I apologise to my Makutano teammates and our valued readership for my tardiness in posting. There is a widening gulf between what I plan to do and what actually gets done of late and to quote Wordsworth, the world is too much with me.
There is a rumour doing the rounds in these parts that South Africa are in fact favourites to win the 2010 World Cup. It so happens that we know how to beat foreigners on home soil. Xenophobia is an ugly truth, one that need not be told in jest to realise. It is the kind of truth we would rather wish away. But in the noticeable absence of fairy god-mothers, I attended, on Tuesday, a debate on xenophobia that sought to take a critical look at government policy and make concrete proposals about how the country can move beyond the current impasse.
Organised by The Star newspaper, the evening followed the theme Never Again. A promise as much to the world, as it is to ourselves, to never again stoop to such levels of inhumanity. A Unisa graduate myself, I've always been rather intimidated by the University of Witwatersrand's Great Hall. Indeed our own ZK Matthews Great Hall may be said to be greater if not in size then, by name. There remains, however, something about Wits Great Hall that demands well, greatness. The night did not disappoint. Among us minions in the audience were such luminaries as, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who the Sowetan newspaper described the following day as lapping up the adulation, George Bizos, members of the diplomatic corps and other more colourful personalities like Robert McBride. The panel, itself was something of a political juggernaut, chaired by the other Mbeki, Moeletsi Mbeki, it consisted of Professor Barney Pityana, Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of South Africa and as Mbeki added, well known for his analysis on the ANC president, Professor Wilmot James; Western Cape Premier, Ebrahim Rasool; representing the ANC, Mohammed Valli Moosa, who attended instead of ANC Deputy President, Kgalema Mthlanthe and Independent Policy Analyst Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen. I was quite taken with this particular Mbeki, he displayed a disarming sense of humour and spoke with the kind of private school accent that reminded me of Antjie Krog's description of an address by the Queen of England in Country of my skull, 'the Accent that has intimidated half the earth for centuries'.
Crucially, research by the Human Sciences Research Council in the xenophobic hotspots has found:
- A lack of faith in the government's capacity to deliver services;
- Unhappiness over migration policy that is "corrupt, unregulated and out of control";
- Competition for housing and jobs with a staggering unemployment rate among 16-30 year olds;
- Hardship arising from rising fuel and food prices.
Adam Habib, vice chancellor of Wits and a contributor to the Never Again supplement to The Star newspaper on the day, says of the so-called xenophobic hotspots:
(T)hink of where this barbarism manifested itself and who it was directed at. It did not occur in the middle and upper middle-class suburbs. Nor was it directed at the Americans and Europeans or the countless other foreign skilled workers that live in our midst. Rather, it was directed against poor Africans who reside cheek by jowl with South Africa's marginalised in the shanty towns. Neither did it occur in the rural areas where some semblance of community still exists. It exploded in the shanty towns where social cohesion has broken down, unemployment is rife, and many eke a living on the margins of formal society.
South Africa's cabinet ministers bristle when this argument is made. They argue that if poverty was the cause then the whole of Africa would have exploded in xenophobic violence. But what they do not care to understand is that it has nothing to do with poverty. Inequality is the main culprit. It creates what scientists call relative deprivation, the social foundation on which revolts are constructed. So it is far more dangerous than poverty and has been growing throughout our transition.
Immediately I was struck by the similarities in this thread of the debate to that made in the World Economic Forum on Africa (see below) when crime was discussed. There, Mark Lamberti, representing big business, argued against crime stemming from poverty and inequality, saying that countries like Brazil, India and China had similar levels of inequality without our crime levels. I admit, at the time I was intrigued by Lamberti's comments, perhaps mainly because my inner-capitalist self and its book and shoe gathering ways leaped at the prospect of reprieve from any sense of complicity. While I continue to agree with Lamberti that South Africa's crime problem is a complex one, not easily explained, Adam Habib has forced further analysis. Poverty and inequality are related, as Habib subsequently clarified. 'Poverty is a result of inequality', the unequal distribution of resources in our society. The social ills from which we are reeling however, run far deeper than a simple sense of, 'You have what I don't so I'll take it,' or even, 'You are a threat to what I'm entitled so away with you'. South Africa has recently overtaken Brazil as the most unequal society in the world. Of course inequality is not unique to South Africa, even the wealthiest nations in the world suffer from inequality but the height and extent to which South African society is divided by it is fatal. Inequality has torn the very moral fibre upon which a society is built. Adam Habib mentions Relative Depravation, referring to the discontent people feel when they compare their lot with others and find that they have less than their peers. I think the strength of an unequal society to divide and to rise among the have-nots sentiments of being cheated is undermined.
Bongani Madondo in his column for The Times, last week, neatly summed up South African society:
Almost every one of us is tied to a township or a village somehow. We all know the truth. We have all seen the sad state of service delivery, poverty, crime, and the disintegration of families....
Truth is, we, the black middle class, and the white folk-yes, I am generalising- have long been satisfied with our lot, minus the nagging thingy about Tito's crazy interest rates, escalating price of sushi, and oh dear, aren't the Woolies staff a tad too slow sometimes? We have been cocooned from reality for far too long.
So inequality goes a long way in explaining the root of it all, but does it justify it?
"There's absolutely no excuse for it," Valli Moosa punched out. "Like sexism, racism, religious bigotry and other pathologies, there's no way of justifying xenophobia – not even talk about poverty, unemployment or a poor home affairs system ...can do that. The main job before us is to build human solidarity", Moosa said, "and this does not only mean among the races making up the rainbow nation, but beyond." "There is no excuse for xenophobia," he reiterated. "It is evil. We must work every day at eradicating it by changing the minds of the people."
Ebrahim Rasool noted that bubbling just beneath the surface of society, is a culture of intolerance. "How do we deal with a brother evil and leave out the sister evil?" he asked. "We can never hope to triumph over xenophobia, which happens out in the public, when we leave sexism in the privacy of our homes to fester. These are all demons. If we remain quiet about one evil, we open the door for one sister, like xenophobia, to come in. The point I'm making is that we must be consistent in the way we fight this whole family of intolerance. We can't pick and choose our battles, otherwise one will explode on to the scene and shatter our smugness that we are Simunye, the rainbow nation." "What next after the 1300 arrests and the humanitarian relief?" he continued to ask. "We must all take responsibility. We must oppose any kind of intolerance, – gender-based or religious – and preach acceptance."
Rasool's address was impressive, by far the most rousing of the evening. It left one of my newly-made acquaintances chanting, 'Rasool for president!' but left another unfazed, 'A politician using rhetoric!' he countered.
It is estimated that there are something like six million 'illegal immigrants' living throughout South Africa. Research shows that a staggering 90% of this population do not intend returning to the countries of their birth, despite the hostility they have recently encountered. Indicative, certainly of the dire conditions crippling the continent and as Professor Pityana pointed out, South Africa is hardly overpopulated. He also noted the fuzziness in determining exactly who a foreigner is, lest we forget that many South Africans were wrongfully targeted. "Ours is a violent society," said Pityana, "where people wantonly take the law into their own hands." He referred to the statement by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema that they "were prepared to kill and die for Zuma" as the height of lawlessness and a manifestation of a crisis in leadership.
Academic and Immigration expert, Professor Wilmot James, stressed South Africa is a nation-state, whose government is obliged to establish a more secure border. A comment that left a Nigerian immigrant in the gathering irate, '(He) thinks he owns South Africa!'
To whom does South Africa indeed belong?
South Africa is a Never-Never-Land, a place some six million people have sought escape from biting realities elsewhere. The very presence of these people within our borders indicates that South Africa offers some hope. And while many, many Africans, like South Africans, feel entitled to the hay made in the sunshine, it is not always sunny in South Africa. And unlike the other Never-Never Land, we do have to grow up here.
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