To express the critical importance of Africa to ourselves, both black and white, we should say that we are either African or we are nothing.
Thabo Mbeki [May 2001]
Neoliberal globalization has impoverished us at an escalating pace for decades but, with the launch of our latest spectator sport, it has evolved into something more ghastly than food riots, political repression, or natural disaster. The army's deployment may bring about a lull, but this previously hidden or inadmissible nightmare is not going to go away. We've entered an utterly predictable, horrific phase in our war against the poor — a phase vaguely familiar and glimpsed briefly in a time and place to which all South Africans swore they'd never return.
Citizens of a world gone wrong — evident in my finding sound reportage in Time, CNN, and The Christian Science Monitor, it is our global future and we cannot avoid it. This time round though, the 'haves' are expressing moral indignation and outrage.
Why? Like it or not, they comprise our "third force" and their obfuscatory babble fans the flames, keeping the 'have nots' at each others' throats.
The question on everybody's minds is: Will the actively indigent destroy each other before turning on their oppressors?
No. Divide and rule always works...but it does so only for a time.
South Africa needs to send out a strong message that an irrational prejudice and hostility towards non-nationals is not acceptable under any circumstances. Criminal behaviour towards foreigners cannot be tolerated in a democratic society.
Human Rights Commission [October 1998]
We've heard all the old phrases, now unforgivably tired or trite: "xenophobia", "legacy of apartheid", "could not have been foreseen", etc. Rubbish. True only in some ways, these terms of expedience cloak lies and blindness in most.
More, Canal du Mozambique reporting the SAS Drakensberg refueling the An Yue Jiang, thereby enabling the shipment of arms previously denied to Harare, puts an altogether grotesque, cynical, and unfortunately believable spin on the recent past.
I'm unable to write much of this latest unfolding in our tale of terror. It's too depressing and I've found the sense of foreboding and imminence in which it has been enveloped as stifling as a lead blanket. Like any new dread, it wells from a memory older than time.
For the moment though, I have managed to extricate myself from the mundane banality accompanying the genesis of our New Normal to find the sound of my own voice. Looking at these images and remembering Lee Kyung Hae at Cancun and Chris Gueffroy's body lying in the East German border strip, I pity those among us unable or unwilling to see in them both our poverty and our 'poverty beyond poverty'.
Never mind our thirty-year long 'flight of skills' — even our refugees are now emigrating.
“They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this one is a foreigner and this one is not’. It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.”
Charles Mannyike [May 2008]
Indeed. We will one day boil the rich and burn their fat. Unfortunately and like us, they will blaze only briefly or, worse, blaze not at all. And we who remain to gnaw their bones will again nurse memories of events we could not have foreseen.
Finally, some images — the media really went to the townships on this one, didn't they?
• The Times | Flames of Hate
• BBC | In pictures: Johannesburg violence
• New York Times | Clashes Escalate in South Africa
• Monsters and Critics | South Africa: Rioting and Violence
• iafrica.com | Xenophobia in images
"These acts of xenophobia are as unforgivable as they are unacceptable in a civilised society, especially that the perpetrators are South Africans, who owe the freedom they are enjoying, to the support the African countries, including Zimbabwe, gave the South African freedom fighters during the struggle to bring about that freedom."
Smuts Ngonyama [2001]
Note: South Africa ranks 116 out of 140 countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Peace rankings. Compounding and feeding violence, food import costs to the world's poorest nations are set to rise by 40 per cent in 2008. The overall cost of food is set to rise by 53 per cent from 2007 says the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
We'll build a world of our own, that no one else will share | All our sorrows we'll leave far behind us there | And I know that you'll find, there'll be peace of mind | When we live in a world of our own.
The Seekers | A World Of Our Own
