Zukiswa Wanner

I was certain that when I wrote my blog this week, I would be reporting about the Franschhoek Literary Festival where I have been for the last few days. Alas, current affairs in my home province of Gauteng prevent me from writing of something that seems so frivolous (no offence meant to the organizers of that great festival). I would loathe for my silence on the madness that has gripped my country to be seen as approval for the xenophobic attacks that are destroying people’s lives – my fellow Africans, who came to my country in the hope of a better life for themselves because of political, economic, ad social upheavals in their own countries.

I am particularly pained because I too have been a refugee in other African countries. In 1976, while South African townships were burning because of African students’ refusal to use Afrikaans as a language of instruction, I was born in a Zambian hospital to a South African father and a Zimbabwean mother, both of them political exiles. The nurses who attended to me were Zambian and the doctor who delivered me was Zimbabwean. My mother tells me they nicknamed me ‘Soweto’ because I was one of the few South African children born during that tumultuous time in our nation’s history in that hospital. Lately I have been wondering whether I would have been alive if the Zambians had been as unwelcoming to my parents as my fellow nationals have been to our fellow Africans?

I wonder whether I would be able to write this if it weren’t for the education I received in Zimbabwe at Zimbabwean taxpayers’ expense?

I wonder too whether South Africa would be the free country it is today if the rest of other African countries had been as unwelcoming?

Would Mama Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela have been as celebrated on the continent?

Would Lewis Nkosi and Eskia Mphahlele have attained their intellectual status if it were not for teaching at some of the African universities they taught at?

Would South Africa be the country it is without the thousands of exiles who were welcomed, educated and attained their professional experience in Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and various other African countries?

Every South African I know has at least one relative who was in exile and yet today, we claim to be good men and women but sit and do nothing while evil prospers in the form of xenophobic attacks as those same self Africans (or their relatives) who helped our people are being bludgeoned to death?

PhD types have come up with reasons why this is happening, why even when we cannot condone the behaviour we should understand the anger of the working class. BULLSHIT!

An analysis of some of the excuses that have been used:

 Service delivery

There are those who claim that poor South Africans are perpetrating these atrocious crimes because of lack of service delivery from the government and that South Africans are frustrated. Uh, hello? How idiotic is that? The non-South Africans are probably tortured by the same lack of service-delivery from government and are therefore in your shoes. I know tons of refuges who have been here for as long as 14 years and are yet to get their refugee papers completely processed by Home Affais. Besides, I don’t get it. How does killing your Mozambican neighbour going to speed up service delivery? May be if the South African working class feels so strongly about lack of service delivery, instead of killing the wretched of the earth who are trying to make it like themselves, they should be intelligent enough to, as my friend Ndumiso was saying yesterday, to go and ‘storm the Bastille’. You know where the Union Buildings are, you know where Parliament is, you know where the municipality offices are – those are the people you should be holding accountable and questioning instead of looting from a person whose corner store holds all the resources he/she has. That’s not an incitement against government by the way. It’s just a statement to highlight how misplaced the anger seems to be when clearly there are people on power who are supposed to be accountable for the service delivery.

 They are taking our jobs

Plain dumb. Most of the people perpetrating the crime on fellow Africans are idiots who have never bothered to get matric certificates and would still be unemployed if these so-called foreigners were not here (you have to question the very idea of calling a fellow African a foreigner on African soil when the David Bullards are living it large and getting applause for spewing their racist diatribe).

This morning as I was writing this, a friend of mine called me and told me of a doctor from another country who was abducted from a hospital because of course he is ‘taking our job’. How stupid is that? In a country where we are bemoaning the lack of doctors, should we not be celebrating this brother and thanking him for wanting to work in our public hospitals for pays that most South African doctors will become expatriates for?

 They are taking our women

Here is the thing folks, from one South African woman to South African mankind – women are not taken, they go. There is no guarantee that we would be with you if the so-called foreigners were not here. Here is the thing. May be if you started spending less time blaming the government for you lack of development and actively tried to do something (go to uMsobomvu and see what innovative project of yours they can fund, actively go to industries and seek work as a cleaner, salesperson, go back to school ad better your qualifications etc). May be if you  stopped standing at street corners at 7 in the morning on Monday mornings drinking beer and asking those who are going to work for one rand for skyf. May be if you stopped beating up your women when they ask you for money to buy your child diapers or food. May be if you treat South African women the way you want your sisters, mothers and daughters to be treated – may be they would not be interested in these ‘foreigners’.

 Crime

No nation is bereft of crime and by the same token, no nationality is bereft of criminals. It is true that some bad seeds who have emigrated into South Africa have criminal elements but while publications like Daily Sun do much to fuel xenophobic feeling among South Africans with headlines such as ‘Mozambicans kill Lucky Dube’, ‘Zimbabweans in shoot out with Police’ the majority of criminals, as the South African jail population will attest, are South Africans.

It is South Africans who are raping 3month old babies and 80 year old grannies.

It is South Africans who are killing fellow South Africans for cell phones late at night.

It is South Africans who are creating front companies for their criminal business activities.

 It is South Africans who are taking bribes before awarding tenders.

It is South Africans who are arresting fellow South Africans and sending them to Lindela because ‘you are too black to be a South African (hello? Did someone forget that we are in Africa and people on this continent are by and large supposed to be dark?).

And yes…it is South Africans who are killing fellow Africans because of ignorance and a lack of understanding of the debt we owe those same Africans for our freedom.

I write this to purge myself of some of the anger that I feel over everything that is happening to my fellow Africans in my country. And yet, I feel it’s a useless exercise. The people who are perpetrating these crimes are probably not people who would visit my blog but rather read the despicable Daily Sun that tends to fuel some of their sentiments.

I write because if there is a non South African fellow African out thee in cyberspace reading this on South African soil, I would like to say on behalf of many other South Africans who feel the way I do – a heartfelt and profound sorry.

I have never been more ashamed of being South African as I have been for the last few days. I am a nobody whose sentiments will probably make little different to what’s happening but to my fellow Africans in South Africa, is there anything I can do to help?

Let me know.

My email is hintsaec@yahoo.co.uk.

Dear Uncle Sam,

You don’t know me. I am an insignificant someone from the designated Third World but I thought I would touch base, say howzit, and tell you about my friend Dana.

When I was a kid, I had a friend called Dana. I have not seen Dana since I was thirteen but I know I will never forget her. There were three reasons to love Dana.

She was the first white person I had met who spoke worse English than me (and therefore she made me feel good about myself).

Dana once also saved my life when I almost drowned (but that’s for another day – feel free to insert your favourite ‘black people and swimming’ joke right here).

Finally I loved Dana because we were simpatico. Dana was a Palestinian girl in Zimbabwe by way of Jordan and her dad was press attaché for the then banned PLO. I was a South African girl in Zimbabwe born in Zambia. We used to have these lengthy talks about our people – her in her halting English but usually with graphics such as photographs and me, in my better English with proof from the news to back up how unjust the overlords in our countries were. She gave me bumper stickers saying ‘Say No to Zionism’ before I knew what Zionism was. My mother was a civil servant and Zimbabwe was non-aligned. She refused to stick them on her bumper.

 

I thought about Dana last night as I read the current issue of Time magazine. In it there is an excerpt of a book called Rutka’s Notebook. Rutka was a Jewish girl in Poland and she wrote a diary akin to Anne Frank’s which has just recently been released. The excerpt that is in Time magazine is largely a coming of age diary – what getting a first kiss would be like, the boy she has a crush on etc – but she also adds a haunting look at the politics of the day.

An excerpt from her entry on February 6, 1943 reads

‘Something has broken in me. When I pass by a German, everything shrinks in me. I don’t know whether it is out of fear or hatred. I would like to torture them, their women and children, who set their doggies on us, to beat and strangle them vigorously, more and more.’

This was written by a Jewish girl and it made me remember a Palestinian girl I once knew. I wondered whether Dana’s young compatriots felt the same type of anger towards the Jews as this poor Jewish girl felt towards the Nazis. I remembered how, at the age of 11, I felt so helpless and yet wished all Afrikaners dead every time there was another news clip on ZBC showing white South African police beating up black youths in the townships.

 

The Boers were humiliated and killed by the English during the now PC-termed South African War (formerly known as the Anglo-Boer War). Their wives and children were interned in camps and yet – less than a quarter of a century later, they were visiting the very same atrocities on the black people of South Africa.

The Jews suffered under the Nazi atrocities and yet, less than fifteen years later they were doing and continue doing the same things to the Palestinians.

Do you sometimes wonder like I do, dear Uncle Sam what it will take for human beings to learn from history? Will we forever keep repeating our mistakes?

I do not know where Dana is now. Whether she is alive, married, and living in Ramallah (I am sure they would have gone back when sanctions were lifted and Arafat unbanned); whether she or one of her brothers decided to cut off their fathers mild political ties, joined Hamas and may be died in what they would have perceived to be a just cause for their country; or even whether she may just have become a victim of stray bullets. Wherever she is though, I know she still carries some of the anger we used to talk about when we were young, some of the helplessness we used to feel when we heard more stories about our people being obliterated and that I have been trying to get rid of since the advent of a South African democracy.  I know Dana, and many other young Palestinians, feel exactly the same way that Rutka, a young Jewish girl, felt in 1943 when the Nazis were humiliating her people so may be, dear Uncle Sam, instead of you and Israel vilifying  your former president Jimmy Carter for his talks with Hamas, you both  need to understand why Hamas exists – and create damage control…FAST.

Not by putting sanctions on Palestine. Not by refusing to negotiate with the democratically elected party in Palestine (alas. Whether you agree with the Palestinians or not, Hamas are their chosen government and you know a lot about democracy don’t you, Uncle Sam?). But by coming to the table with Hamas and asking Jimmy Carter whom Hamas may already have faith in to lead the negotiations. I know policing the world is tough but you can do it.

Do not create any more Rutkas (or Danas) than are necessary.

And oh before you say it (I can see it’s on the tip of your tongue, you love saying it). I am not anti-Semitic. I just hate injustices of any kind, be they to Jews by Nazis or to Palestinians by Jews.

 

Regards,

Anti-Nazi, Palestinian symnpathiser