The African Socialist International condemns the killing of innocent impoverished African workers just on allegations that they are not from South Africa or they can’t speak Zulu properly.
At least five people are dead, hundreds injured, and five thousand displaced around Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and other cities in South Africa. People are now living in conditions not different from concentration camps we see in war zones throughout Africa.
African mothers with babies on their backs and traumatized little children have been forced to flee in the middle of night, while shops and houses belonging to other African nationals have been looted if not set ablaze.
These acts of violence by poor African workers from South Africa against poor African workers from outside South Africa are a result of organized misdirected violence, orchestrated by the African petty bourgeoisie. They are not fortuitous spontaneous acts of violence.
Goodwill Zwelithini, the Zulu King, said that foreigners should “pack their bags” and leave.
Edward Zuma, the son of the Jacob Zuma, the current African National Congress (ANC) South African president said that “We accept foreign nationals that are in the country legally and contributing to the South African economy with their skills. But, we do not accept foreign nationals that shoot our mothers and sisters.”
They are two representatives of the African petty bourgeoisie leading the hatred and assault on African workers from outside and from inside South Africa too.
Attacks on non-South African workers is attack on African nation
The Sharpeville and Marikana massacres were not committed by some African foreigners!
They were carried out by the South African State under apartheid leaders and ANC leadership respectively.
These attacks are not expressions of xenophobia or afrophobia, they are expressions of fratricidal attacks; it is brother against brother, sister against sister.
We carry in our brains a false sense of identity based on false borders defined by white people and imposed on us by white people.
There was no African person at the Berlin Conference when white oppressors drew these damn borders!
They drew them for the purpose of oppressing us, separating us from each other, weakening our overall genuine movement for freedom and independence.
South African or Zimbabwean identity are colonial fabricated identities
As was stated in an article on UhuruNews.com in 2008, ”It is a fabricated colonial national identity that would bring an African to the conclusion that another African who languishes in the same poverty is his enemy and is responsible for his misery just because he was born on the other side of a colonial border created against our interests instead of defining the colonial settlers who have seized our land and imposed poverty on us as the enemy.”
Poverty began with the theft of our land by European settlers, who invaded Africa. They are not even immigrants, they are invaders.
The black people in South Africa are poor for the same reason that the black people from Mozambique, DRC, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Brazil, Trinidad and other countries in Africa are poor.
African workers are poor everywhere for the same reason: our white oppressor has stolen our labor and riches for 600 years.
We are all poor because Africa is looted day and night by imperialist powers.
We are poor because our labor and resources continue to be stolen by foreign powers with the complicity of the African petty bourgeoisie in power from South Africa all the way to Morocco.
The wealth stolen from us is in Europe, North America, Japan, China, Australia and the leftovers are in the homes of African petty bourgeoisie leaders.
African petty bourgeoisie, like African presidents, are against African unity
The African petty bourgeoisie have become richer throughout Africa, and they do not need to travel far across Africa to solve their problem.
The only thing they do is to organize and fight for control or access to national colonial State power and to the board rooms of imperialist corporations.
That is how ANC leaders left the ghettos and poor working class communities at the first opportunity to live next to white people.
They failed to unite Africa, because they are opposed and continue to be opposed to real unity of Africa and African people.
Rich African people throughout Africa have mansions and economic interests in South Africa; they do not have to be worried about a mob of poor workers showing up outside their homes.
Likewise, many South African companies are reaping huge profits exploiting African workers throughout Africa.
Despite contradictions which exist amongst African rulers, they have Africa for themselves.
It is criminal for any African petty bourgeois leader in South Africa to promote hatred between African people while exploiting us throughout Africa.
Just look at the number of companies from South Africa throughout the Continent.
The real question is, “Why can’t African workers have Africa for ourselves?”
After all, we are the ones who produce the wealth of Africa.
In order to get to white power, African workers must defeat the African petty bourgeoisie and all of their neocolonial States
The role of the African Socialist International is to tirelessly work to help the African workers to identify the real enemy of the African nation.
We must turn our anger against our real enemy, those who enslaved Africa, those who created apartheid, lynchings of Africans, the false borders to separate African people, AIDS and Ebola to depopulate Africa and immigration laws to facilitate our exploitation and oppression.
Our colonial oppressors are the enemy that have imposed wars on Libya, Mali, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and he Central African Republic.
They are the same colonial oppressors that have imposed IMF and World Bank imperialist programs that have depleted hospitals of medicine and the few qualified medical personnel that we had.
Identifying imperialism as the main enemy of African people everywhere is the main political task of any genuine political force in the African nation today!
Any violence which does not target settlers and the capitalist and neocolonial State is illegitimate violence.
Any violence that does not target the neocolonial profiteers of the black economic empowerment (the BEE) is illegitimate.
Cyril Ramaphosa, the former Secretary General of National Union of Miners, is today a billionaire and Deputy President of the ANC.
How can a trade union leader become a billionaire in Africa?
The only way is by selling out the long term interests of the vast majority of the toiling masses to the imperialists, the worst class and national enemy of African people.
African workers are poor and landless because the ANC’s leaders have surrendered the land of South African to white settlers.
We must deal with the African petty bourgeoisie before we get to white power.
Once in power, the African petty bourgeoisie is a class working for itself in alliance with foreign capitalist powers at the expense of black workers.
Why is it that the South African masses are no longer revolutionaries?
Why are white settlers in South Africa now able to leave South Africa and travel to Nigeria to fight Boko Haram?
Because the African petty bourgeoisie throughout the Continent had surrendered to white imperialist rulers long before the ANC got to power.
South Africa violence not unique but essential feature of pains imperialism has imposed on African working class communities all over the world
The violence in South Africa is an integral part of violence that is happening in CRS, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and the Dominican Republic where the so-called Dominicans are allowed to lynch African workers on trees and flag African workers attached to a lamp posts.
It is part and parcel of the murder of Africans by white police in the U.S., and the chronic death of Africans in the Mediterranean Sea in desperate attempts to escape poverty and violence at home.
It is one and the same with the violence of African women being beaten in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or sterilized en masse against our will by Israeli doctors.
Whenever you look at Brazilian police armed to the teeth go-ing to the black neighborhood in the favelas, gunning down African people using the familiar bogus pretext of fighting crime, you are looking at the relationship which started 600 years ago, characterized by Karl Marx as primitive accumulation.
African workers of the world, unite and smash neocolonialism
The violence against Africans from outside South Africa does not solve the problems of poor people in South Africa.
On the contrary, it criminalizes them, isolates them from the rest of Africa, while at the same time it makes them the followers of reactionary African petty bourgeois tribalism or “xenophobic” rulers.
We agree with those who advocate that Africans from all over the world are not and can’t be foreigners on African soil.
Africa is our collective home.land which needs to be freed and united. South Africa is a colony, a settler colony of white people.
The presence in South Africa of Africans from Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, etc., is a natural reinforcement of the black population of South Africa.
What we have to do is break free from African petty bourgeois rulers to build our own organization, the African Socialist International, based on our own philosophy of African Internationalism, which binds all 1.5 billion African people in our historical march to unite and consolidate the African nation.
Build the African Socialist International!
In November 2015, African Socialist International (ASI) Chairman Omali Yeshitela and several Uhuru Movement activists will travel to Azania to build and organize our forces on the ground there.
Donate now to help fund this critical organizing trip!
