Cartoon Commentary

Xenophobia Or Agoraphobia?

With current events unfolding in South Africa, as they are, this is the most gut wrenching post to write. My country has taken a dangerous turn in the latest challenge to it's embryonic democracy. Violence, allegedly based on xenophobic prejudice, has erupted in Johannesburg. Xenophobia, as defined by Wikipedia, is a fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown - especially of strangers or foreign people. By now this issue is being illustrated, in high definition, across the world's television screens. Inflammatory rhetoric is being piled on top of highly pressurized communities, fanned by local government incompetence and legitimized by the absence of moral leadership.

However, graphic television footage aside, there is always more than one perspective and this case is no different. As with most incidents of civil unrest, there are several root causes that have combined at a critical juncture to reveal the faultlines in our society. To blame it all on xenophobia is simplistic and misses the larger forces at work. For example, the affected areas are without exception inhabited by poor working class people. The same group of people most vulnerable to current prices increases of food and fuel, rising inflation and unemployment. They are also the would be recipients of improved housing, education and social services promised by the government; which is yet to materialize since those same election promises were made in 1994. Failed expectations have turned to anger; and are now exacerbated by a major influx of Zimbabweans, after that country's economic meltdown.

Agoraphobia, on the other hand, is the fear of a place or event where escape is impossible or when help is unavailable. The sort of anxiety that is a constant companion in a life of struggle. A natural byproduct of high crime levels, especially amongst those least able to defend themselves namely the poor. Thus a continuous thread can be traced from reckless politics to poor service delivery and, ultimately, appeasement of yet another African dictator. Its these underlying, and frankly preventable, problems that are now manifesting as racially motivated unrest. When you are poor and defenseless your frustrations can initially only reach those on your level, such as equally poor illegal immigrants from other African nations.

Only 10 years ago South Africa was a beacon of racial tolerance. It was to race relations what the Gaza strip is to the international peace process; the hope of a new order. That hope hasn't been extinguished, but it has been severely curtailed. More to the point it has sounded a serious warning, that, none will be safe till the least of us have been accommodated in a just outcome. No border, nor law, will stop a hungry human being. Louis XVI of France famously said: "We don't sleep if they don't eat". Unfortunately he didn't heed his own advice and "they" launched a revolution that eventually removed the European aristocracy as hereditary rulers. The political process has been refined since but Louis' truism still holds, well, true.

We, as South Africans, can't duck the fact that we are the ones with the power to change this dismal state of affairs. We ought to start by making the painful admission that we are behaving with a total lack of charity, towards fellow Africans that sacrificed enormously to support the liberation of this country. Furthermore, the wealthy and powerful in our community are no longer exempt from the plight of the poor. Our collective futures are intertwined as South Africans and Africans, in fact as human beings. Today is 911 for race relations and downtown Johannesburg is ground zero. This time we have to pay attention, decipher the signs correctly and respond with just intent.

South Africa's New Struggle

The last article in the series is by John Pilger, author of "Freedom next time". He argues that the struggle continues, with globalization having replaced apartheid as the enemy:

The ANC government has allowed the world's most voracious companies to escape reparations for poisoning the land and its people. When I returned to South Africa following the fall of apartheid, I asked Ahmed Kathrada to take me to Robben Island. Known affectionately as Kathy, he wore dark glasses to cover eyes damaged by the glare of the limestone where he and Nelson Mandela had wielded a pick for decades. He showed me his cell, five feet by five feet, where "the light was burning bright, day and night". I wondered how he had emerged from a quarter-century of incarceration as a sane, rounded, tolerant and gracious human being. His reasons included the teachings of Gandhi and the support of his loved ones, but, above all, "there was the struggle, without which nothing changes".

This sense of struggle is back in South Africa. The other day, I met the writer Breyten Breytenbach, who spent eight years in prison under the apartheid regime. Speaking at the Time of the Writer festival in Durban, he evoked the "dreams" of the great liberation fighters Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe. "How are we going to stop this seemingly irrevocable 'progress' of South Africa to a totalitarian one-party state?" he asked.

It is a question many ask in a country that now typifies an economic apartheid imposed across the world under a cover of "economic growth" and liberal, corporate jargon. For "democracy", read socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. For "governance" and "modernity", read a system of division and plunder designed and approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos - a system in which, says the South African finance minister, Trevor Manuel, "winners flourish". And he speaks from a country where inequality and poverty are described as "desperate", where the ANC government has allowed the world's most voracious companies to escape reparations for poisoning the land and its people, and which has been suckered by British arms companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17m each, "by far the most expensive option", according to a House of Commons report.

Britain's Department for International Development has played a notorious role. Although required by law not to spend money other than on poverty reduction, DfID is, in reality, a privatising agency that greases the way for multi nationals to take over public services. In 2004, the department paid the Adam Smith Institute, an extreme right-wing think tank, £6.3m for plans to "reform" the "public sector" in South Africa, promoting "business-to-business" links between Brit ish and South African companies whose singular interest is profit.

Once the wretched Robert Mugabe is gone, Zimbabwe will get the same treatment. Offering a billion pounds' worth of "aid", the British government will lead the return of capital, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to restore what was, long before Mugabe's wrecking, one of the most exploited and unequal societies in Africa. The new heist was outlined on 5 April at the amusingly titled Progressive Governance Conference in Britain, one of Tony Blair's legacies, where "left-of-centre" leaders pretend to be crisis managers instead of, as is often the case, the cause of the crisis. (In 1999, Blair flew twice to South Africa to promote the now scandalous arms deal.)

The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, is said to have been recruited to get rid of the obstacle that is Mugabe, but he is cautious, no doubt recalling that Mugabe, on his last visit to South Africa, received an embarrassing ovation from the black crowd. This was not so much an endorsement of his despotism as a reminder that most South Africans had not forgotten one of the ANC's "unbreakable promises" - that almost a third of arable land would be redistributed by 2000. Today the figure is less than 4 per cent.

Meanwhile, the evictions continue, along with urban dispossession, water disconnections and the ubiquitous indignity of begging. "Our country belongs to all who live in it," say the opening words of the ANC's Freedom Charter, declared more than half a century ago. Recently, the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in two years to more than 10,000 a year. This may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. Once again, like Kathy, they are calling it "struggle".