It’s a hardy annual but – despite, or maybe because of, all the empty platitudes – xenophobia is alive and well in South Africa.
It starts with the name we use. We’ve compartmentalised it and used academia to render it into an abstract concept, unlike racism, which we have been exceptionally good at reminding white people of their generational sins.
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Racism, white on black that is, has largely been pushed underground because the consequences for being found to be racist are immediate and real; ask Adam Catzavelos, Justine Sacco or Penny Sparrow.
That’s the way it should be. The constitution allows you the freedom to believe what you want, but it doesn’t extend to the consequences of speaking it out loud.
The problem is xenophobia gets a free pass. There is not much difference between some of the growing anti-migrant lobbies in South Africa and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists almost 100 years ago.
Assisted by politicians who should know better, it won’t take much to evolve into a Kristallnacht and from there, to “final solutions”.
There is nothing abstract about xenophobia, not if you are a Somali shopkeeper who had your spaza shop looted and burnt to the ground, or if you were Ernesto Nhamuave set alight, ironically in the Ramaphosa informal settlement, in 2008.
It doesn’t help lies are recast as truths: all Nigerians are scammers, Zimbabweans and Malawians steal jobs, Mozambicans abuse the system to get free schooling and health care, all Somalians are extortionists, etc.
It’s an old playbook perfected a century ago that allowed the Holocaust. It was resurrected by the Interahamwe Hutus in Rwanda.
South Africa does have a serious illegal migration problem, but it needs to be dealt with correctly and consistently – tightening the borders and creating transparent pathways for immigrants to settle and work here legally, paying rates and taxes, while fairly deporting illegals.
Instead, far too many Africans are forced to exist in a half-world of corruption and exploitation.
It’s a travesty by any definition, but an absolute disgrace given the hospitality, safety and the kindness our liberation movements enjoyed when they needed it most – especially since one of those movements ended up as the SA government.
But the easiest step of all would be to treat xenophobes like we do racists because, after all, there’s no difference, the victims are still black.