Pretoria: Violence erupts at anti-migrant protest
Police fire tear gas and rubber bullets to break up local protesters who blame foreigners for unemployment and crime.
XENOPHOBE AFRIQUE DU SUD…
Sous la pression de migrations importantes, des milliers de personnes, la grande nation arc-en-ciel sud-africaine est en train de devenir xénophobe. « Les attaques répétées contre les Africains étrangers conduites par des bandes armées de gourdins, de machettes et de fusils, montrent que les héritiers de Nelson Mandela n’ont pas expliqué à leur peuple le rôle décisif d’une Afrique unie contre le racisme dont ils sont sortis », explique le Financialafrik du 22 février. En dix jours d’attaques et d’incendies des échoppes nigérianes et d’autres pays africains, aucun membre de l’ANC (African National Congress), le parti au pouvoir, n’est intervenu. Trop occupées à une guerre de succession, les élites embourgeoisées ne se sont même pas excusées auprès des pays concernés, si bien que le Nigéria s’en est ému et a appelé l’Union Africaine (UA) à admonester Prétoria. Mais comme en Europe, et maintenant aux Etats-Unis, l’Afrique du Sud traîne les pieds dès qu’il s’agit d’intégration et de libre circulation.
▻https://blogs.letemps.ch/christine-von-garnier/2017/02/26/xenophobe-afrique-du-sud
The migrant and the enemy within
Africa is not exempt from the global phenomenon of hostility to the migrant. As early as 1961, Frantz Fanon warned that, although anti-colonial nationalism constituted new nations in resistance, and marshalled extraordinary courage and commitment in struggle, without “a rapid step … from national consciousness to political and social consciousness”, new forms of chauvinism could emerge. “From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism … These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.”
Across Africa, colonial arrangements that tied rights to territory, within or between national borders, continue to be exploited by elites to sustain oppressive forms of rule. Mahmood Mamdani’s compelling body of work has illuminated the failure of most post-colonial states to break with the colonial attempt to divide people into ethnicities tied to territories.
In South Africa, migrants who arrive from countries like Somalia or Pakistan, and without great wealth or professional accreditation, face systemic discrimination from an extremely corrupt and abusive state. Politicians shamelessly refer to people, irrespective of their legal status with regard to citizenship, as “foreign nationals”, and the conflation between “illegal immigrants” and “criminals” is relentless. Johannesburg mayor #Herman_Mashaba ’s xenophobia is repulsive to the point of being Trumpian in its crudity.
▻https://mg.co.za/article/2018-09-07-00-the-migrant-and-the-enemy-within
Mahmood Mamdani remembers his friend and comrade #Sam_Moyo
▻http://africasacountry.com/2015/11/mahmood-mamdani-remembers-his-friend-and-comrade-sam-moyo
I no longer recall when exactly I met Sam. Maybe it was in the late 1970s at CODESRIA, or in the early 1980s at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies......
White History Month: The American reservation became the South African reserve
▻http://africasacountry.com/white-history-month-the-american-reservation-became-the-south-afric
Mahmood Mamdani: (I)n 1993 … (I) first went to South Africa to study apartheid as a form of the state. I realized that basic institutions of apartheid had been created long before the name and the state came into being. The ethnic cleansing of the African population of South Africa began as early as 1913 […]
File Under: #Mahmood_Mamdani on #South_Africa’s much vaunted #Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission
▻http://africasacountry.com/mamdani-on-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission
Because the (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission) focused on perpetrators and overlooked the beneficiaries of mass violations of rights abuses – such as the pass laws and forced expulsions – it allowed the vast majority of white South Africans to go away thinking that they had little to do with these atrocities. Indeed, most did learn nothing new. The alternative would have been for the #TRC to show white South Africans that no matter what their political views – whether they were for, against or indifferent to apartheid – they were all its beneficiaries, whether it was a matter of the residential areas where they lived, the jobs they held, the schools they went to, the taxes they did or did not pay, or the cheap labour they (...)