelson Mandela’s large heart that Buthelezi became his first Home Affairs Minister in 1994.

Of course ANC/UDF supporters also did many terrible things. For example, they invented the “necklace” treatment for alleged government spies caught in the townships. It was brutal jungle justice and no doubt many innocent persons were killed before their guilt was properly established. The violence unleashed in South African society by impis and ANC/UDF however paled beside the Apartheid regime’s extremely creative violence.

Apartheid era cops had this whip called sjambok, made from rhino hide. The first time I saw pictures of ANC youths’ backs after a sjambok whipping, I again couldn’t sleep, though I was a young lad then. I had never seen anything so awful. It was also from the South African police that we first saw tv pictures of hot water cannons that swept dozens of people off the streets, plus pepper sprays and very aggressive police dogs that rushed ahead and ripped at demonstrators. It was also from South Africa that we first heard of “rubber bullets,” which however killed many people. Let’s not bother to enumerate other types on violence perfected by the Apartheid regime, such as mass shootings in Sharpeville and Soweto, “banning,” enforcement of racial segregation, cross border assassinations and letter- bomb killings, of Ruth First and other activists. A society like that, in which so much blood was spilled over several decades, has a deeply-ingrained culture of violence which could not heal in one generation, if ever.

Nor am I very surprised that South Africa has a very large reservoir of urban underclass elements who could kill at the slightest excuse. You see, when our teacher Prof Chimere Ikokwu was National Chairman of the National Committee Against Apartheid [NACAAP] from 1978 up until the late 1980s, I was his right-hand man to whom he turned over all the brochures and weekly bulletins that ANC sent to him from its Lusaka headquarters in exile. From those documents, I had a good idea of what was happening inside South Africa at the time in relation to the liberation struggle, who was detained, who was jailed and who was killed.

Throughout the 1980s, ANC’s internal wing called United Democratic Front [UDF] organized a campaign of school boycotts under the slogan “Liberation before Education.” Every week in its weekly bulletins, ANC announced figures of the success of the school boycott. Quite often, up to 97% of black schoolchildren boycotted school and instead spent their days fighting Apartheid cops in the streets. This was noble, but when black majority rule was finally achieved in 1994, that whole generation was not equipped to occupy positions in an industrial economy. Other black Africans therefore rushed in to fill the void.

It is true that Nigerian society, which was under colonial rule for 60 years but was never under Apartheid rule, is also ravaged by violence, though not of the xenophobic kind. Even though we twice threw out millions of Ghanaians and other West Africans in 1983 and 1984, we did not kill or even severely molest them. Ghana’s Prime Minister Kofi Busia also threw out half a million Nigerians in 1969. Saudi Arabia also once asked Sardauna to remove Nigerian tukaris from their country, but they did not kill them. One urgent task right now is to discourage Nigerian youths from taking foreign policy into their hands and attacking businesses supposedly owned by foreigners. This is important because in future we are likely to have problems with more countries, including very powerful ones, so it is good not to over-react.

Several South African politicians and government leaders have alluded to the involvement of many Nigerians in criminal deeds in that country as the source of the xenophobia. Some Nigerians who lived in that country, including our friend Dr. Bala Mohammed, have also gingerly made the same allusion. I kept wondering: where is the South African Police that we were familiar with, with all its dogs, equipment and sjamboks, which once effectively enforced racial segregation, pass laws and dealt with protesters? In 2010 when a bomb went off at Eagle Square and our president was busy saying MEND did not do it, South African Police speedily identified the perpetrators, to Nigerians’ amazement. Why is it difficult for such a police force to round up all drug dealers, prostitution rings, robbers and cyber criminals? Why must it outsource the job to city hoodlums? Its newly-found inefficiency has now created a serious intra-African crisis.