TOPIC: IS THE SHINE OF NELSON MANDELA’S ALL-INCLUSIVE VISION FOR POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA DIMMING?: XENOPHOBIA – THE BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN TOWNSHIP “BITCH IS IN HEAT”, AGAIN.
“(Democrats who do not see the difference between a friendly and a hostile criticism of democracy are themselves imbued with the totalitarian spirit)”. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato, 1995, page 202.
INTRODUCTION.
There was once a time, during the USA administration of George W Bush, when the powerful American neocons who ran it were given to succumbing to fits of frustration and anger at South Africa’s votes at the United Nations (UN) in support of such countries as Syria, Iran, Cuba, Burma, Russia, Zimbabwe, Libya, Venezuela, Vietnam, North Korea and China, and would characterize our democracy as “a renegade democracy”.
It was all of course a false and deliberate misrepresentation. It was also a diplomatic ploy intended to embarrass South Africa into abject submission to USA foreign policy diktat.
But the rising tide of xenophobic attacks across our country in recent time may just achieve what the USA neocons failed to achieve, which is to give our democracy a bad name, and thus to damn it. Some of the most appalling acts and utterances of xenophobia of the last few months may just succeed to make the ugly term “renegade democracy” to stick on the name of our country as a permanent suffix.
We should all be shamed and propelled into action by these ugly, totally unacceptable and inhumane manifestations of xenophobia against foreign small traders in our black human settlements, especially in our black townships.
Xenophobia is as unacceptable as racism is and as sexism continues to be.
Are we, by choice and self-consciously, through these ugly manifestations of xenophobia turning ourselves into “a renegade democracy” in the eyes of the rest of Africa and the rest of the international community of nations, and thus unwittingly turning ourselves away from being the post-1994 beacon of hope for the whole world?
There is no doubt that our country is going through one of its most difficult patches at the moment owing to the outbreak of xenophobic attacks in our black areas.
Our principal challenge as a country currently is to gain a correct reading and understanding of the deeply shameful moment we are passing through, the forces at play, both internally and externally, as well as the right responses that befit the enormous challenges facing us. And above all, we should learn to keep a steady and beardy eye on even some of our very ugly and harsh truths about our post-apartheid society, including in black areas such as black townships, ugly truths we should not seek to sweep under the carpet, away from public view.
We should rather subject this ugliness in our black areas and black townships regarding xenophobia and black racism to the detergent power of light and transparency.
In a very thoughtful The Independent (UK) article of 1999 entitled “Why do we run away from the harsh truth about South Africa?’, Anne McElvoy wrote, rather perspicaciously, about how:
“…we bypass the troubles and challenges of today’s South Africa. The happy ending provided by the onset of democracy and the passing of Apartheid is so comfortable, the delight in the triumph of the wind of change so great that it has seemed impolite or ungrateful to raise the gravity of future threats to the country’s democracy and prosperity. If you think this sounds sour or harsh, look to the carefully sanitized popular imagery of post-Apartheid South Africa, which relies on an idealized evocations of the townships.”
There really is no reason now, in 2015 and twenty years since our first, founding all-inclusive democratic election, for us to continue to “…bypass the troubles and challenges” of our South Africa of today, nor to keep on cultivating unrealistic and untruthful “idealized evocations of the townships”.
The ugly, unpalatable truth is that too many of our black townships and other black human settlements have become unacceptable hotbeds of xenophobia, black racism and intolerance. The even more puzzling truth is that our collective national politics seems manacled from confronting and defeating these ugly human pathology of xenophobia, for some inexplicable reason.
Yet we need to defeat rising xenophobia in our black areas as we defeated colonialism, apartheid and the divide-and-rule Bantustan policy in the past.
Of course some of the townships Anne McElvoy wrote about as embodying “carefully sanitized popular imagery of post-Apartheid South Africa, which relies on an idealized evocations” are now theaters of ugly, horrendous scenes of xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders that are being beamed around the world by cable networks and written about by practically every newsman and newswoman around the world.
For some in the rest of Africa, in Asia, in Europe and in the America, our black townships now embody, by their xenophobic attacks, the very Heart of Darkness of Joseph Conrad infamy. So unimaginably horrendous are these xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in black areas that they defy any human comprehension. They need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
The sanitised popular imagery of our black townships has been replaced by unimaginable, horrible, inhumane imagery of xenophobic violence in some of South Africa’s black areas, especially some of our townships, at the current moment.
It is time we engage in “friendly criticism” of our democracy, to paraphrase Karl Poppper, especially as it relates to our treatment of foreigners in our black areas, specifically in the black townships. It is time to stop being unnecessarily polite and rather to speak out truths about “the gravity of …threats to the country’s democracy and prosperity”. The rising tide of the toxic cocktail of xenophobia and black racism in post-apartheid South Africa at this current juncture represents precisely such a dire threat to our slowly maturing democracy and prosperity.
We should also at all times remember that South Africa is a country, to again quote Anne McElvoy, which is only just emerging from “a racialist dictatorship and a brutalized past.”
In fact, in its very essence, Apartheid, which was “a racialist dictatorship”, embodied extreme forms of racism, Afrophobia and xenophobia against migrants from the non-European world, such as from the rest of Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East. Even the Japanese, who were derogatively denoted as “honorary whites”, were barely tolerated but for their economic heavy heft.
If Karl Marx was correct in stating that capitalism creates society in its own image, there is no doubt that some of the inchoate and nascent petty bourgeois capitalism in South Africa’s black areas, such as in our black townships, also carries the ugly birthmarks of Apartheid white capitalism, namely its xenophobia, racism, tribalism, inhumanity, extreme violence and intolerance.
The fruit has fallen close to the tree.
In fact, the very creation of South Africa’s black townships, as they exist today, was a deliberate policy of racial urban separate development on the part of the past Apartheid regimes.
We cannot understand the outbreak of xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in some of our black townships and rural areas outside this crucial historical context.
In his seminal book ‘When Victims Become Killers’, Mahmood Mamdani, in Chapter Three entitled ‘The Racialisation of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism’ wrote thus:
“Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened…Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist…” (2001, page 76).
Undoubtedly, the ongoing xenophobic attacks by fellow black township dwellers against foreign small traders too represent “…an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist”, in relation to these foreign small traders.
The most frightful reality is that only a small, baby step divides the current xenophobic attacks in our black areas, as well as the 2008 xenophobic attacks, from genocide.
In this quoted paragraph of Mamdani two things become clear, namely, that South Africa has historically been the laboratory of racism in the whole world, and secondly, that if the difference between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda could be “racialised”, so can the difference between black South Africans and other black Africans from the rest of the continent, such as the Somali, Ethiopian, Tutsi and Sudanese small traders in our black townships. So there may as well be undertones of racism in the xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in our black areas by our fellow black South Africans, contrary to those who seek to define such attacks as only a reflection of “Afrophobia”. And such a claim of black racism holds more water when viewed against xenophobic attacks directed against foreign small traders from Pakistan and Bangladesh in our black areas
The Apartheid regimes actively encouraged our black population to view its miserable economic condition under Apartheid as representing a vast improvement on what Apartheid rulers claimed obtained in the rest of decolonized and free Africa. Thus the seeds of perplexing Afrophobia and black racism amongst many of our black people were planted.
That there is abominable recurrence of these xenophobic attacks against foreign small traders in our black areas, following the truly horrendous 2008 xenophobic attacks, speaks to our collective failure as a democratic nation to address this shameful phenomenon in our body politic. One is thus reminded of the famous and haunting words of the great German revolutionary poet, Bertold Brecht, when he wrote, in ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’:
“If only we could learn to look
Instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up
on our arse
This was the thing that
nearly has us mastered
Don’t rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up
and stopped the bastard.
The bitch that bore him
Is in heat again”.
We South Africans are collectively failing to stop the “bastard” of xenophobia in some of our black areas and black townships, which rose its ugly face, collectively, for the first time in 2008. And now, in 2015, the black South African township “bitch” that bore the xenophobic attacks of 2008 “is in heat”, again. And like Bertold Brecht’s Arturo Ui, the rise of this black “bitch” that bore these appalling xenophobic attacks in our black townships and other black areas in 2008 and now, is very much “resistible” by us all!
And so the question is: What the hell are we waiting for? Why don’t we resist our own Arturo Ui with all the collective might we can muster under the sun? Does a genocide have to occur in our black townships first for us to neuter the township “bitch” and “bastard” on the loose in the black township xenophobic attacks?
In an important sense, the current xenophobic attacks against small foreign traders in our black areas are but the bitter harvest of the dangerous Apartheid policy of pitting our black people against blacks and Africans from the rest of the continent.
In fact, only a ruthless and sustained “racialist dictatorship” (Anne McElvoy, The Independent, UK) of Apartheid could, through its biblical-scale violence, succeed in recreating black areas and black townships in the manner they are today – desolate reservoirs of black labour with very few meaningful economic resources and opportunities. The large-scale white colonial settlement in South Africa ensured this violent outcome.
Mahmood Mamdani also stated:
“It is more or less a rule of thumb that the more Western settlement a colony experienced, the greater was the violence unleashed against the native population. The reason was simple: settler colonization led to land deprivation.” (Ibid, Settlers’ Genocide, page 10).
That tens of millions of black South Africans have been forced to live in the small urban and rural areas across our country, such as Soweto in Johannesburg, squeezed in like canned pilchards, is exactly the brutal outcome of the great white European settler violence during genocidal colonialism and later white racist Apartheid, which was unleashed against our colonised black South African population.
This brutal outcome is despite the fact that Robert Guest, in his acclaimed book ‘The Shackled Continent – Power, Corruption, and African Lives’, wrote:
“South Africa is huge and sparsely populated, so space is cheap.” (2004, page 219).
The failure to nurture small business development in our townships and other black areas, which could have fairly taken on and overcome stiff competition from the foreign small traders in our black areas, is made more poignant when viewed against this other statement of Robert Guest:
“South Africa has a better shot at creating a genuinely entrepreneurial black business class than most other African countries. The roads in South Africa are better, the airlines run on time, and all the support services that businesses need are in place, more or less. What is missing is a wider understanding that wealth is something you have to create”. (Page 238).
Earlier on page 236, Robert Guest had written:
“The drive for black economic empowerment has produced some perverse role models for young black entrepreneurs. The richest black businessmen have largely got that way by parlaying political influence into a share of someone else’s business. Few new factories are built this way, and few new jobs are created. A few well-connected blacks have become honkingly rich overnight, but there is obviously a limit to how many people can be empowered this way.”
The glaring absence of mature black businesses in our townships, the absence of access to capital for expansion for small black township traders, and the inability of black township traders to sustain any winning competition formula in the face of superior business acumen, organization and networking amongst foreign small traders in the black areas, all owe their origin largely to this failed and skewed and highly selfish form of black economic empowerment (BEE) since 1994, which Robert Guest eloquently, rightly and justly condemns. And it beggars the question: If there is clamour about the financial fire-power foreign small traders bring into the competition in their businesses in black areas, why are the few “honkingly rich” BEE multi-millionares not helping their fellow black small traders in our black areas and townships with capital, business knowhow and “business secrets”-sharing? Why are these empowered “a few well-connected blacks” not coming to the aid of their fellow black small businesses in black areas and black townships? In what sense are these BEE moguls the new “patriotic national bourgeoisie”, if not to assist their junior counterparts across the road or mountain from their new mansions in formerly white areas of Sandhurst, Sandton, Clifton and other such affluent areas?
Clearly space in sparsely populated South Africa is not “cheap” for black township dwellers, who feel even threatened by the tiny spaza shops in garages owned by fellow black South Africans falling under the sway of foreign small traders from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The cardinal failure of our democracy is the inability to change the essentialised Apartheid nature and features of black areas and black townships in South Africa, which remain as junior, subordinated appendages to the “metropolis economy” of white, developed, First World South Africa.
This striking failure of our political economy actually constitutes our democracy’s undeniable, ongoing historical injustice against black South Africans, who almost single-handedly ushered in our democracy through their centuries-old struggles against genocidal white colonialism, white domination and the racism of Apartheid.
The periodic outburst of xenophobic attacks in our black areas is quintessentially also a reflection of this startling failure of our post-1994 democracy.
We are now paying a steep political and diplomatic price for such a monumental democratic failure.
CHAPTER ONE – ON TOWNSHIP XENOPHOBIA AND UNDERSTANDING TOWNSHIP LIFE: THE DEBATES GO ON WHILST BLACK TOWNSHIPS ARE BURNING.
If the great French philosopher Voltaire was correct in stating that “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names”, our national wisdom on xenophobia should begin by calling the attacks on small foreign traders in our black areas and black townships for what they truly are – xenophobic attacks, or violent manifestations of xenophobia.
Unfortunately we have created a suffocating verbal obtuseness about the perils faced by small foreign traders in our black areas, owing to xenophobia in these black areas.
To call these xenophobic attacks only as “criminal acts”, as the ruling ANC and government officialdom are inclined to do, is as disingenuous as calling the Marikana massacre of August 2012 only as “a tragedy.” It is a linguistic cop-out intended to absolve the utterer(s) of any moral agency and responsibility for these most shameful chapters in our new democracy’s history.
But there has been deliberate obfuscation of terminology in the opposite direction amongst civil society as well, which has proven no less misleading and misguided.
In his article ‘Xenophobia is ancient and horrible’, which appeared in The Citizen of 02 February 2015, Andrew Kenny writes:
“In my private conversations with black foreigners living in local townships, they accuse locals of being lazy, resentful and filled with a feeling of entitlement”.
This trope uncannily regurgitates the racist rubbish beloved of arch-racists under Apartheid – that South African blacks are indolent, are ingrates and that they are pathetically envious of others’ success. And how foreign small traders can rent garages from bonded township houses of black South Africans who work hard to pay off their bonds, and still be called lazy, resentful and filled with feelings of entitlement of course only Andrew Kenny can explain.
However, the great wonder is that the twat of Andrew Kenny was given a dubious imprimatur of some respectability by a statement of Rose Nkosi, the president of the South African Spaza and Tuckshop Association. When interviewed by Chris Barron of the Sunday Times (SA) on 01 February 2015, she stated, amongst other things, the following regarding foreign small traders in our black townships:
“Of course that is true, they work harder. I mustn’t tell lies. As a grown up and as a leader. They work harder.”
In his article of 29 January 2015 in The Independent (SA) under the title ‘What kept Soweto apart in 2008′, Michael Schmidt refers to the 2008 xenophobic attacks as “pogroms”, a misleading term that surreptitiously suggests some elements of South African State abetment, if not active encouragement, of the 2008 xenophobic attacks, which delegitimising claim is patently false and cruel. On available evidence in the open source public platforms, to my mind, if anything, it does seem that it is a few foreign small traders who have been the ones who seem trigger-happy and shooting to death a few black South African youngsters caught up in the activities of township looting mobs. Of course, it is possible that contrary information may emerge as this crisis evolves or subsides.
In his article in The Citizen of 28 January 2015, The Citizen’s Martin Williams wrote about “spaza xenophobes”, a term so inelastic and inelegant that it hardly carries any scientific and analytical utility. One can only wonder as to what Martin Williams calls the 2008 xenophobic attackers on foreigners in South Africa’s black areas.
For its part, the Sunday Times (SA) of 01 February 2015 wrote about “spaza shop looters” (page 5), apparently eschewing The Citizen’s term of “spaza xenophobes”. And commendably, the Sunday Times (SA) provided a space under the same headline to one of the boastful “spaza xenophobes” to air his view, albeit quite atrocious views about foreign small traders.
In his Sunday Independent (SA) article of 01 February 2015, professor Tinyiko Maluleke self-indulged in a wordplay about “xenophobic denial of xenophobia”, most probably a wordplay intended to convey his strong, unmistakable and commendable abhorrence for some of the government officials’ denial of the attacks on small foreign traders as “xenophobic”. Unfortunately it is the kind of wordplay which also contributes to the building of the Tower of Babel of alphabetic soup of acronyms around the debate on xenophobia in our country, and very pregnant with inexactitudes and unnecessary theoretic latitude. Otherwise Maluleke’s article was a positive and helpful contribution to the national debate about xenophobia in our country and the real dangers of officialdom’s sustained “xenophobia denialism”, which, as has been correctly pointed out already, sadly echoes the “Aids denialism” of a different, sad, previous era.
Two of the more thoughtful and trenchant commentaries on the subject were the article by Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s deputy general secretary and the deputy Minister of Publics Works, which appeared in Pretoria News Weekend of 31 January 2015 under the title ‘Agenda motive in story on attacks’, as well as Inkatha Freeedom Party leader i’Nkosi Magosuthu Buthelezi’s piece ‘Xenophobia: the makings of disaster’, which appeared in The New Age of 02 Febryary 2015. Also well written and well-argued was Phumulani Khumela’s ‘From spaza to squalor’, which appeared in Sowetan of 28 January 2015 and “An open letter to President Zuma’ by Marc Gbaffou, chairperson of the African Diaspora Forum (ADF) in South Africa. The programmatic recommendations contained towards the end of Gbaffou’s open letter to president Jacob Zuma are worth paying special attention to by us all. The City Press also excellently editorialized on ‘Foreigners should not live in fear in our land’, on its 25 January 2015 issue.
On the other hand, The New Age issue which carried i’Nkosi Buthelezi’s piece, also carried a quote of Lindiwe Zulu, the Small Business Development Minister, under the rubric ‘The Horse’s Mouth’, when she stated:
“Foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy and our priority is first and foremost for the people of the country.”
It is clear that The New Age had either missed or ignored Minister Lindiwe Zulu’s self-explanatory piece on her unfortunate “Freudian slip”, which appeared a day earlier in the City Press of 01 February 2015, in which she stated, amongst other things, that:
“Let me register my unconditional condemnation of the violence and acts of criminality directed at foreign national-owned businesses. This was inconsistent with our Ubuntu ethos and Constitution.”
But even Lindiwe Zulu could not bring herself to characterize the attacks on what she referred to as “foreign national-owned businesses” as “xenophobic attacks”.
Which is a great pity, really.
The DA’s shadow Minister for Small Business Development, Toby Chance, has penned several Politicsweb articles whose key intent seems less to shed light on ongoing xenophobic attacks in our townships, and more to trip Lindiwe Zulu, his government counterpart, owing to her above-quoted unfortunate and unguarded comment. Even when Toby Chance boasted about his visits to “my constituencies” in Soweto, it comes across, as one Politicsweb blogger incisively put on Politicsweb comment section to his artilce, more like “township poverty tourism” by someone on “a short-left domestic tourism” visit to Soweto, after which he retires back to formerly white, leafy and affluent Johannesburg suburbs, timeously abandoning Soweto to continue to stew in its own juices.
The City Press cartoon of Dr. Jack and Curtis had two adult black male and female looting xenophobes – not sneak thieves, for sure – running away from a looted foreign small trader-owned spaza shop, their hands overflowing with their ill-gotten loot, the female’s bountiful physical frame almost succumbing to the ground from the weight of her ill-gotten lucre, and the male partner, with a distorted, sneering snarl and dirty-looking hat worn at a rakish angle, declaring:
‘You know what I hate most about those foreigners? The way they bring out the worst in us!’
No doubt the xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in our black areas represent the very worst in all of us black South Africans, collectively speaking.
Sowetan of 29 January 2015 led with a headline about ‘Minister blasts Somali takeover – Mokonyane criticizes foreign shop owners on Facebook for invading her township.’ Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane’s Facebook message, dated 02 January 2015, was reproduced on page 4 of the same issue of Sowetan, in its entirety. It made for grim reading, in the circumstances. She wrote that she believed that “…the ‘takeover’ by foreigners in townships is ‘a recipe for disaster'”, reported Sowetan.
The greater disaster, the Minister failed to concede, is the xenophobia itself.
The EFF released a surprising statement on Politicsweb condemning the xenophobic attacks, but blaming the government for the difficult human condition in the black areas, which, according to the EFF, drives the black township residents to these inhumane acts of desperation embodied by these xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders. For a welcome change, the EFF resisted the urge to join the populist bandwagon and to support the xenophobic township uprisings.
On the other hand, the SABC3 TV prime evening news bulletin of 28 January 2015 led with a report about Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary general (SG)’s statement controverting the idea that the start of township violence directed at foreign small traders in 2015 was “xenophobia”. He stated that it was a “burglary” gone wrong, which was meant to allow for looting of a Somali shop, but resulted in a 14 year old getting shot dead, which sparked subsequent violence. He further stated that the 2015 anti-foreign small traders violence in black areas was very different from the 2008 attacks on foreigners, which 2008 attacks Mantashe correctly characterized as “xenophobic”.
Mantashe basically reinforced the canard popular in officialdom and the ruling ANC that the 2015 attacks in our black areas against foreign small traders were not driven by xenophobia, but by criminality. That no foreign small trader has been killed (to date) during the 2015 violence does not make violent attacks on their properties, or on them, non-xenophobic. It merely attests to the prolific and gruesome success of the 2008 xenophobic attacks in cleansing many of our townships and black areas of great, definable and demonstrable concentrations of foreigners. The targets of xenophobic attacks in 2015 have apparently become fewer, if also becoming juicier and wealthier, as represented in the main by foreign small trader-owned spaza shops.
It is also interesting to note that Mantashe’s muted condemnation of the latest xenophobic attacks, which he characterized as “criminality”, stands in direct contrast to the clear condemnation of the same offered by Jeremy Cronin and i’Nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the articles by the two quoted above.
And lastly, Sowetan deputy editor, George Matlala had this to say in his piece ‘Hopeless youth pose a danger to society’, which appeared in Sowetan of 27 January 2015:
“The reality is that 20 years into a democratic dispensation, the poor are rising to express their discontent about the status quo. They feel they should be getting more from the country’s riches than is the case now. They are bearing the brunt of an untransformed economy that continues to benefit a minority white population. And they can see that there has been an emergence of a black middle class indifferent to their struggles and a corrupt political class that has drifted into a posh life with white capital. The anger of the poor youth is slowly becoming unmanageable…Before we know it, these youths will form an army that can be used to go beyond foreign-owned shops to cause instability in the country. And next time they will be coming to cities, suburbs and places of power to violently demand jobs and their share in the country’s wealth.”
This is a dire warning worth paying special attention to too.
In his blistering characterization of “…an emergence of a black middle class indifferent to their struggles and a corrupt political class that has drifted into a posh life with white capital”, Sowetan’s George Matlala differs little from Robert Guest’s charactierisation quoted above of “…a few well-connected blacks have become hongkingly rich overnight”, and that “the richest black businessmen have largely got that way by parlaying political influence into a share of someone else’s business”. Neither does George Matlala’s harrowing characterization differ markedly from what John Pilger wrote about in his definitive book ‘Freedom Next Time’, when he stated:
“From banking to mining, manufacturing to media, white-owned companies, since democracy, have taken on black ‘partners’, the most prominent of whom are former liberation heroes, known as ‘the struggle aristocracy’. Thus the same black faces pop up in boardroom photographs. This co-option has allowed white and foreign capital to fulfill its legal obligations under new corporate charters and, more importantly, to gain access to the ANC establishment”. (2006, page 204).
The net effect of what John Pilger calls “co-option” of a few politically well-connected blacks through distorted BEE and their drift “into posh life with white capital” (George Matlala) has been particularly onerous on small business development in the black areas and black townships, from which “the struggle aristocracy” hails, to begin with.
No wonder that the current xenophobic woes in our black townships are as much a function of the white colonial and Apartheid legacy, as they are the outcome of a failed BEE policy since 1994.
All the above provides a representative and generally broad take on the national debate on ongoing and recent xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in black areas of South Africa, especially the townships, although it is by no means an exhaustive list of all commentaries and articles on the subject matter. For an example, I have left out the very helpful and cogent interventions on the debate by such varied organisations as the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), the SA Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the African Migrant Project (AMP).
CONCLUSION: TOWNSHIP XENOPHOBIA – BEYOND THE DEBATES, TOWARDS CONCRETE ACTION.
One of the unfortunate aspects about the debate on xenophobic attacks on foreign small traders in South Africa has been our regrettable collective tendency to imbue township spaza shops only with what Marxists call “vulgar economism.” Yet, in truth, spaza shops are much more than just milch cows for their owners, be they locals or foreigners. Or they certainly should be much more than just rent-accumulating small-scale economic cocks in the big wheel of the dominant, neoliberal and white-dominated formal economy of South Africa. If we miss this important aspect as well, we shall not be in a position to fully address the challenges of small business development in South Africa’s black areas.
I remember vividly that as I grew up in Alexandra Township near Sandton in Johannesburg and in my village of Rabokala near Brits, in the North West province, the corner shop was a very important cultural, spiritual, intellectual and community center as well.
I saw the first TV broadcast in my life in the late 1970s at the small shop owned by a small black South African trader. I fell in love for the first time with a girl I met at the small corner shop. I made my first lasting friendship outside my schools and family at the corner shop. We young black men used to loiter for hours at the corner shop during weekends, exchanging foolish gossip and all manner of small talk. The corner shop was also where we looked at the new fashion introduced by “the clever blacks” coming to buy a pack of cigarettes or cool drinks or to snatch our love conquests from under our noses. Our fervent support for either Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates or Moroka Swallows or Pretoia Callies was born and nurtured in huge football Monday quarter-back arguments at these corner shops. I first heard about the ANC and PAC and Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko at the these small shops.
I will be surprised if the role of township and village spaza shops has changed much from this paradigm of my generation. But it is also possible that the “take-over” (I use the ill-advised term courtesy of Minister Nomvula Mokonyane) of spaza shops in our black townships and villages by foreign small traders has also negatively impacted on the sense of these small trading points as cultural, spiritual, fashion, bonding and even intellectual centers of black life. In rebuilding the spaza shops destroyed in the ongoing xenophobic attacks, we need to restore this important aspect of the life of a spaza shop as the center of township and village life, alongside the church or mosque and the school and the football club.
Interestingly, and by way of a demonstration of my point about small businesses in townships being the center of vibrant and pulsating township life, here is how Hugh Masekela, in his fascinating autobiography ‘Still grazing’, describes the socio-economic life of Alexandra Township of his generation:
“Alexandra Township streets were buzzing with tens of thousands of workers returning from their menial jobs in downtown Johannesburg or the suburbs, where they were employed in every occupation that was considered too lowly for white folks. Among them were shoplifters, pickpockets, burglars, prostitutes, pimps, small-time gangsters, and hustlers of every kind. The streets also teemed with hawkers of fruits and vegetable, fatcakes and mielies (corn), and roadside ethnic fastfood and washerwomen carrying large bundles of white people’s laundry balanced on their heads for the weekend’s ironing, with little babies tied to their backs with moth-eaten blankets”. (Hugh Masekela and D. Michael Cheers, 2004, page 27).
How did it come about that we allowed our post-apartheid democracy to stifle this amazing entrepreneurial spirit of our hardworking and imaginative and resourceful and creative black township folks, so vividly described by Bra Hugh Masekela, the legendary and globally-acclaimed product of the self-same black townships we so much rubbish today, to the extend that we can today bear to listen to the insulting notion that these of our black people are now “lazy, envious of foreign small traders and so filled with feelings of entitlement”, and are unable to hold their own candle against foreign competition from foreign small spaza shop traders in our black townships?
We should all, as one man, demand that our democratic State should henceforth embark, without delay, on a long-term and sustainable black South African Township Renaissance across South Africa, especially in terms of their massive economic rejuvenation, for the sake of our collective future and prosperity as a democratic nation.
After all, this should be the river-bedrock on which former president Thabo Mbeki’s lofty ideal about the African Renaissance should be anchored.
We, as the South African society, should remember and follow up on our own, voluntary commitments to the whole world we entered into regarding the urgency on our part of combating xenophobia as part of the Final Resolutions of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which South Africa, at great expense to our national budget, hosted in Durban on 31 August-08 September 2001. As a host and chairman of that world conference, we cannot appear, nor afford, to be muddled and quibbling, as we presently seem to be, as to what we see, regard and understand to be clearly violent acts of xenophobia being committed by some of our fellow black countrymen and countrywomen against foreign small traders in our black areas and black townships in 2015.
To so quibble and equivocate on our part is to openly and unashamedly betray the outstanding legacy of our hosting, so admirably and successfully, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001.
And lastly, the most practical thing we can all do in the sad times of 2015 xenophobic attacks in some of our black townships on foreign small traders is to do ourselves a big favor and read Nicos Poulantzas’ phenomenal, compelling book ‘Fascism and Dictatorship’, especially its Part Five on ‘Fascism and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, so that tomorrow we do not say: ‘We failed to read the clear writings on the wall’.
The warning signs are flicking incessantly all around us. As the Bible puts it, none is as blind as one who refuses to see.
Our own black township Arturo Ui, in the form of sporadic and periodic xenophobic attacks on foreigners and foreign small traders in our black areas, is very much resistible too.
———–END———
16th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
08 February 2015
Written by:
Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And
SEDIA Research NOT FOR PROFIT COMPANY (NPC)
Cedia blog: http://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.WordPress.com
Email Addresss : cedia.mail@gmail.com
Cell number : +27 72 912 9311
Cedia Pay-Off-Line: Dynamic Thought, Positive Action.
(Mr Isaac Mpho Mogotsi’s Profile can be found at https://centreforeconomicdiplomacy.wordpress.com and by clicking on the icons)
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa 