Sometimes, when SA shows me a side of our character that shocks me, I go back to our founding fathers to remind myself that we were once great — and that perhaps we can be great again.
In the writings of Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Ruth First and many others one can find some of the finest expressions of South African humanist thought and its solidarity with human struggles everywhere.
I found it hard this week to find passages that would make me feel better about where SA is as a nation.
The images of a family washing the ground on which their father was beaten and then burnt to death by a “vigilante” mob in Diepsloot, outside Johannesburg, reminded me of the cruelty and stupidity that lies in the human heart — and what politicians and officials who have been demonising foreigners have stoked without care about what their words drive people to do.
The man, Zimbabwean Mbodazwe Elvis Nyathi, was killed by a group going door-to-door in Diepsloot checking residents’ identity documents.
Who gives them the right?
Nyathi was a human being. I grew up with the Sotho saying motho ke motho ka batho — I am human because I see others’ humanity.
Nyathi was killed as though he was a dangerous, scary, predatory, wild animal.
Not only was he murdered, but his killers burnt his body so as to obliterate him, to remove him permanently from our consideration of humans.
By doing so, they showed us that their own humanity is lacking, compromised, perhaps non-existent.
The group that killed Nyathi apparently committed this crime because seven South Africans were allegedly killed by a Zimbabwean the previous week.
Neither the police or the community can produce the names, bodies, or relatives of those seven dead people. Now a man lies dead at the hands of this hateful mob.
For months now, members of these unelected, unauthorised, unaccountable mobs have terrorised poor black people all over Gauteng.
Old ladies selling tomatoes have been harassed for their identity documents and have had their stock “confiscated” by these mobs.
Nothing has been done about them. The mobs know now that the state is weak and that they can do as they please, including murdering people, and so that is what they continue to do.
They are aided and abetted by the police, who now issue statements about crimes that specifically name suspects as being Zimbabweans or Pakistanis, as if South Africans have not been hijacking cars, raping women, taking part in cash-in-transit heists or committing fraud for decades.
That’s where we are now: a place where logic or facts don’t matter.
Every move we make, every act we take, has consequences. Some consequences are benign, some are not. But there are consequences.
When we attack African immigrants, South African businesses will be targeted in other countries and, politically, we will continue to lose our moral authority and leadership on the continent.
In SA, we have unleashed terrorism on the streets. Mobs can stop anyone and demand their ID because that person looks “different”.
If you are “dark” (what does that even mean?), then you are accused of being a foreigner.
This week, a Tsonga man was asked by a policeman, on camera, what the word for elbow was in xiTsonga.
I can’t tell you what the word for elbow is in Sepedi or isiZulu! What is this — apartheid SA?
The police who go around stopping “illegal foreigners” are not going to arrest any — they are going to take bribes. Plenty of them. We are not solving a problem here. We are making it worse.
By all means let’s kick out the Pakistani shopkeepers, the Zimbabwean gardeners and fruit sellers. We say South Africans are going to replace them? Why haven’t they done so already?
When we are done with the Zimbabweans, who else are we going to target? Well, there’s the Indians.
Oh, why are the Vendas thriving? Why are these Xhosas in charge of everything? And these whites ... Stellenbosch?
Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of SA on May 10 1994.
He said: “Today, all of us do, by our presence here, and by our celebrations in other parts of our country and the world, confer glory and hope to newborn liberty.
“Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.
“Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
“All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today.”
Mandela and all our greats must be weeping in heaven today.