President Jacob Zuma’s Freedom Day statement that South Africans are
full of anger and need to be cured should be taken seriously.
The main questions are: what happens when someone is boiling with anger, and who suffers and becomes the victim of this anger?
The
answers are that those who are weak and vulnerable become the victims,
and when people are angry they can be a very effective tool in the hands
of those who might utilise their anger.
Anyone who can help them to release or unleash their anger becomes their leader, irrespective of his intention.
This
must be a lesson to all those irresponsible leaders who, when pursuing
their political and tribal agenda, must avoid making utterances that can
be utilised wrongly by the proponents of crime, tribalism, xenophobia
and all other forms of discrimination.
Zuma’s points on anger
quickly reminded me of what happened during the talks that preceded the
1994 democratic elections – when King Goodwill Zwelithini led his people
to demand the independence of KwaZulu-Natal, and how he was even
prepared to unilaterally declare the province a kingdom.
I can
also recall what happened before the ANC’s Polokwane conference – when
angry ANC members were mobilised under the Zulu nationalism agenda
through T-shirts and slogans.
There are fundamental questions that
we have to ask ourselves when we with the crisis we are currently
facing. Are we xenophobic? Are we Afrophobic? Or, we are something else. It
is not easy to get a word that will fit “khaxa” but we must ask what
would happen in the absence of these African-born “foreign nationals”.
From
my personal experience and understanding as a Zulu who originates from
KwaZulu-Natal, I can tell you that this war and hatred in KwaZulu-Natal
was also directed at South Africans who were born in other provinces –
there is a history of them being called “izilwanyana” and “izizwana”.
All the accusations levelled against “foreign nationals” were levelled
against these South Africans, depending on which province they came
from.I can recall what happened in the mines when parts of the
province were still under the KwaZulu-Natal government. Many people who
didn’t speak isiZulu were harassed, brutally murdered and called
criminals who were stealing jobs from Zulus because they were associated
with the Xhosas – “the ANC’.
It is true that these “xenophobic
attacks” are also happening in Gauteng. In Gauteng, people from
different ethnic groups lived in peace and tolerated one another except
in the migrant labour hostels and in townships around hostels where
non-isiZulu speakers were killed by hostel dwellers, especially during
the political violence of the 1990s.
This helps us to put things
in perspective about the source and the character of the xenophobic
attacks happening mainly in these two provinces.
Maybe the truth
is that our brothers and sisters born in Africa outside of South Africa
happened to be here at the wrong time, when South Africans are filled
with tribal hostility and also consumed by deep-rooted anger created by
apartheid’s divide-and-rule tactics and Bantustan politics.
Now
the victims of the apartheid-created hostility and anger are ganging up
against their own fellow Africans and misdirecting this hostility and
anger to them because they are more vulnerable than them.
As South
Africans, we must urgently address these things – which must be part of
our national agenda. Why do we still have a province called
KwaZulu-Natal and have a king who is treated and behaves as though he is
the king of the whole country? This is an insult to the many
traditional leaders who took part in our liberation struggles while
others were stooges of the apartheid regime.
We may we have
accommodated many races from different parts of the world – outside
Africa – mostly who came to Africa as colonisers, but we now find it
difficult to accommodate just one race in our Africa – the black African
race.
