How Fellow Africans And The Anc Are Responsible For The Xenophobic Hysteria In South Africa

I had wanted to write just a brief piece highlighting the complicity of the ANC in this effusion of xenophobic hysteria for my FB wall, but since it did not adequately reflect my sentiments and the truth as I know them, a good, more than a jolly social media slug out is what you are going to read now. Brace yourself and fasten your seat belt, as it is going to be a rough ride.

Let’s face it. Let us not be hypocritical and pretend that the South African youth and government are doing something new in Africa. Indeed, fellow Africans did not set a good example for the South Africans to follow. They still don’t. Not long ago, I supported my good friend Femi Akomolafe to write against the xenophobic hysteria the bloke running the Toontoon Network whipped up against Igbos in Ghana, using an old video of the so-called Igbo king talking his head off like a politician in a bid to win support. This, in spite of the fact that too many Igbos do not make matters easy for themselves and other Nigerians because of their negative conduct. They piss both of us off with their boastful claims, which included the ignorant and idiotic claim of being Yawheh’s chosen Jews, more intelligent and smarter than everyone else. And, they indulge in criminal activities like selling drugs, 419 scams ... add your list. From supporting Obi at first, I told everyone that were I a Yoruba, a Muslim, or belong to one of those snake oil selling and Miracle Money conjuring Men of God churches (which, thankfully, I don’t associate with), I’d have to eat frog before voting for Obi. That’s how much the Obedients pissed us off, but it did not stop us from denouncing the xenophobic hysteria against them in articles. Only a few are guilty as charged, so the sins of the few must not and cannot be used to punish all.

I am focusing first on the Igbos because it is the action of one of them who had himself declared as an Ndi-Igbo - an Ibo king - that triggered the current upsurge of xenophobic attacks on all non-South African Africans. Why on earth must the vain idiot do that, in the wake of what happened in Ghana, and the response of the Igbo leadership in Nigeria decreeing that such ceremonial installations with that title must cease and the title Ogbendu, that’s, leader, be used rather? I am from an ancient, freaking, royal background myself, but for my life, I really don’t understand why these newly-rich upstarts have this obsession to be installed as chiefs and kings. I sympathise a lot with some of my friends who belong to the “let’s abolish the archaic institution club.”

Let’s turn to African governments, beginning from the 1960s, for a few bad examples. Political independence brought a new word into the lexicon of the African political landscape: tribalism. Tribalism refers to some politicians taking more than the due share of the meagre resources the neo-colonial governments were allowed to have under the terms of political independence for their areas or ethnic group members. Yes, I know that most Africans mistake ethnocentricism for tribalism, but the latter is quite a different thing, similar to racism, encompassing the prejudices, stereotypical and bigoted views some have about Others, which predated colonialism. Tribalism and ethnocentricism are even far, far worse and destructive in other countries in Africa. The Divide and Rule policies of the colonial powers even hardened the schism in some cases, a prime example being what the Belgians did in the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, the consequences of which are still tearing the Great Lakes Region apart, with 7 million reported dead in the Congo DRC alone since 1996; not to mention the carnage of the years from the 1960s when Patrice Lumumba was killed. I have covered the Hutu-Tutsi bloodletting in separate articles. British policy was not any better. After dividing and ruling the Southern Sudan from the Arabised North that used to raid the South for slaves, the decision to merge them on the eve of independence in 1956 led to the Anya’nya Rebellion and the decades of conflicts in the Sudan. They are still crazily at it. Closer home in Nigeria, the issues of tribalism and ethnocentricism, later mixed with an odious dose of Islamic fanaticism, were not any better. The brutal Biafran civil war, which claimed millions of lives was early eruption of the fissures. The effects are still with them and us all, with Nigeria definitely in the “dismal tunnel” their illustrious Chief Obafemi Awolowo so much feared they’d enter. Enough of the innumerable conflicts in Africa, with Africans within various countries killing each other, setting bad examples for the S. Africans.

That the national cake, being only at first about 15% of the wealth from the formal economy, e.g., from minerals exports, African governments got, was not much to go around, so biting at each other became the norm in Africa is not much understood; neither in S. Africa now with even a better welfare system. It was not much of a problem under the CPP regime of Nkrumah, as it did its best to spread the pork, with some seemingly absurd decisions in locating factories away from raw materials. However, it became a huge issue after the reactionary coup brought the arch-ethnocentrist Dr Kofi Abrefa Busia to power. Though a Bono from Wenchi, he was an old school Asante supremacist and eventual leader of the NLM created by some rightly disappointed and disgruntled CPP voters in the 1951 elections. I disagree with Nkrumah accepting Arthur Lewis’ “anchor of safety,” so “save for a rainy day” and “avoid inflation” advice not to increase cocoa prices but keep the windfall from the Korean War in reserve in London at a very low interest rate even though it led to the reserves inherited upon independence. He started a demonisation and vilification campaign against Ewes because of his former partner in killing and wounding innocent Ghanaians, Komla Gbedemah, in plotting the bombing campaigns from Lome, Togo and, eventually overthrowing Nkrumah with the assistance of the CIA and M16, formed a party to oppose him. Full declassified details are now available. The schism he created is still with us, with Ewes regarded by some ignorant and jaundiced Akans as from Togo and not Ghanaians. Kennedy Agyapong, a stalwart of the NPP who aspires to be President of Ghana even called on the Asantes to kill them, adding Gas who also migrated from Nigeria centuries ago, for good measure. Another ignorant Asante idiot of the NPP that inherited Busia’s tradition and legacy just created another furore by claiming Ghana belonged to the Asantes, the last of the Akan kingdoms to have arisen in the forest zone of Ghana. How then could they have given lands to others before them? Before we throw tantrums and insults at the S. African xenophobes, let us remove the huge logs from our own eyes.

I have not touched the ethnic conflicts in northern Ghana, not because they are not important. They are, as they represent the special lacuna of former victims of slave raiders being compelled to live under the feudal hegemony of their historical enemies within the same country in Africa. This injustice is a major issue to be addressed under the concept of Internal Reparations I have been advocating since the 1990s. The slave trade started from the interior of Africa, not the European fortifications along the coast, built long after the Arabs had been at it in Africa for centuries; and, as we know, still at it.

Now, as an Anlo Ewe, I don’t have any inherited traditional animosity towards Asantes, as my Nzema client who claimed he hated them, adding that if I knew what they say about the Sefwis who are their neighbours, I’d go hang myself. Phew! If he only knew what I knew and don’t talk or write about because I was ashamed for a long time about the alliance of my ancestors with the Akwamus and the Asantes and what they did to fellow Ewes, too. Now, I am ready to write,... actually publish, what I had already written about that pre-colonial period. Charity, we learned, begins at home.

The Apartheid regime of S. Africa used all these bad things happening north of the Limpopo River in a relentless propaganda to reshape the mentality of black S. Africans to think that they were far better under the Apartheid system. S. Africa was separated from the rest of Africa and treated as a white enclave, not part of Africa. Africa remains north of the Limpopo to many S. Africans up to today. Even Asians in S. Africa were told to see what was happening to other Asians in Africa, when attention turned to non-Africans for attack. Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asian settlers was just a major case.

Accordingly, as if the internal tribalism and bloodletting going across Africa were not bad enough, attacks on non-nationals also became another bad example Africans set for the S. Africans. The same evil genius of tribalism in Ghana and Dialogue with Apartheid S. Africa, Dr Kofi Busia, set the tone in Ghana by his infamous Aliens Compliance Order. I have in front of me the Monday Jan. 1970 report of the Time magazine of the expulsion of foreigners from Ghana titled Exodus. I decided to rather type out a bit of what was written there, as it captured the past and resonates very well with what is still happening today.

“The refugee is an all too common figure in modern Africa. He has appeared in Kenya and the Congo, the Sudan and Nigeria, his belongings piled in an ungainly bundle atop his head, his children skipping naked alongside, his path a dusty road leading nowhere. Still, familiar as the phenomenon may be, there is a particularly nightmarish quality to the scene that has been unfolding in recent weeks along the borders of the West African nation of Ghana.

More than a quarter of the country’s 8,000,000 inhabitants have been ordered by the government to leave. They are Africans from other countries, many of whom have lived and worked in Ghana under loose alien status for decades. They include nearly 1,000,000 Nigerians, 186,000 Upper Voltans and 196,000 Togolese, who make their living mostly as small traders, unskilled industrial workers, miners and farm labourers. Last week police began arresting those without residence permits.”

The negative impacts of this internally on Ghana’s economy and Ghana’s image internationally were nothing short of disastrous. It took me just a brief post on Ghanaweb’s SIL to shoot down the attempt of even HKP to defend the heinous action of the Busia-led Progress Party, which breached one of the cardinal taboos of his Asantes of old, the Afisem taboo, which even protected people of slave descent, breaching of which is punishable by death. Africans used to even protect fugitive strangers at the peril of war in those turbulent days.

I think it is worth mentioning that Mobutu also expelled other Africans at the same time, something which affected very badly people from my area who had been settling in the Congo long before its independence, first as fisherfolks. They were not given any prior notice even though the Ambassador was informed, and so could not prepare to leave with anything. They were suddenly rounded up, some from their homes or shops or workplace, with the Congolese mobs looting everything they owned.

Fast forward to 1983 and the Nigerians retaliated with the infamous Ghana Must Go expulsion of other Africans, with over a million Ghanaians being victims. I was then teaching in Nigeria and witnessed it all, and observed the continual deterioration of the economy after the expulsion. Some desperate Nigerian business owners were compelled to travel to Ghana to look for their expelled workers, as their businesses collapsed without them. Now, the Nigerians are back in force in Ghana and facing Ghanaian xenophobes and traders who are unable to compete with them in the retail sector and so are often attacking them. As a no-colonial-plantation borders pan-Africanist, I detest this wholeheartedly. Hardly any of us running businesses and small shops in the UK and the rest of Europe would qualify to operate if they have Ghana’s insane so-called investment money requirement law to enter the retail sector.

That is the kind of scenario into which South Africans regained freedom from Apartheid rule in 1994. Ethnocentricism, tribalism and xenopbobia were already entrenched in the minds of Africans by the misrulers of Africans who took over from the nationalists and pan-Africanists, often after coups. It is into this quagmire and mindset that the ANC was ushered into power under very compromising terms, which in reality amounted to their leadership, represented by the classic case of President Ramaphosa, being coopted into the grossly unequal Apartheid system with Mandela as the President. The Black Jacobins of S. Africa took their place, as they did in Haiti, and many other African countries in the 1960s. The Zimbabwean Lancaster House-class agreement which left the unjustly seized lands, some of them just when Mandela was being released, in the hands of the whites meant the majority native Africans still remain dispossessed and impoverished. I asked one senior German consultant at CMI after one lecture by a guest why the same principle as adopted in Eastern Germany could not be applied, that’s, people ask to go and take possession of their properties that the Apartheid regime took over irrespective of improvements made to them. He replied, “why not?” Yes, why not? But, Mandela and the ANC sold out and the S. African scholars knew that. I used to tease one such Professor on sabbatical that he spoke like a PAC man in private. At times, I wished I had not bet with him that I’d never end up an academic like them: not only “anonymizing” names of informants but also the truth. I won the bet at great cost; perhaps, a Pyrrhic Victory. But, perhaps, that’s why I am still alive and you are reading this, just the tip of what’s on my mind. He has moved on into the private sector and doing just fine on the S. African gravy train.

What eventually pissed me off and dimmed my opinion of Mandela is the ANC accepting the recommendation of the commissioned Report for the ANC regime to ignore the OAU pan-Africanist agenda and rather focus on reviving Cecil Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo plan, with S. Africa as the fulcrum of convergence of the core SADC; all drawn in glossy colours. The ANC, therefore, adopted a policy of paying lip service to the aims of the OAU and later the AU, instead of committed full participation. They even refused to commit troops to peace keeping missions in Africa, even in Rwanda. Meanwhile, they were breaching UN arms embargo on the combatants and supplied arms to the Hutu regime, too. Kofi Annan was compelled to recommend the withdrawal of peace-keeping forces from Rwanda when some Western powers decided to withdraw their troops, leaving the mission in peril.

The ANC regime thus continued the Apartheid policy of exclusiveness from Africa, instead of pursuing a pan-African policy and setting the tone of Africa unity to its population, especially the youth. Meanwhile, it tried to gain from the conflicts in the Great Lakes Regions, conflicts that continue up to today. Frontline states became battle grounds for S. African forces and their proxies like RENAMO during the Apartheid era, something that devastated and impoverished them, not forgetting the deaths they suffered. This attitude and policy must be reversed and get S. Africa fully involved in a pan-Africa force to tackle the conflicts. We do not need foreign bases to do that, as peace-making efforts in Africa have been bogus so far. Peace in Africa is not in the interest of the military-industrial complexes and the arms merchants of death of The North and their proxies in the Islamic world and Africa. The existential challenges and historical causes of the poverty and conflicts must be properly researched and explained to the public. It is in S. Africa’s own interest to assist in doing that.

Practically all the people we see attacking Africans on the streets are under 45. They, therefore, have no solid remembrance of what life under Apartheid was like and what other African countries did to support the struggle against Apartheid. What they know is hearsay.

I have been reading and hearing claims that the S. African youths are lazy and do not want to work. That completely ignores the fact of whether they are qualified and capable of filling the vacancies available. Of course, many are not, being poorly mass educated since the ANC came to power. In any case, there is no way they can best Nigerian and Ghanaian immigrants, whose average education top the average in even Europe and N. America. Besides, practically all simply do not have the capital and experience of say Nigerians, Ethiopians and Somalians to set up shops. Even Ghanaians in Ghana cannot compete with the Nigerians with access to moneybags in Nigeria, not to mention millions salted in foreign accounts, to finance them. Most of the Africans in S. Africa created their own jobs, anyway. The talk of taking their jobs is, therefore, nonsense. It is not different from anti-immigrants whites and racists saying same.

SOME SOLUTIONS
The solution to the problem is not evacuating Africans from S. Africa, and then taking retaliatory actions against S. African companies operating in other African countries. The ANC government, must, as matter of urgency, enforce law and order in S. Africa instead of allowing the disillusioned and angry youth to channel their frustrations away from them into attacking immigrants on the streets, in shops, homes, schools and even hospitals. What is happening is barbaric and uncivilised. Immigration control is not the role of mobs. They should stop disgracing us all. Some of Africans have moved away from that crude mindset and behaviour since our youth.

The authorities must take actions to arrest, prosecute and imprison all foreigners engaged in criminal actions, especially selling drugs and indulging in scams, major accusations against some Nigerians.

The white S. Africans must realise and accept the fact that they do not have the right to hold on to the lands forcibly seized from Africans since their arrival in S. Africa, even more under Apartheid. They must relinquish land without expecting to be compensated for what they wrongfully and illegally seized simply because they were better armed. Rather, they should rather be paying compensation or reparations to black S. Africans for all their centuries of atrocities and exploitation of the African population and devastation they caused in the Frontline States. I do not support the way land seizures happened in Zimbabwe, with seized lands given to ZANU-PF top guns who are not even farmers. A 20000 hectare land is a huge land which can settle 100s of families in cooperative farms with the white farmers retained as co-managers and owners of an agreed percentage of the land. Many so-called rich cocoa farmers in Ghana do not even own up to 100 hectares of cocoa farms.

State sponsored industries in cooperation with the private sector must be set up to absorb the youths. Under sanctions during the Apartheid era, S. Africa was producing a lot of things for itself under state support and protection. Instead of boosting that upon assumption of power, the ANC allowed industrial production to dwindle under the bogus free market, capitalist ideology.

I do not support the Cape to Cairo agenda but it is a fact that white S. Africans acquired the skills to run factories, which can benefit the whole of Africa. I was appalled, though, at the scantily fruit-flavoured water imported from S. Africa on the Ghanaian market. Rather, I expect S. African expertise helping to set up fruit processing factories to process mangoes, oranges, pineapple, etc. into quality fruit drinks, preferably without sugar. Africa, demographically, is the future market of the world. Of course, this is one measure that can help Africans from trooping to S. Africa, so African governments must cooperate with S. Africa to create jobs for their teeming population to stay at home.

Last, but not the least, there must be appropriate education and skills training for the youth in S. Africa so that they fill the job vacancies of the present and the future. Above all, there must be a new orientation from the Apartheid era imagery painted of Africa for S. Africans. The S. African media must begin to play a big role in this immediately.

Andy C.Y. Kwawukume
cyandyk@ymail.com

   Comments0