NGWIRI: South Africa attacks and the frustrated souls of black folk

Those who never had to contend with any form of discrimination can count themselves lucky, for there is nothing as demeaning, as dehumanising, as to be regarded as an object of hate just because of who you are.

When someone claims he was accosted by a bigot, it is easy to dismiss the matter offhand, arguing that it is just part and parcel of the human condition. But it is not.

People who have lived in the Diaspora have sordid tales to tell, but a huge number of them are “economic refugees” who are only looking out for Number One and therefore shouldn’t complain.

However, there is another class of migrants, people who flee their homelands to escape civil war, political violence or even ethnic cleansing.

These are genuine asylum seekers, and by all international conventions, they should be assisted and protected by the host government.

But what if such a government turns a blind eye when the migrants are being killed and their properties destroyed simply because they are non-natives?

Some of them were even born in those countries and know no other home, and, therefore, telling them to go back to their own countries is cruel and inhuman.

That is why what is happening in South Africa is so mindless and humiliating. In fact, it is no different from what happened to black Africans in the same country during apartheid.

One of the hallmarks of that era was that the black population was herded like so many head of cattle into sprawling slums next to opulent estates as sources of cheap labour, and then later confined in the so-called Bantustans where they even had their own puppet “kings” and chiefs.

It is therefore supremely ironic that those who suffered such indignities are now subjecting foreigners in their midst to the same treatment.

Discrimination against fellow human beings comes in many forms. The vilest, in my view, is racism in which the victims are treated like sub-humans.

Unfortunately for Africans, they bear the brunt of racism everywhere they go. As far as I know, there are three major reasons for this, and poverty is the worst.

We have never really won the respect of other races because, 50 years after independence, we are still the poorest continent and will remain so in the future unless a miracle occurs.

This is because our political leaders and bureaucrats have made it part of their job description to loot as much as they can as fast as possible.

What happens then is inevitable; since any country’s wealth is finite, and more than half of it is stolen by a few, there is never enough to go around.

And since most of that wealth is concentrated in a few elite hands, total indigence of half the populations is assured.

That is why the gap between the wealthy and the poor keeps widening in the continent, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, we deliberately mismanage our economies only to flock to Europe to look for menial jobs, or to Arab countries to clean other people’s filthy underwear.

The other reason is that this continent seems to have a disproportionate number of international crooks — drug runners, fraudsters, money launderers, counterfeiters — you name it.

Did you, for instance, know that there are some cities in China where Kenyans cannot get rooms to spend the night?

It appears that many chaps from some west African countries somehow acquire Kenyan passports after which they travel back to China to commit crime.

There are a few more anecdotes of that nature, and I am sure frequent flyers have similar experiences they can relate, but it all boils down to something that former President Moi used to tell us: “Nobody likes Africans.”

The oft-repeated statement was, of course, a trifle hyperbolic, but there seems to be some truth in it.

Why would anyone look at us kindly when most African countries are always on the verge of turning into failed states due to incompetent leadership?

Anyway, to go back to our “thread”, the rest of the world does not like us and in South Africa they do not like fellow Africans.

No less a personage than Julius Malema has lamented that fact.

Since 1994, there have been various xenophobic attacks targeting migrants especially from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, some of which have resulted in death and mayhem.

To explain these attacks, some experts say the rioters are angry at unfulfilled promises by politicians, rising crime, and job losses to migrants.

However, none of those explanations are adequate. After all, South Africa is an economic powerhouse compared to many other African countries, and none of these things happen in those other countries.

What the experts should be saying is that the gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening, and in that country, this divide always had a racial component — the white folks still control the economy while the majority poor blacks still live in destitution, so they take out their frustrations on vulnerable migrants.

Any attempt to gloss over this reality is a mere cop-out.