XENOPHOBIA – FRUIT FROM A POISONOUS TREE

By Zenzile Khoisan

We require an in-depth education, in South Africa, on our collective African history. The regressive, cultural nationalist impulse, sweeping South Africa currently, is a disgrace.

However, it does not come from an unknown source, as it has clear, identifiable roots. Its genesis can be traced to our brutal history, which our political leadership continues to treat superficially. The fact that we mobilised millions of our people on thin slogans rather than a deep education, and the fact that we opted for expediency, burying our heads in the sand of shallow national consciousness are our own chickens, coming home to roost.

We engage with others, as political opportunist and populists have done, castigating thinkers as if they have no right to exist, ridiculing the call for action against African aberrations such as Robert Mugabe, and caricaturing our compatriots to the North of our borders as the progeny of savages.

What we have failed to do is develop a true sense of solidarity with our compatriots, because the political organisations that are supposed to be the vanguard of this project still cannot grasp the essence of a person such as Thomas Sankara, cannot make a clear call for the integration of the African Diaspora into the African Union, and re-enforce fence sitting on critical issues, by advancing the argument of national interest.

It is precisely this type of rubbish that has dumbed down our people's revolutionary spirit, which has been supplanted by a cognitive dissonance that makes it possible to look the other way, or find humour in the barbaric killing of a pregnant women, savage slashings of African elders, or the socio-pathic petrol bombing of a dwelling where human beings tried to find respite from the loneliness of being forced to live far from the temple of their familiars.

We are no more than animals if we find any reason to justify the barbarism that has been meted out to innocents by rapacious mobs, feeding on the cannibal frenzy of self hatred.

As we approach African liberation day (25 May), let us, once again remind our so-called leaders of their responsibility to use their positions to which we have elevated them about the arguments that raged in May 1963. It was then that the question was posed: What kind of Unity do we want; a unity of states or a unity of the African people? Let us, the ordinary people take the initiative to educate our people that the only path to African liberation is the unity of it's peoples, and if the state should die, so be it, because these states, and the parasitic elites they have spawned, have, invariably, brought more misery than joy, to the masses in whose name they claim to speak.

Let us isolate the haters and embrace our sisters and brothers, in peace, in love, in unity.

Zenzile Khoisan is editor of Rootz Africa magazine and a published author.