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A bad reason to drop machetes

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I don’t know about you, but I am really finding this “Africa liberated us” narrative rather irritating.

At all the Africa Day events, leaders kept repeating the line that we should not be xenophobic because South Africans owe their freedom to outsiders.

This distortion of history has been repeated many times in the past few months as politicians tried to convince South Africans that it was not a good idea to hack foreigners with machetes and that burning people alive was not nice.

The most irritating thing about this narrative is that it makes the help South Africa received the prime reason we should refrain from unleashing violence on foreigners. If one were to follow this logic then it would mean our xenophobia should differentiate between those who helped us and those who didn’t. Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, a xenophobe would then be able to argue that it is okay to chop up those who did not help to fight apartheid.

Which then takes us to the next point: who really helped us? One of the loudest anti-South Africa voices during and after the xenophobic upheavals was the government of Malawi.

Malawi happens to have been a close friend of apartheid South Africa. The country went against the resolutions of the Organisation of African Unity and maintained diplomatic relations with Pretoria. Its president for life, Hastings Banda, happily visited apartheid South Africa and hosted National Party leaders. The relationship did not just stop with diplomacy.

During the sanctions years, Malawi was South Africa’s biggest trading partner in Africa. It also received assistance from the pariah state, with South Africa helping to build the infrastructure of one of its few friends.

Today, the impoverished nation is a mass exporter of humans to South Africa, where Malawians have often found themselves victims of xenophobic violence.

Should they be punished for Banda’s sins?

The other mass exporter of humans is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko was also very intimate with Pretoria. So intimate that he even allowed the South African military to use the country as a springboard for its intelligence and elite units wanting to infiltrate Angola. Should Congolese car guards therefore be fair game?

Then there was Somalia, whose government can be described as turncoat. After initially being a strong supporter of liberation movements, that country’s dictator, Siad Barre, turned against the ANC when the Soviet Union sided with enemy Ethiopia during a regional war in the 1980s.

Arguing that “South Africa and Somalia have the same aggressors”, Barre sidled up to the Pretoria government, which was only just too happy to grow its tiny circle of friends. It supplied Somalia with arms and the countries shared intelligence. Does this justify the looting of Somali spaza shops?

Now to turn to countries that did support the struggle. In the premier league of the list of countries who literally took the bullet for us are the front-line states, which were subjected to military destabilisation by the apartheid military.

In the case of Mozambique, Frelimo’s support for the liberation movements resulted in apartheid South Africa backing the barbaric Renamo rebel movement. Many other countries on the continent lent financial and logistical support and provided education for exiles. They also suffered economically due to not trading with the continent’s biggest economy.

So there is no question at all that parts of Africa made sacrifices for the people of South Africa. The question is whether we now have a huge and everlasting debt to pay. And what form this payment should take and on what terms.

It is the view of this lowly newspaperman that the best way of repaying a debt for international solidarity is general good neighbourliness and reciprocation through more international solidarity. In this regard, South Africa has more than overpaid its debt. South Africa’s role in development in its 21 years as a democracy has surpassed that of countries that have been part of the international community for much longer.

The country’s participation in peacekeeping missions has been outstanding and has stretched the country’s limited resources. Since South Africa became democratic, particularly during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency, the country has been an uncompromising champion for African issues on global platforms. South African companies have become leading investors, infrastructure developers and job creators on the continent.

It is these attributes we should be emphasising rather than being meekly grateful.

Repeatedly telling our citizens they owe their freedom to someone else is not only wrong but also minimises their role in their own liberation. Most importantly, it misses the point that we need to educate people about the wrongfulness of hating and beating up strangers.

There should be much more convincing and effective ways of fighting xenophobia.

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