That the country that gave the world Nelson Mandela is once again in the throes of a spectre of episodic xenophobia is outrageously disturbing.
Nothing can justify the perpetration of violence against “foreigners”, who, especially fellow black Africans, live and work in South Africa mainly as peaceful and law-abiding economic migrants.
Much as xenophobia has become synonymous with contemporary South Africa, the roots of this wild rage are old.
First, the country is still grappling with the wounds of the Apartheid regime, which mainly brutalised and discriminated against black South Africans and placed them in impoverished areas where many still live in squalor and unemployment.
Another important but less acknowledged reason for the problem: Just as Prof Ali Mazrui observed, Mandela was “less pan-African than the pan-Africanism he caused in others”.
Mandela’s Rainbow Nation seems to have a similar quality of having not embraced Africa the same way the continent has embraced it.
Little wonder the xenophobes brutalise and mistreat their fellow black Africans like unwelcome strangers.
But even beyond South Africa, there is this dangerously growing but misplaced hatred for economic migrants coupled with economic introversion and islamophobia that are spearheaded by populist politicians in first-world countries — like United States President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban.
That reveals the selfishness of the materialistic capitalist economic system, where individuals and states try to achieve happiness and success at the expense and, sometimes, detriment of others.
The global scale of human hatred calls for a countervailing narrative and policies that would establish love and a sense of “human family”.
In a brief but powerful lecture at an interfaith forum in the US state of Michigan, Prof Mazrui shared a popular verse from the Koran.
He used it to build a positive theory: Perhaps, America was specially chosen by God to be a laboratory for fashioning a global human family, as its demography is more representative of the human race than any other nation; although it has not succeeded in establishing tolerance for cultural diversity.
In her poem, “Human family”, Maya Angelou also beautifully observed that: “In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same. I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
As American leader Bayard Rustin said, “If we desire a society in which men are brothers, then we must act towards one another with brotherhood. If we can build such a society, then we would have achieved the ultimate goal of human freedom.”
South Africa owes Mandela, Africa and the world a duty to make peace with itself in ways that are more genuine and practical than rhetorical.
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