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27.03.2019 Feature Article

Who is your Enemy?: Confronting the Monster of Afriphobia from the Pan Africanist Perspective

A paper presented to the HURISA Provincial Dialogue celebrating 25 years of Democracy, 20th March, 2019, Constitution Hill, South Africa.
Who is your Enemy?: Confronting the Monster of Afriphobia from the Pan Africanist Perspective
27.03.2019 LISTEN

Introduction

As South Africa’s democracy fails to deliver to the poor (largely because the ANC government facilitated the looting of the state’s coffers), politicians search for scapegoats, and foreign migrants are sitting ducks.

Notwithstanding the serious allegations of treachery against the ANC government which border on treason (and which facilitated State Capture by Bidvest, Guptas and Bosasa, among others, and some who are implicated are now on the party’s election candidate list); the devastation of SoEs like Eskom, Prasa, Transnet, SAA, SABC, and the deliberate decimation of the South African economy; the shenanigans of the State Security agencies and the incorporation of criminals into government; fake pastors who fleece the poor and raise the dead; and those who burn universities to promote higher education – the quarter century of South Africa’s democracy is still worthy of celebration, even in its fragile state.

It is also an opportunity to reflect on the deviation from the egalitarian human rights’ ideals as entrenched in the South African Constitution. Chapter 2 of the Constitution incorporates the Bill of Rights which is “a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom”.

The SA Constitution is opposed to any form of discrimination and religious prejudice.

“The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth,” it states.

Furthermore, everyone in South Africa “has the right to have access to healthcare services, including reproductive healthcare; sufficient food and water; and social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependents, appropriate social assistance. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights”.

The major challenge is to translate constitutional rights into reality. Kofi Annan, when he was United Nations Secretary-General, contended:

Wherever we lift one soul from a life of poverty, we are defending human rights. And whenever we fail in this mission, we are failing human rights.”

In December 2018, the South African Human Rights Commission reported:

“Lack of access to socio-economic rights provides the clearest reflection of the levels of systemic poverty, unemployment, and inequality in South Africa and demonstrates the persistent recurrence of the cycle of poverty.”

More recently, Barney Mthombothi wrote that “the state of our streets, our backyards, our towns and cities, children merrily playing on dump sites, villagers drawing water from polluted dams and rivers, are a metaphor for the condition of our souls … It is a physical reflection or manifestation of our pathologies”.

According to the 2018 Human Rights Watch World Report, the South African “government’s record on human rights and respect for the rule of law was poor. Corruption, poverty, including high

unemployment, and crime significantly restricted South Africans’ enjoyment of their rights”. Also, all forms of violence against women was increasing and under-reported.

In the 2018 report there was concern that “despite recurring waves of xenophobic attacks on businesses and the homes of refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants, authorities appeared reluctant to even publicly acknowledge xenophobia and take decisive action to combat it, including ensuring proper police investigations. Virtually no one has been convicted over past outbreaks of xenophobic violence”.

According to the 2019 Human Rights Watch World Report, the South African government “has yet to finalise the draft national action plan to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and

related intolerance, or provide a mechanism for justice and accountability for xenophobic crimes”.

The reason for this foot-dragging becomes clear in the 2019 election manifestos and public discourse of senior members of the ruling ANC party, as well as those in opposition.

In its 2019 election manifesto, the ANC promised to “take tough measures against undocumented immigrants involved in criminal activities in the country or in cross-border crimes, including those involved in illegal trading and selling adulterated food in townships and villages”. ANC Secretary-

General Ace Magashule said that the “issue of undocumented foreigners was raised by the general society in South Africa … We are listening to the cries of our people”.

In November 2018 Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi blamed foreign migrants for problems in the public health sector, and contended that when they “get admitted in large numbers, they cause overcrowding *and+ infection control starts failing”.

In September 2017 Johannesburg DA Mayor Herman Mashaba tweeted: “We are not going to sit back and allow people like you to bring us Ebolas in the name of small business. Health of our people first. Our health facilities are already stretched to the limit.”

Dr Francois Venter from the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute at Wits University, and who had worked in the public health sector for 10 years, stated that “blaming foreigners for the failure to organise the public health services properly is the worst kind of xenophobia … the problems we see [in public hospitals] are largely due to poor human resource and supply line management, and the disease burden related to the local failure of poverty relief programmes and poor organisation of services — not a handful of foreigners who are here for jobs, not for healthcare”.

While the EFF has claimed to be anti-xenophobic, its senior leaders have claimed that those not born in South Africa (e.g. Duduzane Zuma) are not patriotic or loyal to the country.

In a message to mark World Peace Day on 1 January 2019, Pope Francis “warned politicians of the dangers of exploiting nationalism and fear of foreigners to undermine the trust essential to their task of binding societies together, not dividing them”. He maintained that in a “climate of mistrust rooted in the fear of others or of strangers, or anxiety about one’s personal security … political addresses

that tend to blame every evil on migrants and to deprive the poor of hope are unacceptable”.

Nelson Mandela University researcher Savo Heleta recently maintained: “Why would politicians choose to face the rightful anger of millions of poor and hopeless South Africans when they can revert to anti-immigrant rhetoric and shift blame to those who have no voice?”

Marc Gbaffou, the chairperson of the African Diaspora Forum, similarly argued:

“Those politicians who have no tangible arguments to convince their electorate always take the short cut by accusing foreign nationals. It’s a populist approach which seems to be working very well in South Africa. The idea is to make community members believe that migrants are the cause of their suffering.

Confronting the Monster

A story is told of one community where a big river was flowing from a certain forest. In this river, dead bodies floated and flowed with the river. This community told their pastor that whenever they went to fetch water from the river, they saw floating dead bodies of people who had the same features as them. The pastor was overwhelmed by the increasing number of deaths so much so that his work was just burying the dead. He kept burying the dead but would never question the root cause of the deaths. Year after year they died and kept burying. One day, a new pastor came to replace him, and could not withstand the workload. He called the community together and told

them ‘enough is enough, we have to know why many people died in order to stop losing more of our people.’ They travelled miles and miles away into the thick forest, and upon entering the forest, they found a boy who told them that all his family members have been killed by a man-eater. The boy said that the man-eater ate the soft part of the stomach and discarded the rest. He said that he was the only member in that community that was left. The other members had been eaten by this man- eater. They were mesmerised and started fearing for their lives. They camped with the boy as they sharpened their poisoned arrows. A few days later, behold the man-eater appeared charging from a distance. The men and women rained their poisoned arrows on it. After killing the man-eater, there were no more floating bodies.

In South Africa, Xenophobia (I will call it Afriphobia) is an ad-naseam phenomenon that will continue to make headlines year after year in the media, if our mitigation strategies don’t go a little deeper into searching for this man-eater. At the height of the recent xenophobic attacks, too many ‘finger- pointing rhetorics’ went into the public as we watched our sisters and brothers mercilessly butcher each other and ask them to go back to their home counties. A stitch in time saves nine. The man- eater is complex, and therefore a complete overhaul of our mitigation processes is inevitable if our efforts are to bear any fruit. Xenophobia like any other crisis can emerge anywhere in the world,

because it’s a symptom of a structure that has gone awry. It is more legitimate, therefore, to blame corruption of those charged with delivering services, than the innocent migrants who are actually job providers, or if not are building the South African economy with their expertise and energies.

Due to the fact that Afriphobia is an attitude and an activity, government organs or nongovernmental organisations interested in curbing xenophobia must contain spiralling levels of corruption. When we don’t tame corruption, the ‘man-eater’ is still breathing. Corruption and afriphobia are entangled; they are cousins if you like. Corruption robs-off resources and opportunities meant to improve the lives of disenfranchised members, and when this happens,

migrants become the scape-goat. According to Muthuki (2013), the anger of the marginalised locals is legitimate, but ought to be directed to oppressive government and the wealthy elite. The tragedy and irony of the matter is that this anger is directed to the most vulnerable individuals that fled from their warring nations. In my opinion education of the masses is a necessary recipe that could liberate the mind from the claim that migrants are a threat to locals.

In order to tame the man-eater, South Africa must make sure that her resources are distributed equally. The problem we have is not foreigners, but economic inequality created by bad governance of visionless leaders. Xenophobia is a loud voice of the side-lined population crying and telling government, “look! we are homeless while others have homes, we are jobless while others have jobs, we are illiterate while others are literate, and we have no reliable hospitals while others have, we have no water and electricity while others have”. When the nation’s common cake is not cut equally we have a wide lacuna between haves and have-nots. A fix on policies that would enhance

equal sharing of wealth is paramount. When a Zulu, a Somalian, a Mozambican, a Zimbabwean have enough water, electricity, jobs, education and opportunities for decent living, xenophobic attacks will be a thing of the past.

Xenophobia is like any other social evil that is socially constructed; no one is born disliking the other nationality. The disliking can be unlearned through education. A good education would enable learners to understand that a Nigerian, a Moroccan or a South African is their family member from the same Mother Africa. This education ought to be taken to education institutions, faith groups, and into local social groups so that the ideology that yields to violence can be killed. When educators teach a young generation to respect and appreciate their “family members” from another part of Africa, African integration will be possible.

Africa has experienced all kinds of socio-economic and political ills as a result of colonialism and demarcation of borders. For the greater part of its history, Africa has been caught in between political and economic challenges that cannot be underestimated. She has remained the hive of political violence, genocides and most recently xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Most scholars lament and attribute this to the loss and erosion of the social fabric and the absence of Ubuntu in the African society. In my view, there is a patriotic obligation for all Africans not to allow the law, the idea of respect for human rights and dignity to slide into the historic dustbin because they play a pivotal role in the continent’s revival. Against the background of the call for an African renaissance that has now become topical globally, I would like to demonstrate the potential that traditional African values of Ubuntu have for influencing the development of a new African jurisprudence and unity. I would like to present this analysis of Pan-Africanism as part of the broader process of African renaissance within the framework of the theory of Ubuntu and cultural uniformity.

The concept of Ubuntu, like many African concepts, is not easily definable. It has been described as a philosophy of life, which in its most fundamental sense represents personhood, humanity, humaneness and morality; a metaphor that describes group solidarity as a thread that holds the community together, based on the belief that umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which literally translates to “a person can only be a person through others” (Mbigi and Maree, 1995). In other words, the

individual’s whole existence is dependent on that of the group. This is usually manifested in anti- individualistic conduct towards the survival of the group.

The demarcation of the African continent into the territories/countries that it has today, can be traced back to the Berlin Conference in the 1880s, and is highly contested within the Pan-African discourse. The migration patterns of the Bantu from Lake Tanganyika to other parts of the continent, as well as the Nguni clan linkages between the Swati of Swaziland, Ndebele in Zimbabwe and the Shangani in Mozambique, are a clear demonstration that despite the immigration borders, we are all one people. Hence, the weight of the concept of Ubuntu in answering Africa’s problems, such as the spate of recent xenophobic violence in South Africa becomes much clearer when its social value is highlighted through cultural uniformity in Africa. I am a Ndebele from Zimbabwe because my grandfathers were separated from the rest of their families in Botswana or South Africa when the borders were drawn, but in essence we have cultural similarities. “Group solidarity, conformity, compassion, respect, human dignity, humanistic orientation and collective unity have, among others, been described as key social values of Ubuntu’ (Shivji; 1990).

Due to the expansive nature of the concept, its social value will always depend on the approach and the purpose for which it depends on. Thus, “its value has also been viewed as a basis for a morality of co-operation, compassion, communalism and concern for collective interests, respecting the dignity of personhood and emphasizing the virtues of that dignity in social relationships and practices all the time” (Mokgoro, 1998; 4). For the purpose of a peaceful society, Ubuntu is a prized ideology, an ideal to which age-old traditional African societies found no particular difficulty in striving for. This is the same idea that Africans must embrace and integrate into their cultural beliefs. It leaves no space for an African to call another African a ‘cockroach’,’kwere-kwere’ or any derogatory term whatsoever. This is so because these societies had their own traditional institutions that functioned on well-suited principles and practices, which modern societies are lacking. Of course, in view of the influence of globalization today, the revival and preservation of those original principles and practices is strongly recommended and clamored for and in my view they are suitable because they are culturally and historically situated and context oriented. Indeed, as Mazrui (1986) observes ,“… Africa can never go back completely to its pre-colonial starting point, but there may be a case for re-establishing contacts with familiar landmarks of modernization under indigenous impetus.”

Harmony is achieved through close and empathetic social relations within the group, implying that during one’s life-time, one is constantly challenged by others, practically, to achieve self-fulfillment through a set of collective social ideals and needs. In terms of conflict transformation after attaining independence, Pan-African leaders clearly set the tone for socio-political transformation in Africa. Post-independence governments created,“…a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society, characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on recognition of peaceful co-existence … for all Africans and humanity.” (Mbigi and Maree, 1995). In order to realize peaceful co-existence, Ubuntu recognizes that despite the injustices of the past, there is need for understanding, not vengeance, a need for reparation, not retaliation (Mokgoro, 1998; 1). In addition, African cultural values emphasize the need for Ubuntu and not victimization, opposing the slaughter of fellow Africans in countries such as Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia and Sudan among others. The importance of group solidarity requires restoration of peace among them.

This ideology strives to,“…create a new order in which all Africans will be entitled to a common citizenship … where there is equality between men and women and people of all races so that all citizens are able to enjoy and

exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and it is necessary for such purposes that provision should be made for the promotion of national unity and the restructuring and continued governance of Africa” (Levin, 1987). I am of the stubborn belief that in their highest level of development, Africans must cross borders without the need of producing a passport, but rather an identity card.

All Africans must embrace each other in the name of Ubuntu, rather than chasing each other with a bush knife or gun.

In my own view, Ubuntu establishes a new restructured socio-political order of continental and national unity, with a common citizenship; peace, a new constitutional order where the law reigns supreme, where all and not only some, shall enjoy and exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms. This is exactly what Africans need to reach self-fulfilment, peace and shared aspirations, thus answering Africa’s problems.

Who is the enemy? Can anyone of us say in this conference who the enemy is?

Why I don’t criticize our leaders?

Simply because most are good but trapped in a game that overpowers them.

Our states are still colonial states meant to exploit our resources for foreign interests, regardless of who manages them.

The continuation of the colonial state is enforced by a huge apparatus going from freemasonry lodges to assassinations.

Anyone taking power tomorrow in any of these states would end up being criticized, blamed, accused of incompetence or treason. Or assassinated.

Without understanding the game, leveraging the game, with a hidden agenda to decolonize the African state, everything else is only outsider noise in search of fame or power.

Sure, there are hundreds of areas in which a puppet leader still has room for improving the conditions of their people. Unfortunately, the puppet requires thousands of loyalists who occupy positions that abuse those areas too.

Strategy, hard thinking labs, are to be invested in, otherwise the loud outsiders are playing into the game of African enemies, unconsciously.

We are in catch 22 situation. The more we criticize our leaders, the more fragile they feel, the likely they seek protection from foreign powers. "the people are against me. Whatever I do, they are angry and disrespectful. I'd better do with the foreigners who more often come to me smiling with gifts". I've seen that logic plays to even local leaders like mayors.

On the contrary, when a leader has a strong support from home, they are more confident to stand a chance from external aggression or infiltration. Examples are Russia and China. Regardless of the deluge of critique from the west, those leaders could rely on their elite and people support.

There is a need to strike a balance, otherwise, we can feel like criticizing our leaders, but indeed we are playing into the game of the foreigners.

Such opinion won't fare well in the contest of reactionary activism, which is good only in situations of incidents, not in the case of large scale strategy shift like we are working on.

Our long list of good leaders assassinated, imprisoned or victim of coup are the proof of the sustained strength of the colonial apparatus.

Without patiently and systematically dismantling the current colonial apparatus, any opposition leader who would take power in Africa, would just be the next vomit of the people.

The Way Forward

Kwame Nkrumah once said ‘Africa must unite or perish!’ Without genuine African unity, our continent will remain at the mercy of imperialist domination and exploitation. Below are 10 simple, yet profound, reasons why Africa must unite under a socialist economic system.

Africa’s Wealth

Africa is extremely wealthy! In fact, it is the wealthiest land mass on the face of the earth. This wealth can be found in its abundant mineral resources and in its huge agricultural potential. Africa’s mineral wealth includes a wide variety and huge volume of resources that are critical to the technical and industrial development of humanity, e.g., gold, platinum, diamonds, manganese, colbalt, cromite, coltan, coal, radium, iron ores, chromium, copper, lead, zinc, tin, titanium, antiomony, tantalum, germanium, lithium, phosphates, bauxite, uranium, petroleum, and natural gas. Similar figures could be provided regarding Africa’s agricultural potential, which remains largely untapped. Although there are an estimated 632 million hectares* of arable land in Africa, only 179 million hectares are actually cultivated, i.e., less than 30% of its arable land. As with Africa’s mineral resources, this arable land is unevenly distributed. In fact, in just four countries (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and the two Sudans), where nearly 40% of this uncultivated land is located, there is enough agriculturally-rich land to feed Africa’s 1 billion population several times over. However, because this wealth is unevenly distributed, showing no relationship to the artificial, imperialist imposed division of the continent, this wealth can only benefit the masses of African people when it is shared on a continent-wide basis.

Pooling Investment Resources

To invest in large scale production, in both industry and agriculture, a large amount of investment resources is needed. When Africa unites, it will be able to pool its investment resources to ensure that it will have enough money to invest in the large-scale production of industrial and agricultural goods and services. Once Africa unites, it will no longer have to go begging the World Bank, IMF, and

various donor nations of the world for loans that are tied to very high interest rates and exploitative conditions designed to keep Africa impoverished and dependent. Africa’s total foreign reserves (held by African central banks) is ½ trillion dollars--$510 billion!

Separately, the various individual states in Africa will never be able to raise the funds required to invest heavily in any aspect of production, especially in the production of heavy equipment designed to build cars, trucks, tractors, roads, bridges, trains, ships, airplanes, and other basic items required of the 21st century. Let each African country invest 5% of its foreign reserves into a giant African Infrastructure bond. In short, genuine African unity, where the wealth and resources of this great

continent are amassed in the ‘Great Bank of Africa’ and shared amongst its people, is the only alternative for Africa to avoid begging for loans that are designed to keep Africa poor and in perpetual debt.

Optimal Market Size

Only a united Africa, with its more than one billion people, can provide the requisite market size to stimulate large-scale production. In fact, according to African Union figures, the actual purchasing power of the continent of Africa is $1.515 trillion, which would place it, if it were one nation, as the 11th highest purchasing power country in the world. However, as it stands, a weak and divided Africa has been forced to turn its purchasing power, i.e., its various balkanized markets, over to the United States and various other industrialized nations of the world. These nations, in turn, use this so-called ‘free market’ opportunity to flood Africa’s markets with goods, many of which are of very dubious quality, produced by their large-scale factories, plants, and farms. These factories, plants and farms, because of the huge size of their markets, benefit from what economists call ‘economies of scale,’ and are, therefore, able to produce their goods at a cheaper cost, per unit. Additionally,

these same companies often benefit from their governments’ effort to protect them from international competition in the form of government subsidies.

As it stands, the producers and potential producers of Africa have little or no incentive to expand production when faced with the tiny markets of their individual so-called nation-states. As a result, workers in other lands are producing everything from underwear to cellular telephones, from handkerchiefs to refrigerators, from matches to motorcycles, from rice to computers, from chicken to automobiles, and exporting them all to Africa.

Protectionism

Only a united Africa will be able to protect its market! China protects its industries by keeping its currency, the rinminbi, relatively low, thus ensuring its exports will remain attractive on the global market. The United States provides millions of dollars of subsidies for its farmers—especially its rice, cotton, and maize growers—in order to protect their goods against local competition in countries around the world. The European Union does much the same, with European poultry farmers being one of their largest beneficiaries, and with the declining African poultry farmers being the hardest hit. Once united, however, Africa will have the power to use tariffs, duties, quotas, salary increments, propaganda, and subsidies.

Bargaining Power

The balkanized states of Africa are always at a disadvantage when, separately, bargaining with the stronger industrial nations of Europe, Asia, and North America. This is especially the case when trying to court Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). For while there will always be occasions when Africa could benefit from FDI, the terms of agreement will never be in our favor if we try to bargain with

the stronger industrialized nations under our current balkanized status. We will always lose! However, once Africa is united, it will be in the best position to set the terms of agreement between it and any potential foreign investor.

Common Currency

One of the best ways to integrate Africa’s economy, enhance inter-African trade, and gain control in setting the prices of African exports is through the use of a common currency. A common African currency will eliminate the transaction costs customers pay when buying a different currency other than their own, especially for those involved in inter-African trade. Secondly, the prices of goods and services will be more transparent, and thus more comparable, when there is a common unit of account. Thirdly, the African common currency will become an international currency of higher value that billions of people, inside and outside of Africa, will have to acquire in order to purchase anything made and sold anywhere in Africa!

Continental Planning

Only a united Africa can plan continentally. Indeed, the major problems facing Africa do not affect the various states separately, nor can they be solved separately. For example, global warming is having a devastating impact on our major river basins in Africa—including the Nile, Congo, Zambezi, Niger, and Orange River Basins. They are slowly, and in some cases, swiftly, drying up! But how do we solve this problem when each of these major river basins interacts with several African micro- states in all of the five regions of Africa? Can (or should) any one African country solve this problem when, ultimately, the entire continent is being affected?

In fact, all of the major challenges facing Africa require continent-wide solutions, based on continent-wide, scientific planning. For instance, there is absolutely no reason for the people of Africa to be going hungry anywhere on the continent, due to drought, with these huge water bodies located throughout the continent. However, with less than 5% of African land being irrigated, is there any wonder that our rain dependent-agriculture systems throughout the continent are unable to feed all of its people? Independent of the critical need to irrigate the continent which, perforce, is a continent-wide task—both financially and planning-wise—the agricultural potential of our great continent can only be realized when we plan, continentally, to make this happen. After all, just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has the agricultural potential to feed the whole of

Africa. How, then, are our people starving when just one of Africa’s 54 micro-states is capable of feeding the entire continent!

Providing Land locked Countries Access to the Sea

A united Africa will allow nearly 20 African countries to acquire the benefits of having immediate access to the sea. With slightly more than 70% of the earth’s surface covered by the ocean, the benefits of having immediate access to marine life are tremendous. They include, minimally, food, medicine, raw materials, mineral resources, tourism, and the protection of geopolitical strategic interests.

Resolving Internal Conflicts and Disputes: Military Defense

The balkanization of Africa at the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 not only created small, economically, nonviable dependencies; it also engendered and/or exacerbated ethnic and religious hostilities throughout the continent. This longstanding strategy of ‘divide and rule’ was used to perfection throughout Africa, which now has more borders than any other continent on earth: 166!

The recipe was simple: Fossilize Africa’s various ethnic groups, many of whom were historical rivals; then force them under the same ‘national roof.’ Independence, then, would be fraught with so many ethnic hostilities that achieving national integration, political stability, and economic development would be practically impossible. As a result, we have an entire continent replete with intrastate and interstate conflicts, many of which, over the years, have blossomed into full scale civil wars.

However, only a unified African government, buttressed with the full-scale might of an All-African Military High Command, will be able to resolve these conflicts and end these wars. The UN, NATO, EU, USA, or any other entity outside of Africa can never and will never solve our problems. None of them have the interest, will, means, or mandate to do so; instead, if left in their hands, they will only make matters worst in order to make Africa more malleable for continued imperialist domination.

Asserting the African Personality

Despite the cultural diversity that exists among the African people, there is a far greater degree of cultural unity that exists wherever you find Africans in the world. This is especially obvious in the common African ethos that binds us together as one. Our core values of humanism, collectivism and egalitarianism, for example, are demonstrated, amongst the masses, everywhere. Even our sense of being, space, and time are fundamentally different from other peoples in the world. However, because of our status as a dominated people without power to determine our destiny, we are rarely able to have our view of the world expressed, regarded, or respected in any meaningful way by the rest of the world, and especially in any of the various corridors of power. Once Africa unites, however, the rest of the world will have to sit up and take notice. We will take our seat on the Security Council of the United Nations and be free to express, to the fullest, the most salient characteristics of what Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah termed, the African Personality.

Dr Edward Mitole, Visiting Professor at the UNISA Institute of African Renaissance Studies and Founder of the African Renaissance Project.

References.

Levin, R.M (1987)”, Democratic Struggles in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, no.40.

Mazrui, A (1986), The African, Pearson Publishers, London, p10-25.

Mbigi, L and Maree, J (1995), Ubuntu: The Spirit of African Transformation Management, Sigma Press, Johannesburg; p1-7.

Mokgoro, J.Y (1998), Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa, Longman, Johannesburg.

Shivji, I.G (1990), Fight My Beloved Continent: New Democracy in Africa, SAPES Trust, Harare.

Muthuki, J (2013).The Complexities of being Foreign Student in South Africa Tertiary Institution. Alternation Edition, (7) 109-127.

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