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South Africa: In Africa? Or Not?
AfricaFocus Bulletin
October 30, 2014 (141030)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"In the early years after I got 'home,' it took me some time
to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa was a
place that began beyond South Africa's borders. I was
surprised to learn that the countries where I had lived --
the ones that had nurtured my soul in the long years of
exile -- were actually no places at all in the minds of some
of my compatriots. They weren't geographies with their own
histories and cultures and complexities. They were dark
landscapes, Conradian and densely forested. Zambia and Kenya
and Ethiopia might as well have been Venus and Mars and
Jupiter. " - Sisonke Msimang
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains an essay by Sisonke
Msimang, "Belonging--why South Africans refuse to let Africa
in," as published earlier this month on the blog
http://africasacountry.com
This eloquent essay, by a South Africa exiled under
apartheid who returned home after the liberation struggle, explores the
contradictions in South African identity, questioning
assumptions from the apartheid era carried over into the
present by many black as well as white South Africans. For
North Americans, this discussion on borders and identity
echoes, albeit with no precise parallels, the contradictory
meanings embodied in identities of "Americans" and the
"Americas."
For a related article focused on the details of current
changes in South African immigration regulations, see James
Hamill, "Closing the Door: South Africa's Draconian
Immigration Reforms," World Politics Review, Oct. 7, 2014.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/lxthpbj
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on South Africa, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/southafrica.php
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Ebola Perspectives
[AfricaFocus is regularly monitoring and posting links on
Ebola on social media. A few are included here. For
additional links, see
http://www.facebook.com/AfricaFocus]
Over the past week, much attention in the U.S. media in
particular has been focused on healthcare workers and Ebola,
including the controversial overreach by governors in New
Jersey, New York, and Illinois to impose quarantines on
returning healthcare workers even if they do not show
symptoms.
- National Nurses United has stressed a more substantive
response to stepping up safety, by prioritizing appropriate
equipment for healthcare workers, who are the most
vulnerable to the virus, over hospital profits. "Help Stop
Ebola—Tell Congress and the White House to Order Hospitals
to Put Safety Standards First" http://tinyurl.com/navs86g
- In the UK, Sierra Leonean medical workers are volunteering
to return to help in their country.
http://tinyurl.com/l8fyxuf
- Many Ebola survivors are now serving in Ebola treatment
centers. For one case see http://tinyurl.com/kx5gf9p
Survivor stories and other daily roundup articles are
featured on the new website http://www.eboladeeply.org
- Survey article on responses to Ebola by Africa and
Africans
http://tinyurl.com/orwxcj8
- Act Up Against Ebola - AIDS activists step up to oppose
quarantines, support science-based responses
https://www.facebook.com/actupagainstebola
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Belonging--why South Africans refuse to let Africa in
Sisonke Msimang
October 22, 2014
http://africasacountry.com / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/o9co46b
[Sisonke Msimang writes about money, power and sex. She
lives in Johannesburg.]
Any African who has ever tried to visit South Africa will
know that the country is not an easy entry destination.
South African embassies across the continent are almost as
difficult to access as those of the UK and the United
States. They are characterised by long queues, inordinate
amounts of paperwork, and officials who manage to be
simultaneously rude and lethargic. It should come as no
surprise then that South Africa's new Minister of Home
Affairs has announced the proposed establishment of a Border
Management Agency for the country. In his words the new
agency "will be central to securing all land, air and
maritime ports of entry and support the efforts of the South
African National Defence force to address the threats posed
to, and the porousness of, our borderline."
Political observers of South Africa will understand that
this is bureaucratic speak to dress up the fact that
insularity will continue to be the country's guiding ethos
in its social, cultural and political dealings with the rest
of the continent.
Perhaps I am particularly attuned to this because of my
upbringing. I am South African but grew up in exile. That is
to say I was raised in the Africa that is not South Africa;
that place of fantasy and nightmare that exists beyond the
Limpopo. When I first came home in the mid 1990s, in those
early months as I was learning to adjust to life in South
Africa, I was often struck by the odd way in which the term
'Africa,' was deployed by both white and black South
Africans.
Because I speak in the fancy curly tones of someone who has
been educated overseas, I was often asked where I was from.
I would explain that I was born to South African parents
outside the country and that I had lived in Zambia and Kenya
and Canada and that my family also lived in Ethiopia.
Invariably, the listener would nod sympathetically until the
meaning of what I was saying sank in. 'Oh.' Then there would
be a sharp intake of breath and a sort of horrified
fascination would take hold. "So you grew up in Africa." The
Africa was enunciated carefully, the last syllable drawn out
and slightly raised as though the statement were actually a
question. Then the inevitable, softly sighed, "Shame."
In the early years after I got 'home,' it took me some time
to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa was a
place that began beyond South Africa's borders. I was
surprised to learn that the countries where I had lived --
the ones that had nurtured my soul in the long years of
exile -- were actually no places at all in the minds of some
of my compatriots. They weren't geographies with their own
histories and cultures and complexities. They were dark
landscapes, Conradian and densely forested. Zambia and Kenya
and Ethiopia might as well have been Venus and Mars and
Jupiter. They were undefined and undefined-able. They were
snake-filled thickets; impenetrable brush and war and famine
and ever-present tribal danger.
Though they thought themselves to be very different, it
seemed to me that whites and blacks in South Africa were
disappointingly similar when it came to their views on
'Africa.' At first I blamed the most obvious culprit:
apartheid. The ideology of the National Party was profoundly
insular, based on inspiring everyone in the country to be
fearful of the other. With the naiveté and arrogance of the
young, I thought that a few lessons in African history might
help to disabuse the Rainbow Nation of the notion that our
country was apart from Africa. I made it my mission to
inform everyone I came across that culturally, politically
and historically we could call ourselves nothing if not
Africans.
What I did not fully understand at that stage was that it
would take more than a few lectures by an earnest
'returnee,' to deal with this issue. This warped idea of
Africa was at the heart of the idea of South Africa itself.
Just as whiteness means nothing until it is contrasted with
blackness as savagery, South African-ness relies heavily on
the construction of Africa as a place of dysfunction, chaos
and violence in order to define itself as functional,
orderly, efficient and civilised.
As such, the apartheid state was at pains to keep its
borders closed. The savages at the country's doorstep were a
convenient bogeyman. Whites were told that if the country's
black neighbours were let in, they would surely unite with
the indigenous population and slit the throats of whites.
By the same token, black people were told that the Africans
beyond South Africa's borders lived like animals; they were
ruled by despots and governed by black magic.
When apartheid ended, the fear of African voodoo throat
slitting should have ended with it. Indeed on the face of
things, the fear of 'Africa,' has abated and has been
replaced by the language of investment. South African
capital has 'opened up' to the rest of the continent and so
fear has been taken over by self-interest and new forms of
extraction.
In the parlance of South Africans, our businesses have 'gone
into Africa.' Like the frontiersmen who conquered the bush
before them they have been quick to talk about 'investment
and opportunity' to define our country's relationship with
the continent. The pre-1994 hostility towards 'Africa' has
been replaced by a paternalism that is equally
disconcerting. Africa needs economic saviours and white
South African 'technical skills' are just the prescription.
Amongst many black South Africans, the script is frightfully
similar. The recent collapse of TB Joshua's church in
Nigeria, in which scores of South Africans lost their lives,
has highlighted how little the narrative has changed in the
minds of many South Africans. Many have called in to radio
shows and social media asking, what the pilgrims were doing
looking for God in such a God forsaken place?
In the democratic era we have converted the hatred of Africa
into a crude sort of exceptionalist chauvinism. South
Africans are quick to assert that they don't dislike
'Africans.' It's just that we are unique. Our history and
society are too different from theirs to allow for
meaningful comparisons. See -- we are even lighter in
complexion than them and we have different features. I have
heard the refrain too many times, 'We don't really look like
Africans.' Never mind the reality that black South Africans
come in all shades from the deepest of browns to the fairest
of yellows.
This idea that South Africans are so singular in our
experience; that apartheid was such a unique experience that
it makes us different from everyone else in the world, and
especially from other Africans, is an important aspect of
understanding the South African approach to immigration.
As long-time researcher Nahla Vahlji has noted, "the
fostering of nationalism produces an equal and parallel
phenomenon: that of an affiliation amongst citizens in
contrast and opposition to what is 'outside' that national
identity." In other words, South Africans may not always
like each other across so-called racial lines, but they have
a kinship that is based on their connection to the apartheid
project. Outsiders -- those who didn't go through the
torture of the regime -- are juxtaposed against insiders. In
other words foreigners are foreign precisely because they
can not understand the pain of apartheid, because most South
Africans now claim to have been victims of the system.
Whether white or black, the trauma of living through
apartheid is seen as such a defining experience that it
becomes exclusionary; it has made a nation of us.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which sought
to uncover the truth behind certain atrocities that took
place under apartheid, was also an attempt to make a nation
out of us. While it won international acclaim as a model for
settling disputes that was as concerned with traditional
notions of justice as it was with healing the wounds of the
past, there were many people inside South Africa who were
sceptical of its mission. As Premesh Lalu and Brendan Harris
suggested as the Commission was starting its work in the mid
1990s, the desire for the TRC to create the narrative of a
new nation led to a selection of "elements of the past which
create no controversy, which create a good start, for a new
nation where race and economic inequality are a serious
problem, and where the balance of social forces is still
extremely fragile."
This is as true today as it was then. Attending the hearings
was crucial for me as a young person yearning to better
understand my country, but I am objective enough to
understand that one of the consequences using the TRC as the
basis for forging a national identity is that 'others' --
the people who were not here in the bad old days -- have
found it difficult to find their place in South Africa.
Aided and abetted by the TRC and the discursive rainbow
nation project, South Africans have failed to create a frame
for belonging that transcends the experience of apartheid.
Twenty years into the 'new' dispensation, many South
Africans still view people who weren't there and therefore
who did not physically share in the pain of apartheid as
'aliens.' The darker-hued these aliens are, the less likely
South Africans are to accept them. Even when black African
'foreigners' attain citizenship or permanent residence, even
when their children are enrolled in South African schools,
they remain strangers to us because they weren't caught up
in our grand narrative as belligerents in the war that was
apartheid.
While it is easy to locate the roots of xenophobia in our
colonial and apartheid history, it is also becoming clear
that our present leaders do not understand how to press the
reset button in order to remake our country in the image of
its future self. They have not been able to outline a vision
for the new South Africa that is inclusive of the millions
of African people who live here and who are 'foreign' but
indispensable to our society for cultural, economic and
political reasons.
America -- with all its problems -- offers us the model of
an immigrant nation whose very conception relied on the idea
of the 'new' world where justice and freedom were possible.
Much can be said about how that narrative ignores those who
were brought to the country as slave cargo. It is patently
clear that America has also denied the founding acts of
genocide that decimated the people of the First Nations who
lived there before the settlers arrived. Indeed, one could
argue that while oppression and murder begat the United
States of America, the country's founding myth is an
inclusive one, a story of freedom and the right to life. In
South Africa murder and oppression also birthed a new
nation, but the founding myth of our post 1994 country has
remained insular and exclusive, a story of freedom and the
right to life for South Africans.
The South African state has always been strongly invested in
seeing itself as an island of morality and order in a
cesspool of black filth. The notion of South Africa's
apartness from Africa is deeply embedded in the psyche that
'new' South Africans inherited in 1994 but it goes back
decades. For example, the 1937 Aliens Act sought to attract
desirable immigrants, whom it defined in the law as those of
'European' heritage who would be easily assimilable in the
white population of the country.' This law stayed on the
books until 1991, when the National Party, in its dying
days, sought to protect itself from the foreseeable 'deluge'
of communist and/or barbaric Africans. The Aliens Control
Act (1991) removed the offensive reference to 'Europeans'
but it kept the rest of the architecture of exclusion
intact.
As a result, when the new South Africa was born the old
state remained firmly in place, continuing to guard the
border from the threats just across the Limpopo, as it
always had. It was a decade before the Bill on
International Migration came into force in 2003 and it too
retained critical elements of the old outlook.
The ANC politicians running the country somehow began to buy
into the idea that immigrants posed a threat to security.
Immigration continued to be seen as a containment strategy
rather than as a path to economic growth. As President Jacob
Zuma tightens his grip on the security sector, and extends
the power and reach of the security cluster in all areas of
governance, this attitude seems to be hardening rather than
softening.
None of South Africa's current crop of political leaders
seem to be asking the kinds of questions that will begin to
resolve the question the role that immigration can and
should play in the building of our new nation. South
Africa's political leadership sees Africa in one of two
ways: either as a market for South African goods,
differentiated only to the extent that Africans can be sold
our products; or as a threat, part of a deluge of the poor
and unwashed who take 'our jobs and our women.'
No one in government today seems to understand that postapartheid
South Africa continues to be the site of multiple
African imaginations. One cannot deal with 'Africa' without
dealing with the subjectivity of what South Africa meant to
Africa historically, and the disappointment that a free
South Africa has signified in the last decade.
So much of the pan-Africanist project -- even with its
failings -- has been about an imagined Africa in which the
shackles of colonialism have been thrown off. South Africa
has always been an iconic symbol in that imaginary. Robben
Island and Nelson Mandela, the burning streets of Soweto,
Steve Biko's bloodied, broken body: these images did not
just belong to us alone. They brought pain and grief to a
continent whose march towards self-determination included
us, even when our liberation seemed far, far away. With the
invention of the 'new' South Africa the crucial importance
of African visions for us have taken a back seat. South
Africans have refused to admit that we are a crucial aspect
of the African project of self-determination. In failing to
see ourselves in this manner, we have denied ourselves the
opportunity to be propelled -- transported even -- by the
dreams of our continent.
What would South Africa be like without the 'foreign'
academics who teach mathematics and history on our campuses?
How differently might our students think without their deep
and critical insights about us and the place we occupy in
the world? How might we understand our location and our
political geography differently if 'foreigners' were not
here offering us different ways of wearing and inhabiting
blackness? What would our society look like without the tax
paying 'foreigners' whose children make our schools richer
and more diverse? What would inner city Johannesburg smell
like without coffee ceremonies and egusi soup? What would
Cape Town's Greenmarket square be without the Zimbabwean and
Congolese taxi drivers who literally make the city go?
In an era in which borders are coming down and becoming more
porous to encourage trade and contact, South Africa is
introducing layers of red tape to the process of moving in
and out of the country. The outsider has never been more
repulsive or threatening than s/he is now. This is precisely
why Gigaba's announcement of the Border Management Agency is
so worrisome. Yet it was couched in careful language. Ever
mindful of the xenophobic reputation that South Africa has
in the rest of the continent, Gigaba asserts, "We value the
contributions of fellow Africans from across the continent
living in South Africa and that is why we have continued to
support the AU and SADC initiatives to free human movement;
but [my emphasis] this cannot happen haphazardly,
unilaterally or to the exclusion of security concerns."
Ah, there it is! The image of Africa and 'Africans' as
haphazard, disorderly and ultimately threatening is in stark
contrast to South Africa and South Africans as organised,
efficient and (ahem) peace-loving. The subtext of Gigaba's
statement is that South Africans require protection from
'foreigners' who are hell bent on imposing their chaos and
violence on us.
Nowhere has post-apartheid policy suffered from the lack of
imagination more acutely than in the area of immigration.
Before they took power, many in the ANC worried about the
ways in which the old agendas of the apartheid regime state
would assert themselves even under a black government. They
understood that there was a real danger of the apartheid
mentality capturing the new bureaucrats. Despite these
initial fears, the new leaders completely under-estimated
the extent to which running the state would succeed in
dulling the imaginations of the new public servants and
burying their intellect under mountains of forms and rules
and processes. They also didn't understand that xenophobia
would be so firmly lodged in the soul of the country, that
it would be one of the few phenomena would unite blacks and
whites.
South Africa's massive immigration fail is a tragedy for all
kinds of reasons. At the most basic level, the horrific
levels of violence and intimidation that many African
migrants to South Africa face on a daily basis represent an
on-going travesty of justice. Yet in a far more complex and
nuanced way, South Africa's rejection of its African
identity is a tragedy of another sort. All great societies
are melanges, a delicious brew of art and culture and
intellect. They draw the best from near and far and make
them their own. By denying the contribution of Africa to its
DNA, South Africa forgoes the opportunity to be a richer,
smarter, more cosmopolitan and interesting society than it
currently is.
In spite of ourselves South Africans still have a chance to
open our arms to the rest of the continent. The window of
opportunity for allowing our guests to truly belong to us as
they have always allowed us to belong to them is still open.
I fear however, that the window is closing fast.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic
publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on
African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and
international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by
William Minter.
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