Pallo Jordan, Business Day, 19 September 2013
THE
shocking attacks on Somali-owned shops in the Port Elizabeth
townships this weekend are an indictment of our failure as South
Africans. Walking through our cities, it is clear SA has become an
attractive destination to millions from our region and beyond. There
are parts of Johannesburg where French and Portuguese are the
languages one hears on the streets. In the towns of the Eastern Cape,
one often finds that the local shop owner is from the Indian
subcontinent. Until recently, the 7-Eleven I frequent in my Cape Town
neighbourhood was run by a Congolese woman and her daughters.
These
are unremarkable patterns of immigration and urban migration many
countries have witnessed over the past 200 years. The occupants of
storefront sites of worship in New York’s Lower East Side attest to
the immigration of a variety of communities in the 20th century.
Storefronts that served as synagogues earlier in the previous century
became storefront Puerto Rican evangelical churches in the 1950s,
only to be taken over as Hare Krishna and Buddhist temples when
hippies took over the neighbourhood in the late 1960s.
New
arrivals gravitate to poorer neighbourhoods to occupy the housing
left behind as native populations climb the social ladder. Low-paid,
unskilled menial jobs are then taken over by migrants from the rural
areas or by new immigrants. Even in instances of high unemployment,
native-born workers choose the dole rather than accept work they
consider beneath them. One rarely finds native-born South Africans
offering their services as gardeners, even though thousands have no
jobs.
During
an outbreak of xenophobic violence in Cape Town in 2006, spaza shop
operators in the informal settlements blamed Somali shopkeepers for
the failure of their own businesses. These spaza shop owners incited
the violence to drive their competitors from the field. The looting
that accompanied the weekend’s pogroms in Port Elizabeth suggests
economic competition was a factor.
Immigrants
tend to cluster together for warmth in an alien environment. They set
up mutual support networks and send home remittances to support
families. Immigrants are usually highly motivated people who are
willing to take risks. Driven from home by circumstance, immigrants
usually undertake a passage of no return in the knowledge that they
either make it in the new country or go under. Consequently, they are
prepared to work harder for less.
The
complaints one hears against the foreign-born range from the
ridiculous to the reckless. A recent survey found that close to 40%
of our young people regard foreigners as an undesirable presence.
Worse, their hostility is directed almost exclusively against
immigrants from Africa and Asia. Apparently, according to such
respondents, whites from Europe and the Americas may come and go as
they please. But blacks from the Third World are a problem. They
blame foreign-born Africans for the attacks on their businesses,
claiming immigrants have a negative effect on businesses owned by
locals.
Such
crude nativism resonates with too many South Africans. It tells us
that our people have not come to terms with the place SA occupies on
the African continent. Having rid ourselves of the stench of
apartheid, SA’s economy has become a powerful attraction for those
in search of opportunity.
Foreign-born
Africans, especially from our region, have played a significant role
in the development of our economy. Since the opening of the
Witwatersrand gold fields, SA’s mines have employed Mozambican mine
workers in large numbers. Lesotho, Swaziland and, before it began
exploiting its own mines, Botswana, contributed hundreds of workers
to SA’s farms and mines every year. The large Indian population of
KwaZulu-Natal are descendants of labourers recruited to work on the
sugar plantations.
Since
1994, professionals and business people from Africa and Asia have
augmented these numbers. SA’s educational institutions, health
services and corporate boardrooms have benefited. Immigrants from
Africa and Asia arrive with many of the scarce skills our economy
requires for swifter and more consistent growth. Reckless attacks on
foreign-born Africans and Asians, fuelled by ignorance and prejudice,
amount to shooting SA in both feet. The government is still wrestling
with the elaboration of immigration policies that will attract talent
and skills.
Active
grass-roots interventions contained the last wave of xenophobia. The
scale of the violence in Port Elizabeth is indicative of a collective
failure to root out such prejudices amongst our people.
The
government cannot combat xenophobia on its own. The eradication of
xenophobia will require a huge public campaign to educate our people
not only about the inevitability of immigration but also about its
desirability for the success of our nation.
