By Takura Zhangazha*
A couple of months ago, after the November 2021 South African local government election results were officially announced I came to the realisation
that xenophobia was becoming an electoral issue in our neighbouring country. This was mainly because some of the emerging
parties that had made some sort of newfound headway in the elections had
carried a 'South Africa first' message.
And in the process had affected the traditionally anticipated majorities
of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party. Even with the mainstream opposition parties such
as the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the seemingly radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Even when the issue of special permits for Zimbabweans came to the fore in the aftermath of these local government elections, I had penned on this platform an article titled, ‘Special Permits as Passes: Countering South African False Consciousness’. In it I had argued in the main about the umbilical cord that binds all black Southern Africans historically on what would be considered a basic and easily understandable historical point. Based on again historical migration patterns, the colonially forced labour migration to mines and farms from countries surrounding the settler colonial state that was South Africa.
And how a lack of a more popular understanding of this history has led to what
would be a false consciousness among South Africa’s majority black population. By way of a regrettable assumption of
proximity to colonially inherited capital and ‘whiteness’ as a symbol of post independence national success. Let alone
revolution.
Not that I thought my brief write up would amount to much in
South Africa itself since it was written more to reach out to our own
Zimbabwean colleagues in the regional Diaspora as well as try and affect our
local policy makers’ understanding of emerging foreign policy concerns.
What has happened since the turn of the year (2022) in South
Africa should raise a lot of Zimbabwean eyebrows. The current minister of home affairs
of the South African government Aaron Motsoaledi undertook a visit to the
Beitbridge border post between Zimbabwe and South Africa to briefly inspect preventative
measures of what were referred to by the media as illegal border crossers. With
the South African mainstream and social media referring to them as mainly
Zimbabweans as a predetermined media story line that thrives on raising (black)
xenophobic alarm and despondency.
More recently, the whole xenophobic aspect of the local government
election results has been playing itself out in disputes at forming coalitions
or electing council committees by political parties in major South African
cities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria.
And only this week opposition leader of the EFF Julius
Malema launched a rather convoluted programme of visiting restaurants, farms
and security companies to inspect how many foreign nationals are employed
there. Even though before the local government
elections he had taken on a Pan African tone of seeking to embrace all Africans
in South Africa’s political economy.
All of these immediate events between December 2021 and now January
2022 point to a newly reinvigorated desire by South African political leaders
to exploit what they now know to be a general xenophobic sentiment among their electorate.
Especially after the results of the local government elections indicate to any serious analyst that this will be in an electoral issue within
the context of internal party congresses leading up to the 2024 general
elections in that country. Especially
because the newer opposition political parties have been effectively but tragically
playing to its populist gallery. Never
mind how it will also spiral into ethnocentric connotations given the divisions
within the ruling ANC as well as the white liberal counter hegemony of the opposition
DA in the Western Cape.
Cutting across these populisms and assumed counter
narratives is the common factor again of South Africans and their leaders
assuming an ‘exceptionalism’ of their country as separate from the rest of the African continent. Almost in similar fashion to that of Donald Trump’s American populism. Where everything foreign is seen as a threat
to either jobs or a populist South African ‘way’. Which in reality does not exist because the
history of the country has no singular trajectory or narrative. But it is all now being done in order to reposition parties
in the expected highly contested general election of 2024 .
It is really a question of who can rise above this Trumpian parapet in order to counter such shallow xenophobic populism we are seeing
today.
Let me turn to a penultimate point that some of my
colleagues here in Zimbabwe and in South Africa will obviously raise. And this, again, is a populist argument that
Zimbabwe must fix its own country in order for its citizens not to want to
cross borders. While the Zimbabwean government
can never wash its hands of its own complicity neither can its South African
counterpart instrumentalise populism at the expense of regional historical
solidarity that extends beyond even Zimbabwe.
Neither should we as ordinary citizens either side of the border gate-keep political-economic histories of colonialism and its post/neo-colonial
political economies to our collective detriment.
Finally, and this is primarily a message to South African
politicians who are seeking to mimic Trumpism on this African side of the
Global South. The making of progressive, Pan-African history is never realised
in immediate populist or hate motivated languages based on gatekeeping colonial
political economies. Or the ‘othering’ of those that you are, have been, essentially
struggle comrades with. The xenophobic
electoral strategies that the ANC, EFF, DA and newer political parties now seem
to be employing do not bode well for who we were, we are and who we can be. As Southern Africans and as Africans.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
(takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)
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