South Africa: An explosion of xenophobic rage
Black foreigners have once again become targets of xenophobic violence in South Africa, said Sabelo Skiti and Thanduxolo Jika in the Mail & Guardian (South Africa). For more than a week now, mobs of black South Africans have attacked and looted foreign-owned shops, cars, and homes; foreign truck drivers have been pulled from their cabs and beaten. At least 12 people have been killed and more than 640 people arrested. The riots began in Pretoria following the alleged murder of a local taxi driver by a Nigerian drug dealer, and the mayhem quickly spread to Johannesburg and other cities. Intelligence agencies believe the violence may have been orchestrated by a truckers’ union that accuses foreign drivers of stealing jobs, or possibly by a political faction eager
“to embarrass and ultimately destabilize the presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa.” But this country has experienced bloody xenophobic riots before, in 2006 and 2015, and poor South Africans don’t need anyone to tell them to hate foreigners. African migrants are blamed for all our nation’s woes, “from the proliferation of drugs and fake goods, to crime and filth in inner-city Johannesburg,” to our 29 percent unemployment rate.
This is “an African tragedy of unimaginable proportions,” said The Guardian (Nigeria) in an editorial. Nigerians were the ones who most supported South Africans in their fight to end the “cancer of apartheid”—even taxing our own people to fund the struggle against white rule. And we are now blamed as the cause of their poverty? This is the result of the “abject failure” of successive black-led South African governments “to redress the terrible economic and other imbalances inherited from the white racists.” We condemn those Nigerians who in recent days have attacked South African–owned businesses in this country as retaliation.
But our government was right to recall Nigeria’s ambassador to South Africa and to order the evacuation of our citizens from that ungrateful country.
South Africa has a long history of xenophobia, said Luis Franceschi in the Daily Nation (Kenya). The “hatred for brother Africans” began during apartheid, when mining companies imported foreign labor to avoid “organized and unionized local labor.” Black foreigners have been resented ever since. The African National Congress—which has led South Africa for 25 years—has consistently exploited that hatred to excuse its own deficiencies, blaming foreigners “for crime, unemployment, and rape,” and now for the drug epidemic that is ravaging townships. The country is an “explosive mixture of hopelessness, disadvantage, ignorance, envy and malice, and violence” that could well lead to genocide. The rest of Africa can’t let that happen, said FrontPage Africa (Liberia). President Ramaphosa isn’t going to stop the bloodshed; he’s given only “feeble statements” condemning his citizens’ murder of “fellow Africans in cold blood.” He needs to declare and enforce “a state of emergency.” If he doesn’t, we should boot South Africa out of the 55-nation African Union, and readmit it only when Ramaphosa can guarantee security for all South African residents—citizens and foreigners alike.