The Lie We Have Been Living
Over at Pambazuka News Mukoma wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji remind us that South Africa is all of us, lamenting that:
The mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding. There is no point in running away from this. The edifices we have of Truth and Reconciliation, post-apartheid healing, rainbow nations and multi-party post-dictatorship democracies are coming down all around us.
Africa's problems are boiling onto the surface everywhere you turn this year. It grieves my spirit. What happened to hope for Africa and all that other positivity?
Still, we have to concede it was presumptuous of nations to attempt to 'move ahead' while leaving behind a majority of their people. What could we all have been smoking? How far did we imagine we could take this? Now the question is: are we learning our lesson, or do we remain criminally clueless?
I certainly hope time will have a redeeming story to tell.
When time tells.
(And to be clear, I'm not excusing xenophobia and its deadly consequences in South Africa. It is what it is.)
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3 Other Thoughts:
I don't know if I'm the only one who wonders if the greed and the desire for power and dominance that underlies majority of the world's woes will some day vanish or should we simply make the best of a world where those two forces will never cease to control us or fight for control over us.....in short I am asking, should we expect that the poverty in Africa will simply cycle into the poverty of some other people's a century or so from now or will we one day actually manage to suppress this human desire for greed and power and create an egalitarian society?
Immigrants to Italy have been beaten, killed and are now being treated in an openly racist manner; xenophobic violence is not an exclusively African phenomenon.
Mukoma and Manji's despairing conclusion - and yours - only follows if the African outbreaks of xenophobic violence have the same cause. That's a big ask: the violence in Kenya was (mostly) deliberate, politically-motivated ethnic cleansing and attendant counter-violence; SA's doesn't seem to possess the same control, organisation or clear political goals. It's too early to tell just what the causes are there - which doesn't mean that inequality isn't deplorable or that ethnic violence is an acceptable response to it in either case.
I hear what you're saying Daniel. But I as I look at what has happened both in South Africa and in Kenya, I see also the underlying theme of disenfranchised people venting their frustration. The construction, the context, the expression are all a lot more complicated than that, I will concede, but there's a great deal of that in there as well, it cannot be denied.
Mwangi, your energy is amazing.
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