Sisonke Msimang, Africa is a Country
Any African who has ever tried to visit South Africa will
know that the country is not an easy entry destination. South African embassies
across the continent are almost as difficult to access as those of the UK and
the United States. They are characterised by long queues, inordinate amounts of
paperwork, and officials who manage to be simultaneously rude and lethargic. It
should come as no surprise then that South Africa’s new Minister of Home
Affairs has announced the proposed establishment of a Border Management Agency
for the country. In his words the new agency “will be central to securing all
land, air and maritime ports of entry and support the efforts of the South
African National Defence force to address the threats posed to, and the
porousness of, our borderline.”
Political observers of South Africa will understand that this
is bureaucratic speak to dress up the fact that insularity will continue to be
the country’s guiding ethos in its social, cultural and political dealings with
the rest of the continent.
Perhaps I am particularly attuned to this because of my
upbringing. I am South African but grew up in exile. That is to say I was
raised in the Africa that is not South Africa; that place of fantasy and
nightmare that exists beyond the Limpopo. When I first came home in the mid
1990s, in those early months as I was learning to adjust to life in South
Africa, I was often struck by the odd way in which the term ‘Africa,’ was
deployed by both white and black South Africans.
Because I speak in the fancy curly tones of someone who has
been educated overseas, I was often asked where I was from. I would explain
that I was born to South African parents outside the country and that I had
lived in Zambia and Kenya and Canada and that my family also lived in Ethiopia.
Invariably, the listener would nod sympathetically until the meaning of what I
was saying sank in. ‘Oh.’ Then there would be a sharp intake of breath and a
sort of horrified fascination would take hold. “So you grew up in Africa.” The
Africa was enunciated carefully, the last syllable drawn out and slightly
raised as though the statement were actually a question. Then the inevitable,
softly sighed, “Shame.”
In the early years after I got ‘home,’ it took me some time
to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa was a place that began
beyond South Africa’s borders. I was surprised to learn that the countries
where I had lived – the ones that had nurtured my soul in the long years of
exile – were actually no places at all in the minds of some of my compatriots.
They weren’t geographies with their own histories and cultures and
complexities. They were dark landscapes, Condradian and densely forested.
Zambia and Kenya and Ethiopia might as well have been Venus and Mars and
Jupiter. They were undefined and undefined-able. They were snake-filled
thickets; impenetrable brush and war and famine and ever-present tribal danger.
Though they thought themselves to be very different, it
seemed to me that whites and blacks in South Africa were disappointingly similar
when it came to their views on ‘Africa.’ At first I blamed the most obvious
culprit: apartheid. The ideology of the National Party was profoundly insular,
based on inspiring everyone in the country to be fearful of the other. With the
naiveté and arrogance of the young, I thought that a few lessons in African
history might help to disabuse the Rainbow Nation of the notion that our
country was apart from Africa. I made it my mission to inform everyone I came
across that culturally, politically and historically we could call ourselves
nothing if not Africans.
What I did not fully understand at that stage was that it
would take more than a few lectures by an earnest ‘returnee,’ to deal with this
issue. This warped idea of Africa was at the heart of the idea of South Africa
itself. Just as whiteness means nothing until it is contrasted with blackness
as savagery, South African-ness relies heavily on the construction of Africa as
a place of dysfunction, chaos and violence in order to define itself as functional,
orderly, efficient and civilised.
As such, the apartheid state was at pains to keep its borders
closed. The savages at the country’s doorstep were a convenient bogeyman.
Whites were told that if the country’s black neighbours were let in, they would
surely unite with the indigenous population and slit the throats of
whites. By the same token, black people
were told that the Africans beyond South Africa’s borders lived like animals;
they were ruled by despots and governed by black magic.
When apartheid ended, the fear of African voodoo throat
slitting should have ended with it. Indeed on the face of things, the fear of
‘Africa,’ has abated and has been replaced by the language of investment. South
African capital has ‘opened up’ to the rest of the continent and so fear has
been taken over by self-interest and new forms of extraction.
In the parlance of South Africans, our businesses have ‘gone
into Africa.’ Like the frontiersmen who conquered the bush before them they
have been quick to talk about ‘investment and opportunity’ to define our
country’s relationship with the continent. The pre-1994 hostility towards
‘Africa’ has been replaced by a paternalism that is equally disconcerting.
Africa needs economic saviours and white South African ‘technical skills’ are
just the prescription.
Amongst many black South Africans, the script is frightfully
similar. The recent collapse of TB Joshua’s church in Nigeria, in which scores
of South Africans lost their lives has highlighted how little the narrative has
changed in the minds of many South Africans. Many have called in to radio shows
and social media asking, what the pilgrims were doing looking for God in such a
God forsaken place?
In the democratic era we have converted the hatred of Africa
into a crude sort of exceptionalist chauvinism. South Africans are quick to
assert that they don’t dislike ‘Africans.’ It’s just that we are unique. Our
history and society are too different from theirs to allow for meaningful
comparisons. See – we are even lighter in complexion than them and we have
different features. I have heard the refrain too many times, ‘We don’t really
look like Africans.’ Never mind the reality that black South Africans come in
all shades from the deepest of browns to the fairest of yellows.
This idea that South Africans are so singular in our
experience; that apartheid was such a unique experience that it makes us
different from everyone else in the world, and especially from other Africans,
is an important aspect of understanding the South African approach to
immigration.
As long-time researcher Nahla Vahlji has noted, “the
fostering of nationalism produces an equal and parallel phenomenon: that of an
affiliation amongst citizens in contrast and opposition to what is ‘outside’
that national identity.” In other words, South Africans may not always like
each other across so-called racial lines, but they have a kinship that is based
on their connection to the apartheid project. Outsiders – those who didn’t go
through the torture of the regime – are juxtaposed against insiders. In other
words foreigners are foreign precisely because they can not understand the pain
of apartheid, because most South Africans now claim to have been victims of the
system. Whether white or black, the trauma of living through apartheid is seen
as such a defining experience that it becomes exclusionary; it has made a
nation of us.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which sought to
uncover the truth behind certain atrocities that took place under apartheid,
was also an attempt to make a nation out of us. While it won international
acclaim as a model for settling disputes that was as concerned with traditional
notions of justice as it was with healing the wounds of the past, there were
many people inside South Africa who were sceptical of its mission. As Premesh
Lalu and Brendan Harris suggested as the Commission was starting its work in
the mid 1990s, the desire for the TRC to create the narrative of a new nation
led to a selection of “elements of the past which create no controversy, which
create a good start, for a new nation where race and economic inequality are a
serious problem, and where the balance of social forces is still extremely
fragile.”
This is as true today as it was then. Attending the hearings
was crucial for me as a young person yearning to better understand my country,
but I am objective enough to understand that one of the consequences using the
TRC as the basis for forging a national identity is that ‘others’ – the people
who were not here in the bad old days – have found it difficult to find their
place in South Africa. Aided and abetted
by the TRC and the discursive rainbow nation project, South Africans have
failed to create a frame for belonging that transcends the experience of
apartheid.
Twenty years into the ‘new’ dispensation, many South Africans
still view people who weren’t there and therefore who did not physically share
in the pain of apartheid as ‘aliens.’ The darker-hued these aliens are, the
less likely South Africans are to accept them. Even when black African
‘foreigners’ attain citizenship or permanent residence, even when their
children are enrolled in South African schools, they remain strangers to us
because they weren’t caught up in our grand narrative as belligerents in the war
that was apartheid.
While it is easy to locate the roots of xenophobia in our
colonial and apartheid history, it is also becoming clear that our present
leaders do not understand how to press the reset button in order to remake our
country in the image of its future self. They have not been able to outline a
vision for the new South Africa that is inclusive of the millions of African
people who live here and who are ‘foreign’ but indispensable to our society for
cultural, economic and political reasons.
America – with all its problems – offers us the model of an
immigrant nation whose very conception relied on the idea of the ‘new’ world
where justice and freedom were possible. Much can be said about how that
narrative ignores those who were brought to the country as slave cargo. It is
patently clear that America has also denied the founding acts of genocide that
decimated the people of the First Nations who lived there before the settlers
arrived. Indeed, one could argue that while oppression and murder begat the
United States of America, the country’s founding myth is an inclusive one, a
story of freedom and the right to life. In South Africa murder and oppression
also birthed a new nation, but the founding myth of our post 1994 country has
remained insular and exclusive, a story of freedom and the right to life for
South Africans.
The South African state has always been strongly invested in
seeing itself as an island of morality and order in a cesspool of black filth.
The notion of South Africa’s apartness from Africa is deeply embedded in the
psyche that ‘new’ South Africans inherited in 1994 but it goes back decades.
For example, the 1937 Aliens Act sought to attract desirable immigrants, whom
it defined in the law as those of ‘European’ heritage who would be easily
assimilable in the white population of the country.’ This law stayed on the
books until 1991, when the National Party, in its dying days, sought to protect
itself from the foreseeable ‘deluge’ of communist and/or barbaric Africans. The
Aliens Control Act (1991) removed the offensive reference to ‘Europeans’ but it
kept the rest of the architecture of exclusion intact.
As a result, when the new South Africa was born the old state
remained firmly in place, continuing to guard the border from the threats just
across the Limpopo, as it always had.
It was a decade before the Bill on International Migration came into
force in 2003 and it too retained critical elements of the old outlook.
The ANC politicians running the country somehow began to buy
into the idea that immigrants posed a threat to security. Immigration continued
to be seen as a containment strategy rather than as a path to economic growth.
As President Jacob Zuma tightens his grip on the security sector, and extends
the power and reach of the security cluster in all areas of governance, this
attitude seems to be hardening rather than softening.
None of South Africa’s current crop of political leaders seem
to be asking the kinds of questions that will begin to resolve the question the
role that immigration can and should play in the building of our new nation.
South Africa’s political leadership sees Africa in one of two ways: either as a
market for South African goods, differentiated only to the extent that Africans
can be sold our products; or as a threat, part of a deluge of the poor and
unwashed who take ‘our jobs and our women.’
No one in government today seems to understand that
post-apartheid South Africa continues to be the site of multiple African
imaginations. One cannot deal with ‘Africa’ without dealing with the
subjectivity of what South Africa meant to Africa historically, and the
disappointment that a free South Africa has signified in the last decade.
So much of the pan-Africanist project – even with its
failings – has been about an imagined Africa in which the shackles of
colonialism have been thrown off. South Africa has always been an iconic symbol
in that imaginary. Robben Island and Nelson Mandela, the burning streets of
Soweto, Steve Biko’s bloodied, broken body: these images did not just belong to
us alone. They brought pain and grief to a continent whose march towards
self-determination included us, even when our liberation seemed far, far away.
With the invention of the ‘new’ South Africa the crucial importance of African
visions for us have taken a back seat. South Africans have refused to admit
that we are a crucial aspect of the African project of self-determination. In
failing to see ourselves in this manner, we have denied ourselves the
opportunity to be propelled – transported even – by the dreams of our
continent.
What would South Africa be like without the ‘foreign’
academics who teach mathematics and history on our campuses? How differently
might our students think without their deep and critical insights about us and
the place we occupy in the world? How might we understand our location and our
political geography differently if ‘foreigners’ were not here offering us
different ways of wearing and inhabiting blackness? What would our society look
like without the tax paying ‘foreigners’ whose children make our schools richer
and more diverse? What would inner city Johannesburg smell like without coffee
ceremonies and egusi soup? What would Cape Town’s Greenmarket square be without
the Zimbabwean and Congolese taxi drivers who literally make the city go?
In an era in which borders are coming down and becoming more
porous to encourage trade and contact, South Africa is introducing layers of
red tape to the process of moving in and out of the country. The outsider has
never been more repulsive or threatening than s/he is now. This is precisely
why Gigaba’s announcement of the Border Management Agency is so worrisome. Yet
it was couched in careful language. Ever mindful of the xenophobic reputation
that South Africa has in the rest of the continent, Gigaba asserts, “We value
the contributions of fellow Africans from across the continent living in South
Africa and that is why we have continued to support the AU and SADC initiatives
to free human movement; but [my emphasis] this cannot happen haphazardly,
unilaterally or to the exclusion of security concerns.”
Ah, there it is! The image of Africa and ‘Africans’ as
haphazard, disorderly and ultimately threatening is in stark contrast to South
Africa and South Africans as organised, efficient and (ahem) peace-loving. The
subtext of Gigaba’s statement is that South Africans require protection
‘foreigners’ who are hell bent on imposing their chaos and violence on us.
Nowhere has post-apartheid policy suffered from the lack of
imagination more acutely than in the area of immigration. Before they took
power, many in the ANC worried about the ways in which the old agendas of the
apartheid regime state would assert themselves even under a black government.
They understood that there was a real danger of the apartheid mentality
capturing the new bureaucrats. Despite these initial fears, the new leaders
completely under-estimated the extent to which running the state would succeed
in dulling the imaginations of the new public servants and burying their
intellect under mountains of forms and rules and processes. They also didn’t
understand that xenophobia would be so firmly lodged in the soul of the
country, that it would be one of the few phenomena would unite blacks and
whites.
South Africa’s massive immigration fail is a tragedy for all
kinds of reasons. At the most basic level, the horrific levels of violence and
intimidation that many African migrants to South Africa face on a daily basis
represent an on-going travesty of justice. Yet in a far more complex and
nuanced way, South Africa’s rejection of its African identity is a tragedy of
another sort. All great societies are melanges, a delicious brew of art and
culture and intellect. They draw the best from near and far and make them their
own. By denying the contribution of Africa to its DNA, South Africa forgoes the
opportunity to be a richer, smarter, more cosmopolitan and interesting society
than it currently is.
I spite of ourselves South Africans still have a chance to
open our arms to the rest of the continent. The window of opportunity for
allowing our guests to truly belong to us as they have always allowed us to
belong to them is still open. I fear however, that the window is closing fast.
