It’s a painful life for a black foreigner in Southern Africa

Southern Africa is a very unfriendly region to live in as a black foreigner.

Living in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Lesotho, for instance, requires a lot of self-control and understanding. But South Africa takes the cake as the most inhospitable for black African foreigners.

The black community in South Africa tolerates and even admires the non-black foreigners, but they will constantly inflict emotional pain on the Congolese, Nigerians, Kenyans, Zimbabweans and other black Africans.

I spent three of my high school years from 1999 to 2001 in Harare. My family then moved to Johannesburg, where I completed my high school years in West Ridge High in 2003, before returning to Kenya.

I was to return to Johannesburg in April 2004 to study at Monash University. In 2005, I returned to Kenya.

At one of the gateways to South Africa, the OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, one encounters the first, mild vestiges of xenophobia.

A customs official can skim your passport, give you a hard stare and ask if the country indicated is next to Nigeria.

Then without making eye contact, the official may ask, "Are you a drug dealer?"

Male security personnel might go through suitcases of a female traveller, exposing her undergarments while making lewd comments in a local language.

The police randomly flag down vehicles leaving the airport and when they notice that the occupants are black foreigners, they will ask you to open your suitcase, threatening to take you to hospital to check for drugs that they allege you are trafficking, while pressing your stomach.

Any activity that is not appreciated is met with comments like, “Is that what you do in Kenya? In South Africa we don’t do that.” But one of the most annoying questions is, “Where is your motherland?”

When a black South African communicates with another black person, they mostly speak in the local dialect.

When you say you don’t understand Xhosa or Zulu, you are asked, “Where are you from? Why did you come to South Africa? Is there war in your country? Why is your country so poor?”

Most social and professional debates can easily result into you being labelled kwere kwere, a derogatory term for foreigner.

Guns are mostly readily available to the public, therefore in a confrontation one harbours the risk of getting shot.

Areas in Gauteng Province such as Roodeport, Kloofendal and Krugersdorp are generally safe, but townships like Orlando, Alexandria and Dobsonville are dangerous to live in as an African foreigner.

In the apartheid era, the black population was segregated into certain regions, by various tribes during the heights of the oppression.

Through propaganda, they were made to believe that the other tribes were the enemy. After independence in 1994, the animosity was aimed at the rapidly expanding black foreign population.

In apartheid South Africa, the black population was offered poor education, non-creative books, and were starved of knowledge about the African continent. That level of ignorance has persisted to this day.

An average South African believes Ethiopia still suffers famine and there is genocide in Rwanda. Some South Africans cannot locate Angola, Ghana and Zambia on the world map, and others believe Guinea and Guinea Bissau are birds.

The only African countries they might be familiar with are Zimbabwe and Nigeria, due to the high populations of the two countries’ citizens in their nation.

The combined effects of the ignorance and hatred for self that was inflicted by the apartheid regime are corrosive.

They have resulted in the average black South African constantly viewing the non-South African black person as the cause of the problem. The self-hatred is deeply embedded in South African society.

The writer is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative, and founder of Jeff’s Fitness Centre; @jeffbigbrother