The Sunday News
Four telling events have punctuated the beginning of the year 2022 in the Republic of South Africa. So telling in their spectacle these events have been that they have momentarily stolen attention away from the ravaging Covid-19 pandemic; a pandemic that is slowly graduating into an endemic, something terrible that people must learn to live with as an unwelcome but still inevitable companion to daily life.
The King of the Khoi national group was dragged to court for growing Marijuana in the gardens of the Union Building, just outside the offices of the President. The Parliament building in Cape Town went up in flames causing damages that will require more than Five Billion Rand to repair.
A senior member of the African National Congress, a Minister and member of the National Executive Committee, has critiqued the Constitution and the judiciary for allegedly maintaining apartheid social inequalities decades after political independence. And the Minister of Home Affairs has, popularly supported by some marauding crowds, taken a stand against foreigners in South Africa.
In their nature, telling events are not born with any meaning but they are given meaning by those who observe and experience them. No matter how big or small an event is if it has not been experienced or observed, and given meaning, it does not exist.
I want to do my part in giving meaning to these four telling events that look separate and random but are enjoined by their true nature as signs of the times in South Africa.
The King of the Khoikhoi outside the Union Buildings
The Khoi Khoi whose name means ‘man of man’ or ‘the real people’ are the true indigenous natives of what is presently called South Africa. Their history in the land dates to many centuries. They are the native and indigenous people that Dutch settlers found in the mid-17th Century. The settlers conquered, colonised and enslaved the people that they derogatorily called the ‘Bush Men.’
Their land was appropriated without compensation. Dispossessed of their cattle and displaced from the land and whatever title and dignity they had the Khoi Khoi became true colonial subjects and foreigners in their own God-given land. Combined with their friends and rivals, the San, the name of the natives became ‘Khoisan,’ for Khoi and the San.
Decades after the end of apartheid, the Khoi king lives outside the Union Building, the seat of power and symbol of the democratic dispensation. For him and his people very little has changed. It is for that reason that the King, for the past three years has camped in the gardens of the Union Building in protest, demanding attention from the President and the Nation.
The burning parliament
It is a paradox that when news broke out that the Parliament building in Cape Town was up in flames some groups of South Africans publicly celebrated. The building where the laws of the land are made went up in flames, allegedly torched by a homeless man that has some mental illness. If the Union Buildings are the seat of power the parliament building is the seat of the law.
That some South Africans, many in their number, found the burning of the seat of law an event to be celebrated is queer.
It might have taken the courage of a mentally unwell fellow to torch the building, but it looks like that many sane South Africans would have loved to do it themselves, only that their sanity always prevailed, perhaps.
It is noteworthy that South Africa may perhaps claim the title of being the protest capital of the world. And when South Africans protest, trains, buses, cars, buildings and people burn. One scholar wrote of the “burning desire” amongst South Africans to burn and bring down buildings, vehicles and people. It might be the anti-apartheid philosophy of the late Oliver Reginald Tambo that still haunts South Africa. Tambo spoke of “rendering apartheid South Africa ungovernable” through peaceful protests, sabotage and fire.
But some years after apartheid some South Africans still believe in burning things and people, and in rendering the Republic ungovernable. The language, diction and vocabulary of fire, is a true South African language.
The trouble with foreigners
Foreigners are the real creatures of the modern colonial world system. The colonial system created nations (identity communities) and countries (landed territories), built borders around them, and crafted laws of citizenship and subjection. Being a citizen or a subject, as Mahmood Mamdani noted, is the real national question in all countries and their nations in the present world. The outsiders of nations and countries, the aliens and arrivants, the subjects that are not citizens, are the foreigners. They have all sorts of names depending on the nature of their alienation.
They can be immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, fugitives and or expatriates. In any country the foreigners are the true scape goats. If food and water are short, it is the foreigners that are finishing it. When diseases break out, it is the foreigners that brought them from their strange countries. They are responsible for all the criminality and delinquency in the country.
What is true but perhaps not easy to understand is that if the world inter-state and inter-national system remains as it is foreigners will always be there.
They are, as things stand, the true citizens of the world that cannot be finished by any amount of hate and harassment. Is it not interesting that in South Africa it should be the Khoi and the San that are talking about foreigners in their land, not the arrivants from other lands that are pointing fingers at other arrivants and crying foreigners?
It is even more interesting that the white people who are largely the descendants of settlers and foreigners from other continents do not have their being foreigners questioned and used against them, because they have the power and the privilege.
It is not only true, philosophically speaking, that everyone is a foreigner somewhere, but also that everyone is a foreigner everywhere. Foreigners do not come to an end because the most native and indigenous person can wake up a foreigner tomorrow morning, depending on who decides and what standard is used to name the foreigner. The leader of ActionSA, the party spearheading the South Africa for South Africans mantra, has been reminded that he is a third-generation Mozambican whose hatred of foreign nationals is self-hate.
Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s point is that the South African Constitution and the judiciary have done nothing to undo the social inequalities between blacks and whites that were created by colonialism.
What she means is that the independence of South Africa from apartheid did not remove apartheid but just gave political power to blacks but the economy has remained in the hands of descendants of the conquerors.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from KwaMabusabesala Village, in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
