Bryan Rostron – Out of Africa
THE flash flood of xenophobia that has swept across South Africa this past fortnight has finally sluiced through our dozy little valley outside Cape Town, leaving dazed and terrified victims in its hate-crazed wake. We’re now sheltering two Congolese refugees. Along with hundreds of other foreign nationals, they fled for their lives from the local township last Friday night. The wife is so traumatised that she is almost catatonic.
Astonishingly, save for our own government, the signs were all there to see clearly. Over the past year, the drumbeat of xenophobia has been beating ever louder.
This poor Congolese woman, when pregnant, was so severely beaten in a frenzied xenophobic attack some months ago that she lost her baby. Now they’ve lost all their possessions, looted on Friday night. On Sunday, I went to the local police station with her husband to report the loss. The police reservist behind the desk, a black South African, was hostile from the start.
“If there was a theft, why didn’t you report this on Friday night?” he demanded.
He knew perfectly well that almost every foreign national in Imizamo Yethu, also known as Mandela Park – Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Congolese – left in panic that night. Hundreds are now being housed in churches, schools and the local mosque.
With the Congolese refugee – let’s call him George – I then drove to Mandela Park to see if the woman from whom they rented a room in her shack could identify the looters. She said she couldn’t. The window of the room had been smashed and every single thing that George had worked hard for as a car guard for three years had been stolen.
George wanted to walk around to see if he could gather more news. I argued that it wasn’t safe, even in broad daylight. Here’s the grotesque irony: he was probably only safe in a black South African township last weekend because he was with a white man.
At that moment, we saw another Congolese man, who (temporarily) feels safe because he’s married to a Xhosa woman. “Is it okay for George to walk around?” I asked.
“It’s a risk”, said his friend. His wife had told him she expected more trouble that night, with local gangs hunting for foreigners who may have stayed.
We proceeded to the beachfront to check on some of George’s Congolese friends who work there as car guards. One of them had been at a taxi rank in town when some youths identified him as a foreigner, but fortunately he managed to escape.
It was a hazy autumn day, the sun shimmering through a light mist and reflecting on the waves. The car park was full and there were lots of white people walking on the beach, enjoying their day of rest. These are the parallel universes we live in here.
Perhaps the strangest parallel cosmos at present is that occupied by President Thabo Mbeki and his government. In the time of our greatest crisis since the advent of democracy, our president has kept to a normal schedule and even been out of the country.
His ministers have come up with risible and contradictory explanations. The intelligence minister at least candidly admitted he had no idea; the director-general of intelligence claimed this mayhem has been orchestrated to influence next year’s elections. Mbeki’s right hand man, Essop Pahad, blamed “right-wing” forces without one shed of evidence, while his brother Aziz, the deputy foreign minister, lashed out at “the media”.
What can be the explanation for this ignorance and paralysis? Perhaps the most obvious reason is one given by George Orwell in a letter to a friend where he referred to “the Labour MPs who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more”. Many liberation leaders now ride on the magic carpet of affluence: chauffer-driven, surrounded by bodyguards and mixing with the rich – both old and new. They are hopelessly out of touch. Consequently, they have little idea how to respond.
My other explanation is more speculative: the effects of exile. One of the travails of exile is that you dream obsessively of your homeland and, even though you know all the problems, memory and nostalgia combine to conjure up a mirage. I was away from South Africa for 28 years and the longing was palpable. You desperately want to come home and for all to be well. And when you examine Thabo Mbeki’s response to all the greatest problems of his presidency – AIDS, Zimbabwe, crime, the apparent corruption of his top policeman – his response has been astonishingly consistent: denial. So, now, with xenophobia. Mbeki seems unable to face the most unpalatable facts.
The current tsunami of xenophobia may also be a venomous, death-rattle bite of apartheid. But we will not find our way out of this disaster without courageous leadership. Here in Hout Bay, however, many of the local ANC leaders in Imizamo Yethu township are irredeemably autocratic and self-serving. But instead of calling their own rotten leaders to account, a poor community has rounded viciously on the innocent.
