South Africa has a long history of movement of labour within the country and within the region. Have we forgotten that workers from Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland risked their lives to mine the minerals that built our country’s economy?
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To that I would like to add the fact that when our brothers in South Africa were in need, we were there for them. My country welcomed many refugees from South Africa fleeing Apartheid, especially after the June 16 events.

On top of that, our countries, “the Frontline States,” (1) were frequently attacked by South Africa, with the complicity of the United states, for harbouring ANC, PAC and brothers and sisters belonging to others parties. During these attacks, our nationals were also killed, but we saw it as a loss to war. We were waging a war and supporting our siblings across the border.

Why is it that now these same siblings hack and murder us when we need them? We helped them when they were in need for ideological reasons. Why won’t they help us when we’re in need for survival reasons (food, livelihood, a roof, etc.)? It is indeed true that…

A: The collapse of apartheid and the advent of democracy in South Africa was regionally supported by a group of southern African states called the Frontline States. These were Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and, from 1980, Zimbabwe. The Frontline States were formed in 1970 to co-ordinate their responses to apartheid and formulate a uniform policy towards apartheid government and the liberation movement. For the liberation movement in South Africa, the formation of the Frontline States was a welcomed development and a new front in the fight against apartheid.
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B: Support from the African frontline states was crucial, and it came at great human and economic costs.
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C: At the height of apartheid racism and discrimination parents even had mea and ways of reminding themselves that they are human beings and they belong to Africa. This included naming their children in a manner that maintained this memory. Phyllis Naidoo writes about a South African couple who were exiled in Lesotho and named their first child “Le Rona Re Batho” (We too are people). This forms a theme of a real story where the father to Le Rona Re Batho was killed together with about 44 other South Africans and Lesotho nationals in a raid by the apartheid forces of the time. These were people who were crying out proclaiming that they were also people and deserved to be treated like human beings. The same cry is made by those who have suffered through these senseless xenophobic attacks- “LE RONA RE BATHO!”
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Kameelah adds to the discussion on xenophobia in South Africa by linking to a number of articles in Pambazuka News and by making a connection between the violence, poverty and global food crisis.

connected to this food crisis is the rise in violence against immigrants especially in south africa–joburg to be specific though cape town has had it’s share of anti-somali violence………….it certainly breaks my heart to see poor folks turn on each other rather than channeling this anger in a productive way that targets the people and institutions that are more responsible for this crisis than a 20-something zimbabwean fleeing mugabe. but in reality, having not eaten in two days and being unemployed for two months, i really cannot expect a town hall meeting and a civil discussion. folks are hungry and frustrated.

One of the articles in Pambazuka News by Owen Sichone, traces violences across the continent - Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda - and asks why anyone should be surprised over SA’s response to foreigners. The important point is that Sichone reiterates the connection between anti-immigration, poverty and social inequalities.

So why is Pius “confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid” ? Like the Biafrans, they have been let done by their leaders. Just look at post-elections Kenya and see the petty bourgeois selfishness that Museveni criticised in his own country and you will understand that South African leaders have not just keep silent about the support they received from the Frontline States (including Nigeria) but that they have not shared the national cake equitably. The inherited Brazilian style gap between rich and poor always creates violence in society. There is still apartheid in post apartheid South Africa and it is not just the foreign Africans who suffer. Indeed the Nigerian doctors and other professionals are more likely to be beneficiaries of the end of the apartheid system than the poor workers whose factories closed down because of the flood of cheaper Chinese goods onto a previously protected market and now have no hope of ever earning wages again.

So let us not portray South Africans as ignorant, ungrateful or just bloodthirsty. The only way to reverse xenophobia, whether in Nigeria, Russia or South Africa is by exposing its roots in social inequalities and joining the struggle against social injustice.

The reasons given by indigenous people for their dislike of immigrants is the same whether in South Africa, Britain, France or the US. They are taking our jobs, our women, they are responsible for increases in the crime rate, they walk off the plane / boat / bus and into a flat, they undermine our labour. Sit on a bus in London and watch when a Somali woman gets on with a pram and a toddler. The hostility is so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife and it’s not just white people who are hostile. The reality is so far from the myth, so how does the myth begin to dominate and feed the hostility and violence? The media creates and uses the myth to either attack one political party’s policies or support another, so in the UK you have a situation where the present Labour government is desperately trying to hold on to power and immigration is the ideal issue to latch on to because it feeds into people’s myths about why they don’t have a job or a flat. You only need one story in the Daily Mail about a Nigerian woman who “heard” you can get a flat easy with a child so went to Nigeria bought a baby for £150 and came back to get a council flat, for all immigrants to be crooks, liars and baby thieves and worse “Africans sell their babies!” Hating and blaming someone you see every day for your poverty is so much easier than facing up to the fact that you don’t have a flat because Thatcher sold everyone the idea of home ownership as opposed to social housing which was never replaced. And now there just isn’t enough to go around and never will be unless a government is elected that will start to build the millions of homes needed - in that sense the chickens cant roost cause they have no home to come back to.

Tags:
South Africa
Immigration

My friend Beauty at “Nigeria What’s New” posted on the violence against immigrants taking place in South Africa and wonders

why bloggers in the diaspora are not screaming about this horrible human rights issue since the story broke on May 1st.

Good point, Beauty after all if this was happening in Spain, France, Britain or any where else in Europe we would be screaming. In fact I was screaming the other day about asylum seekers in Britain. Talk to any African foreigners and they will tell you their own experience of xenophobia in South Africa. But these encounters are superficial and hide the truth. What is happening is far more complex than is being presented in the reports as violence and xenophobia. Nonetheless, these very disturbing videos here and here and here, fit well with the one posted from last week on Race Hate in Russia. More importantly the videos tell us how governments with the support of the media can and have used immigration as a way of deflecting people away from the real issues and their failure to meet the valid expectations of the people.

This article in the Times [A simple recipe for xenophobia] points to a number of factors that have no doubt contributed to the violence.

What caused the terrible scenes unfolding in our country today: children beaten and displaced, women raped and men left with pieces of flesh hanging from their faces, homeless and hungry and desperate?

What led to a situation where young men were unashamed to stand in front of television cameras and say they will kill foreigners?

We should not be surprised. For the ANC, led by Zuma and Mbeki, the chickens are coming home to roost………….

These people are behaving like barbarians because the ANC has failed — despite numerous warnings — to act on burning issues that are well known for having sparked similar eruptions across the globe.

But the bulk of the cocktail comprises the failed state that is Zimbabwe. The country’s economy has collapsed. Its political leaders, security services and agents are looting the treasury. Zimbabweans are fleeing.

The writer, as in the last paragraph, still externalises the violence by bringing it back to Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe. But it is not just Zimbabweans who are victims of the violence - all Africans are - from townships to universities. In fact the statement only fuels the violence against refugees. Yes clearly there is a struggle for scare resources such as food, housing and jobs but this does not explain everything. The truth lies more in the total failure of the post Apartheid government to bring about meaningful social change for the masses with the country largely remaining in an economic time warp of white rule. The violence is an indictment on the government which has engaged in an outright attack on the poor in urban and rural areas which is reminiscent of apartheid and what people see is more hardship not less.

The media and the government are naming the violence as xenophobia but the reality is that people have reached boiling point after 14 years of dashed hopes and have now turned on the most vulnerable in their communities, refugees, and foreigners to vent their frustration. This in no way justifies the violence but does go some way to explain the fragility of the country.

I would add that progressive shack dwellers’ movements, like Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) which has members in some shack settlements in Jo’burg, as well as the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, have always taken a strong position against this violence. Abhalali has always been clear that it welcomes all shack dwellers in to the movement irrespective of where they come from and indeed has hosted men and women from Zimbabwe’s shackdweller communities as well as reached out to the residents as far away as Cite Soleil in Haiti.

It is a tragedy that such attacks are happening in poor working class communities, where the poor are fighting the poor. But there is a clear reason for this. Many in our communities are made to believe that unemployment is caused by foreigners who take jobs in the country – this is simply untrue. Forty percent (40%) of all South African citizens are unemployed and this has been the case for many years. This is not the result of immigrants from other countries coming to South Africa but rather, the result of the anti-poor, profit-seeking policies of the government and the behaviour of the capitalist class. Such massive and sustained unemployment is a structural problem of a capitalist system that cares little about the poor, wherever they are from/live.

Links: Tourista Africana

The Sowetan

Tags:
South Africa
Immigration

Google Earth and the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) have added a new layer of refugee camps around the world - Chad, Darfur, Palestine, Western Sahara to name a few.

Google Earth’s new mapping programme takes you on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.

The first use of this geospatial tool focuses on refugees and displaced people located in remote areas of Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Sudan’s volatile Darfur region. Sit in front of your computer and, with a few clicks, see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.

Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away. To start your journey, click here.

Haitham of Sabbah’s blog was initially very excited over the project until he realised that “NONE of the Palestinian refugee camps within the Occupied Palestinian Territories are published there”

Haitham suggests two possibilities for ignoring the Palestinian camps: there has been an end to Israeli occupation of Palestine and they forgot to tell the world; or possibly the UNHCR doesn’t recognise the Palestinian refugee camps. I wonder if there is something bordering on a conspiracy of silence going on here between Google and the UNHCR. We all know how strong the Israeli lobby is in the US so I don’t think it is beyond belief.

It is disturbing to see such a horrible mistake (intentional or unintentional, we need to know) spread by a UN agency which claims to be taking care of refugees all around the world. The UNRWA lists the name of all the refugees camps in West Bank (19 camp) and Gaza (8 camps) and their population (West Bank 486,479, Gaza 478,272, total 964,751). Not only that, but they also have location maps for these refugees camps on their website:

A petition has been created to ask Google Earth and UNHCR to correct the mistake and to include the Palestinian camps on the map. You can sign the petition here.

Links:
Google Earth map of Darfur atrocities
Silobreaker - Google maps various

Tags:

Google Earth
Refugee Camps

Via Sabbah’s Blog

Links: Anthem For Someone’s Child

Tags:
Palestine
Gaza
Israel