South Africa is still Africa's responsibility

One can understand the rage, pain, and disappointment, that informs Pius Adesanmi’s but a cooler, more dispassionate view of South Africa may have cast more light on the issue For all his preamble about making ‘psychic’ reconnection to Africa and escaping the dominant racial generalisations about Africa in the West, Adesanmi shows a marked inability to escape these very race stereotypes. Perhaps this is part of the point he wishes to make but he shows a surprising willingness to reproduce these stereotypes. When he encounters the squalor and danger of inner city Johannesburg he can only recount his experience in the very race terms he condemns earlier.

Does Adesanmi not know that other cities in Africa and the world have mugging, violence and robbery on an almost equal scale. Has he been to Lagos recently? Yet Adesanmi’s fixation on race – all those inscrutable black faces - does not allow him to recognise or indeed consider the new demographic pressures on the limited public and social infrastructure in Johannesburg; a city that draws poor Africans not only from the immediate surrounding area but also a large regional hinterland extending beyond the Equator. Population pressure on infrastructure in African cities built for small affluent white colonial populations are not new.

Adesanmi then goes on to imply that Nigeria liberated South Africa single handed with little help. This would be news to South Africans and many other Africans. Yes, Nigeria did contribute significantly to the liberation of southern Africa. But its role – somewhat belated - was not the key defining moment for South Africa’s long struggle. The frontline states – particularly Mozambique and Tanzania – contributed more over a longer period. Yes, the struggle to overcome apartheid seized the imagination of young informed Nigerians but it also captured the attention of whole generation of Africans, inspiring music, literature, art and politics across the continent. It did not capture of the imagination of Nigerians alone.

The xenophobia that drives everyday urban life and current disturbances are not a new phenomenon and probably have deep roots in Apartheid South Africa. The South African view of ‘Africans’ who come from north of the Limpopo as ‘black’, physically repellent and possessed of incomprehensible and inelegant languages is not new. Indeed the word ‘ African’ is a historically ambiguous term in South Africa, freighted with all the contempt and violence of Apartheid. The conflicts and competitiveness of post Apartheid South Africa have only added new hostility to old contempt ‘Insider/outsider’ or ‘native/stranger’ strife is one of the perennial and defining binaries of African politics. The fact that Black South Africans have turned on other Africans is a sad surprise – we expected more of them - but, on reflection, it is not a million miles away from the ethnic clashes in Kenya earlier this year or the anti- Ibo pogroms in Nigeria in the 1960’s.

Informed Africans from other parts of the continent should recognise that South Africa – culturally, socially, economically and politically - is very much part of the rest of Africa; challenges, dilemmas and hopes. We should appreciate this even though South Africans seem unable to realise this.