South Africa, Memory, and the Unfinished Project of African Freedom

An Open Letter to Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma (Founder & Leader of the March and March Movement)

Dear Jacinta,
I have read your reflections on migration and South Africa with close attention. I have also witnessed the intensity of the reaction they have provoked across social media.

Many Africans, including some in my own country, have responded with anger and personal attacks.

I do not wish to join that chorus. Public debate is rarely enriched by outrage. Your remarks deserve thoughtful engagement, not denunciation. It is in that spirit that I write.

Part of the current tension reflects a generational distance from history. Younger Africans may not fully appreciate the magnitude of apartheid South Africa’s impact on the continent.

This is understandable. Memory fades when it is no longer lived experience, and historical truths are not always passed intact from one generation to the next.

For those who came of age during the struggle, however, opposition to apartheid was never a distant issue. It was a continental reality that shaped political consciousness across Africa.

Permit me to take the liberty, Jacinta, to share with you that our continent has always been a continent of paradoxes. We invoke unity while living within inherited divisions. We defend borders we did not draw, yet resent those who cross them. We champion Pan-Africanism while sometimes questioning the presence of fellow Africans in our midst. It is within this paradox that your reflections must be read.

Every sovereign state has the right to regulate its borders and enforce its laws. South Africa is no exception. But when an African crosses an African border, a deeper question arises: who exactly is the foreigner?

The generation of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Samora Machel, and Nelson Mandela understood that sovereignty without solidarity remains incomplete. The dream of African liberation always transcended the colonial boundaries that divided us.

South Africa today faces genuine economic pressures. Yet attributing unemployment and structural crises primarily to African migrants risks substituting scapegoating for serious analysis.

The Zimbabwean selling vegetables in Johannesburg, the Ghanaian running a small business in Pretoria, or the Malawian working as a security guard are not the architects of South Africa’s deeper economic challenges. When such individuals rise through effort to become supervisors or managers, it reflects enterprise and merit, not theft.

History repeatedly shows that migrants become convenient targets for broader economic anxieties. Many Africans also carry painful memories of xenophobic violence in South Africa, violence that at times prompted governments, including Ghana’s, to consider the evacuation of their citizens as a basic duty to protect human life. Those affected were not invaders, nor job takers but ordinary workers, traders, students, and families seeking opportunity and dignity.

My own perspective is shaped by lived experience. As a student in mid 1980s in Geneva, Switzerland, I followed Southern Africa’s liberation struggles closely. Research travels through Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Botswana revealed how profoundly the anti-apartheid cause resonated across the continent. Like many young Africans of that time, I wrote and performed poems against apartheid l, l met with ANC and PAC members, l took university courses on South Africa, I read widely on South Africa and served as Secretary of York University Against Apartheid.

Across Africa, ordinary people supported South Africa’s freedom not out of expectation of repayment, but because apartheid was seen as an assault on African humanity itself.

This is why many react with unease when that solidarity is treated as an exhausted historical account.

The issue is not debt or an invoice for past support. It is memory, Jacinta. A people without memory risk misunderstanding both themselves and their shared future.

The question is not whether South Africa has the right to enforce its immigration laws. It does. The deeper question is whether Africa can preserve the spirit of solidarity that helped defeat colonialism and apartheid, while fully respecting the sovereignty of its member states.

The answer, Jacinta, must be yes.
Sovereignty without solidarity risks isolation. Solidarity without sovereignty risks disorder.

Africa needs both.
Reconciling them remains one of the great unfinished projects of African freedom.

I extend my warmest greetings to the people of South Africa

Yours sincerely,
BY Seth K. Awuku
Ghanaian writer and commentator on governance, diplomacy, and Pan-African affairs. Founder and Principal, Sovereign Advisory Ltd.

Ghana

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