It was mid afternoon and the clouds in the northern region of Johannesburg – one of the most affluent places in the country – looked too bright. This city has not seen rain since April. The EuropCar driver who brought me from the airport to my hotel, Palazzo Montecasino, Fourways, on Monday was full of excitement because Spring was around the corner.
I had tried to draw him into talking about the reports of attacks against foreigners happening in some parts of Johannesburg, he merely replied in a rich Swahili accent,“They are very ignorant people,” and moved the conversation to the weather and traffic.
The wind on this particular day wasn’t high like it was on Monday, but it was cold enough to warrant a long-sleeve shirt buttoned to the neck and worn under a thick cardigan. I was in the company of two other journalists from Nairobi and we were all pumped for our tour of Soweto.
My first encounter with Soweto was as a child from the movie ‘Sarafina’, a 1992 South African musical whose plot focused on students involved in Soweto uprising.
“Will you take us to her school?” I asked the tour guide who identified himself simply as Vuyo. It wasn’t the first time service providers here were identifying themselves by first names. South Africans probably are not big on offering surnames. I could still envision the songs and heavy stamp of feet of the students led by the female character as they marched on the streets to resist domination of the Afrikaans.
“She was merely a character symbolising the resistance by students in Soweto,” Vuyo replied with a smile. Like many misconceptions, it was the first time I was hearing that as I had always thought Sarafina was real life. “Over 600 students died from wounds sustained from bullets fired by the police deployed by the apartheid government.” Apartheid means apartness.
Our history class on xenophobia proper began in front of the house where Nelson Mandela lived as soon as he retired from politics, at upper Houghton – another affluent neighborhood. The prisoner-turned-president retired from party politics in 1999 and from public life in June 2004 at the age of 85.
Our tour guide who had stopped by an express gas station at Fourways to fill his tank started by telling us how Mandela left the house to his third wife, Marcia who later donated the house to Mandela’s grandchild who wasn’t even her baby.
There was no sign on the high-fenced house because they didn’t want crowds camping around his house everyday to catch a glimpse of him. Those who arranged the house apparently wanted him to have some peace before his death. But there were stones where people had written messages for him outside the house. Mandela had reportedly told journalists that he was “retiring from retirement” to spend more time with family and friends. He later died at the age of 95.
“What we realised, too late, was that Mandela only brought us political and social freedom, but we needed to win our economic freedom,” Vuyo said. The vehicle was back on the road and making its way to a bridge.
The Mandela Bridge
When you get to the Mandela Bridge the contrast in living standards began to become clearer. Vuyo explained why the bridge was symbolic for many South Africans. After apartheid, two strong ideologies emerged.
First was Nelson Mandela who spent almost the entire apartheid regime in prison but while there managed to hone his skills in negotiation. When he came out of prison he expressed belief that by cultivating white people and allowing them to coexist within the South African society with blacks, that black South Africans will eventually come to become like the whites economically. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations with de Klerk to end apartheid and bring about a peaceful transition to a nonracial democracy in South Africa.
But one of his major ‘sins’ was asking the black nation nursing fresh scars from fighting for their freedom to do something they never imagined doing – forgive.
Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995, which investigated human rights violations under apartheid, and he introduced housing, education, and economic development initiatives designed to improve the living standards of the black population. But his support base had dwindled as a result of his insistence on peaceful integration.
The inequality between blacks and their former white overlords had grown so much that the black leaders opposing Mandela felt justified that a more radical – any means necessary – approach was needed.
Mother of the Nation
The second ideology was championed by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the second wife of Mandela who actually lived through the horrors of apartheid while Mandela was in prison. Apart from seeing little children, mothers and able bodied men murdered on the streets and in their homes, she too had shed her blood fighting the Afrikaans – the Dutch who were responsible for the segregation between whites and blacks. In doing so, she had become so popular that almost the entire black nation rallied behind her.
“If you are free to yourselves you must break the chains of oppression yourselves,” she once said in 1976, “Only then can we express our dignity, only when we have liberated ourselves can we cooperate with other groups. Any acceptance of humiliation, indignity or insult is acceptance of inferiority.”
She is still referred to as “Mother of the Nation”.
After her husband had been released and was elected the first black president, Winnie told him that the only way to address the economic situation in South Africa was by taking back the lands white supremacists have cornered and giving them back to blacks the real owners. Her approach also included taking the businesses built by the whites. She didn’t believe that peaceful coexistence with the whites would address the inequalities of apartheid.
Her husband, Mandela vehemently refused. It ultimately led to a divorce. As radical and aggressive her approach was, it drew the support of many South African leaders many of whom quickly moved to adopt her approach.
Against the advice of Mandela, many regions like Hilbrow which used to be the Hollywood of South Africa, and Orange City, black leaders seized lands and businesses forcing many whites to relocate or leave South Africa all together. Hilbrow is currently at the heart of the drug war raging in the country. In Soweto today, only one white family lives in the entire region.
“A big part of the problem we have today is that while our brothers from other African countries were taught how to trade, the average South African was not. So once the whites left, our people who took over lacked the capabilities to run the businesses left behind. The businesses eventually died and the place has become a ghost town,” Vuyo said.
In the 1970s Hilbrow was an apartheid-designated “whites only” area but soon became a “grey area”, where people of different ethnicities lived together. It acquired a cosmopolitan and politically progressive feel, and was one of the first identifiable gay and lesbian areas in urban South Africa.
Today, from abandoned skyscrapers to closed shops whose verandas may not have seen a broom in years, Hilbrow has become a shadow of its former self. It is now the epicentre of the drug business, prostitution, and crime with high levels of population density, unemployment, and poverty.
The labour question
The whites in Johannesburg migrated to the north of the city for fear of attacks. The north soon became so rich that poor blacks who couldn’t afford the quality of life there restricted themselves to the southern part of Johannesburg. From the south, many of them would come to work for white companies in the north. But while they made decent wages from working in the north, it still wasn’t enough to afford a quality lifestyle or afford their children a place in schools like St John’s College.
The situation worsened when African immigrants began to be preferred by employers in the north.
“The anger that the whites have taken everything away from us and are exploiting our African brothers against us is what is causing the protest. It is not right, but it is what many of our people have been taught by apartheid,” Vuyo said.
African migrants from different countries including Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, Congo etc, all come to South Africa to search for greener pastures. When they arrive from countries where the currencies are relatively weaker than the rand, these migrant workers usually will work for less than what South Africans would be willing to accept as living wage.
He had stopped in front of a road sign with the inscription ‘Welcome to Soweto’.
Fight for the narrative
Abena – not real first name – our second tour guide who had stayed silent almost the entire journey chipped in. She says politicians are perhaps the biggest contributors to the escalating xenophobic attacks. Those who control the narrative of apartheid are the leaders in various political capacities. For different reasons they stand to benefit from propagating anti-foreigners’ rhetorics.
“We don’t hate our African brothers, it is anger at our leaders and how they have failed our people,” Abena said. We were now standing within the premises of the Apartheid Museum starring at the statue of Hector Pietersen, a South African boy who was shot and killed during the Soweto uprising, when police opened fire on students protesting the enforcement of teaching of Afrikaans.
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