Generally stinking attitude towards foreign Africans

Zwelithini, speaking recently at an official event in KZN which was also attended by Minister of Police Nathi Nhleko, reportedly said: “We are requesting those who come from outside to please go back to their countries.

The fact that there were countries that played a role in the country’s struggle for liberation should not be used as an excuse to create a situation where foreigners are allowed to inconvenience locals.”

God forbid that South Africans should be inconvenienced by the horrors experienced by humanity in other parts of the world.

The chairman of the Royal Household Trust which manages Zwelithini’s affairs, Judge Jerome Ngwenya, has suggested the king was quoted out of context or the comments were fabricated. But Edward Zuma subsequently echoed this view in an interview, saying South Africa was sitting on a ticking time bomb with the prospect of foreigners taking over the country.

Meanwhile human rights activists in Durban this week predicted a black Easter for foreigners as violence flared in various communities.

Government’s silence on the matter is astounding, but fits in with its abject failure to apply the law to protect the rights of all foreigners, and to hold South Africans accountable to a vision of a society that welcomes the “other” or the stranger in our midst.

Given our racialised past under colonial administrations and the National Party, and the parlous efforts of the ANC-in-government to ditch “othering” or entrench a non-racial consciousness, it is perhaps not surprising that the presence of foreign nationals has been such a fraught issue.

In the past two decades African foreign nationals – many of them refugees from horrific wars – have relocated to South Africa in the hope of finding refuge from anti-democratic forces or economic ruptures in their home countries.

They have found, instead, a hostile destination where xenophobia thrives, one in which black, poor foreigners are arguably treated worse than black South Africans were at the height of apartheid. We South Africans should be ashamed of ourselves and our countrymen.

There is a wrong perception propagated by local politicians and bureaucrats – and now seemingly the king of the Zulus – that huge numbers of foreign nationals live among us. In reality, African foreign nationals make up a miniscule percentage of our total population.

The notion of many millions of (especially illegal) African foreigners inside our borders is a figment of a racist mind-set. Census 2011 set the country’s population at 51.7 million, of which only about 1.4-million or 2.7% were foreigners of every conceivable nationality.

According to the UN High Commission for Refugees and based on Department of Home Affairs 2013 figures, there are some 65000 recognised refugees in South Africa, with another 230000 asylum-seekers awaiting decisions from the department on their status.

These relatively small figures belie the significance given to the presence of African foreign nationals in the imaginations of many South Africans, as reflected in media reports and tavern or braaivleis conversations. These allege that vast numbers are flooding into our country from elsewhere in Africa.

We, of course, also choose to ignore the historical backdrop of refugees “flooding” into South Africa over the past almost 500 years.

If Zwelithini has been correctly reported then he has continued to project enduringly stereotypical imagery of hard-done-by locals having to compete almost unfairly against African foreigners who live high on the hog in our country.

But the reality for most African foreigners seeking refuge here is that they have not willingly given up their homelands. Instead, the range of oppressive circumstances have often been so acute that these pitifully vulnerable souls have little option but to endure struggling to subsist in an environment which – on paper at least – offers comparatively better chances for their basic survival.

But they live here hugging the shadows to avoid the hatred of locals, continually having to affirm their legality to the authorities, while trying to eke out a living.

Not all foreigners are uniformly victimised however, and the recent comments play into the racist rejection of dark-skinned, foreign language-speakers or impecunious foreigners.

Skilled and professional whites of British, European and North American descent occupying the middle and upper classes in South Africa do not experience xenophobia in this manner at all. On the contrary, we welcome their contributions to the local economy which, through various taxes end up in the fiscus which eventually keeps people like Zwelithini and his large royal household, and President Zuma’s extended household, in clover.

Our constitution is a global benchmark of how rights should be protected for all in our country – both citizens and foreigners. We are also a signatory to international conventions on refugee rights.

Our law states emphatically that no person may be refused entry to South Africa, or expelled or extradited, or returned to any other country if they have a well-founded fear of being subjected to persecution or their physical safety is threatened.

The law does not protect foreigners who commit crimes in South Africa, but it certainly does not provide a basis for tarring asylum seekers, refugees and permanent residents with the same brush – as we are wont to do.

As a result of our law’s failure to address so-called “hate crimes” motivated by prejudice, comments like those we have recently heard are likely to easily escape censure. And it is noteworthy that the South African state has no official definition of xenophobia. As a result, xenophobia is not a crime in our law, and neither the police nor the National Prosecuting Authority are able to bring a case of xenophobia before the courts.

The national Department of Home Affairs, a key implementing agent of government’s strategy on issues relating to foreign nationals, including refugees and responses to xenophobia, has failed miserably to address the plight of African foreigners within our borders.

Tracking the department’s annual reports to date shows absolutely no programme to deal with xenophobia or its policy response – community cohesion – despite a special unit on the issue being set up 10 years ago.

The paltry efforts to deal effectively with the racism inherent in xenophobic violence and hateful utterances can be traced to these lacunae. But having good laws and applying them is one thing. The more important issue to address is the general attitude of most South Africans towards African foreign nationals.

The absence of criticism of Zwelithini’s alleged comments – outside of the DA, groups representing foreigners and the Human Rights Commission probe – is deafening. Together with the support for Zwelithini on news sites, it points to a complicity between locals and the state about hate speech and xenophobic behaviour.

It is time our country’s hatred of African foreign nationals is stopped. Our actions and our words thus far have been largely despicable. We have no place to be engaging with the world – as businesspeople in London, tourists in Thailand, rugby spectators in Australia, or as politicians at the United Nations – until we end the horror heaped on African foreigners here at home.