The Sunday Mail
The current xenophobic violence has one winner, the whiteman. The whiteman was also liable for mfecane and without making any apologies . . .
The Sharp Shooter COLUMN by Vukani Madoda
Today we call it xenophobia but it has always been known as mfecane or simply the time of troubles.
In more recent times, it was called apartheid – a system of segregation. The causes of mfecane are very similar to the causes of today’s xenophobia. The bottom line is lack of resources.
The other factors are dominance of one group over another. Human weakness and vice caused mfecane, human weakness and vice caused apartheid, and today human weakness, wickedness and hatred cause xenophobia.
And the bottom line remains lack of resources, greed and refusal to share the cake.
When this scenario is contrasted with the issue of race and the Zimbabwe question it is very easy to see that what happened in South Africa during the early 1800s and during apartheid and even now during this xenophobic period, there is a clear perpetrator to the racial and tribal hatred and that is the whiteman.
Mfecane was caused in part by declining rainfall patterns in the last decades of the eighteenth century, followed by a catastrophic ten-year drought that began about 1800, which caused massive disruption and suffering in South Africa.
The adoption of maize from the whiteman as a staple diet also gave this drought an even greater impact than those of the past because maize needed much more water than traditional grains such as finger millet and sorghum.
When the rains failed, therefore, the effect was devastating. People fought one another for meagre supplies of whiteman’s grain. They fought for cattle and hunted down whatever game they could find, and sought out any remaining water supplies in a desperate attempt to survive.
War erupted, and two kingdoms – the Ndwandwe under the leadership of Zwide, and the Mthethwa under Dingiswayo – battled for control of resources. Both kingdoms became more centralised and militarised. Their young men banded together in age regiments that became the basis for standing armies, and their kings became more autocratic as they fought for survival like they do today through xenophobic violence. The Ndwandwe appeared victorious in 1818 when Dingiswayo was killed and his forces scattered, but they were soon overcome by Shaka, founder of the Zulu state.
In 1795, the British, who were at war with France, invaded the Cape Peninsula from False Bay and took over the Cape (including Cape Town) from the Dutch until 1803 when the colony was handed back to the Dutch. When war between the British and French broke out once more in 1806, the British permanently occupied the Cape Colony.
After the Napoleonic wars, Britain experienced a serious unemployment problem. Therefore, encouraged by the British government to immigrate to the Cape colony, the first 1820 settlers arrived in South Africa. When the whiteman interfered with an African society already fighting for scarce resources, the hatred amongst the Nguni people escalated as the British used divide and rule tactics by providing weapons and ammunition to clans in order to wipe out each other. It was indeed a time of great trouble, mfecane, as the Nguni dispersed north with Mzilikazi, king of the Ndebele, settling in modern day Zimbabwe where in the next few weeks we are expecting thousands of returning residents from South Africa who are fleeing the xenophobic violence.
Blacks were used by the whiteman to fight and displace one another. One other resultant effect of the mfecane was that a labour shortage ensued because the once mighty people of the Zulu state refused to be subservient to the new regime while thousands of blacks had migrated north. The whiteman then brought in Indian slaves into KwaZulu Natal as cheap labour. The Indians still dominate Durban to this day.
While the Zulu’s continued to live in the illusion of a great State, those that had migrated north quickly became industrious and started to fend for themselves and they also became independent nation states with Zimbabwe obtaining total independence following the land reform programme.
As opportunities arose in South Africa with the discovery of huge mineral deposits especially in gold and diamonds, some of those that had migrated north trekked back to South Africa to supplement their living.
They were never fully welcomed by those that had remained. They were never fully welcomed because they worked hard and worked for a purpose to supply capital back home from the countries that they had migrated to. In essence they became foreigners in their land of origin. Although they were “foreigners” they become successful while the black South Africans that had remained continued to wait for their messiah. To entrench this animosity among the black people, the whiteman in 1948 introduced a vicious and dehumanising system of racial segregation called apartheid.
Apartheid literally castrated any glimmer of black racial pride as white on black violence and black on black violence became the order of the day. There was chaos in South Africa from the top to the bottom.
From whites, to blacks, to foreigners. For example, as amplified by the late great Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera in his masterpiece The House of Hunger; the colonial government oppressed all the blacks causing a domino effect in which a man publicly rapes his wife and no one does anything to stop the absurdity, the wife/mother beats up her child for speaking in English, and a cat is killed by children.
This is the kind of environment that best describes South Africa since the whiteman set foot in that land of Azania. The ghettos of South Africa where xenophobia is most pronounced is not only filled with violence but also immoral behaviour including prostitution and thuggery which is all engulfed in an atmosphere of abject poverty which all blacks and some foreigners endure.
However, this is just a tip of the iceberg. The black South Africans need land which the Zimbabweans managed to reclaim, they need independence which Zimbabwe has and not this semblance of democracy.
The South African blacks have been under oppression for centuries and they are still in chains.
They have been extremely marginalised and deprived of basic human rights for centuries. The whiteman has beaten them up black and blue and they have been blinded and confused to think that while they are illiterate blacks sitting on their laurels, the reason for their unemployment is because a qualified engineer, lawyer, medical doctor or accountant from another African country has taken a job which is their birthright. The whiteman damaged the black South African and the black South African’s anger is misdirected at other blacks whom they label foreigners. The current xenophobic violence has one winner, the whiteman. The whiteman was also liable for mfecane and without making any apologies, the whiteman was responsible for apartheid.
The conditions that the whiteman subjected the black South African made him fear the whiteman such that Africans will pound each other to pulp forgetting who the real enemy is. The silence of the Western world is also very telling.
Clearly, the way the xenophobic violence has especially targeted Zimbabweans is also a direct attack on Cde Robert Mugabe. White people have failed to bully Cde Mugabe and therefore they have now resorted to using pawns in the form of black South Africans to fight against foreigners, Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. This is chess, it is not checkers. Black South Africans need to wake up and realise who the real enemy is.
Dubulaizitha, igamalamingu Vukani Madoda
