JOHANNESBURG–More than a year ago, we were able to locate the platform for the contest for political office in South Africa on the question of migrant African workers. While campaigning for the 2024 general elections, all political parties had to answer the question: “What is to be done about the migrant African workers?” Many of the organizations resolved that our people should be deported back to the countries they come from. It was only the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) that took the position to defend African workers, something they have since regretted and currently shy away from.
Black politicians stand on State-sponsored horizontal violence
According to most of the politicians, African workers are the central cause of all the problems being experienced by this country. They claim that African workers in South Africa are unemployed because “foreigners” take the jobs, and that crime has been increasing because we (black people) are the criminals. By foreigners, they are referring only to African people, and sometimes Pakistanis–never white people. The suggestion is that if “we” get rid of our own and remain with our colonizers, everything will be repaired and we’ll finally make the “rainbow nation” work.
However, not only is this narrative false, but it is also a betrayal of the masses of African people who fought against colonialism for the last four to six hundred years. The reality is that South Africa is not a nation; rather, it is a settler colony built on the backs, sweat and blood of the indigenous African majority. The construction of South Africa coincided with the creation of the rest of the countries on our continent, all of which are illegitimate.
Why we refuse to be called South Africans
The partitioning of Africa into tiny colonial entities, which would later be called countries, was a continuation of the colonial dispersal of the African Nation, which began in 1441 when the Portuguese captured the first few Africans to be enslaved in Europe. The colonial borders that separate us from our people and resources do not define us, but rather bear evidence of the extent to which our colonizers went to keep us from our African identity and wealth. Therefore, an African cannot be a foreigner on African soil.
The South African neo-colonial government has attempted to create a euphemism around this concept of “foreigners.” These sellouts suggested that saying “foreign nationals” is less derogatory and should be more acceptable. This has since been short-lived with the resurgence of the campaign against migrant African workers. The State kills our people daily, but when it’s time for us to fight back, they transmute our anger into the cannibalism of harassing and butchering our own people instead of confronting the real enemy.
The inherent corruption characteristic of neocolonialism, coupled with the overall crisis of imperialism, is the source of the current resurgence of this attack on African workers. The target is African workers overall (be we “citizens” or “migrants”); the trick of it is that from time to time they attack us from different angles—this is the counterinsurgency that our Party has spoken of for decades. In fact, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, our main mass organization, was founded to defend the African working class from counterinsurgency in all its forms.
It is horizontal violence—not xenophobia
In 2008, while the global capitalist order was trying to find its way out of the economic meltdown, South Africa made the news with migrant African workers being lynched, burned and maimed on the streets. The media characterized the murder of our people, by the hands of our people, as “xenophobia”; however, the word “xeno” means different—African people are one people. The other part, “phobia,” means fear, which is a feeling we only have towards the police and the colonizers, not a fellow African who lives in the same neighborhood with us. Therefore, xenophobia is obviously not a fitting term to describe the State-sponsored horizontal violence that we are confronted with.
A few years after the aforementioned 2008 crisis, Marikana happened—with mine workers rising up against the real enemies of our people and sacrificing their lives for the just cause of getting what’s due to us. The role of the State is to make sure that the masses never rise up against the ruling class and their neo-colonial minions. With that understanding, we can rest assured that the ruling class and the politicians that are on their payroll work around the clock to make sure we never threaten their hegemony. Thus, the sponsoring of movements and campaigns that scapegoat African workers to make us the targets of the rage embodied by the masses.
Operation Dudula, March and March, Patriotic Alliance and other reactionary organizations have been receiving much backing from the State and government to fuel the artificial animosity between Africans in South Africa and those migrating into the colony to survive economic hardships from the countries that they originate from. The aforementioned organizations have put forth no work to boost the economic development of African communities but instead, each of them has spent millions of rands in working to create horizontal violence in the black community (where Africans kill each other as a way to compete for meager resources available in the concentration camps called townships and inner cities). It is shameful to sacrifice the authentic onward motion towards a unified African nation for a fake rainbow “nation” with our colonizers—it is the apex of opportunism!
What about the white people?
In South Africa, it is on record that white people own 72% of the agricultural land. This excludes the large suburbs and industrial companies that occupy large tracts of our Africa—none of these, without exception, are for repairing the colonial damage done to our people and our land. These white people have taken the stance of white-only towns even after having already taken up so much land and blood from our Continent.
There is this colonial attitude amongst the South Africans (white settlers), that black people should be thankful for this country’s existence because were it not for colonialism, our people here would have been in bad shape just like those of us outside of this colony. This popular South African logic is unable to conceive that all of Africa is a result of colonies being built, so it is akin to reasoning that were it not for a zoo, lions would be starving.
All Africans need to join the struggle for Black Power right here in South Africa—it’s already happening in Mbombela where Zakhele Mkhonza, an African Internationalist agricultural worker is running community development programs through planting; it’s happening in Fochville where there’s the Black Power Carwash and it is happening in Evaton West and Orange Farm where waste management education has been systematized since 2019.
Africa IS for the Africans! Those at home and those abroad!
The Pan-Africanists, aka the nationalist sector of the black petty bourgeoisie, have suggested that instead of Africans moving toward One Africa, we ought to have a gradual, legalistic approach to our unification. Do they not understand that this question is not a question of abstractions or wishes—but rather one of food, clothes and shelter for the most oppressed people in the world?
Chairman Omali has long since exposed the African petty bourgeoisie’s stance on this question; he has clearly stated that “our struggle has run into its limitations when fought within these borders.” And so, in line with this trajectory that he and the Party charted in 1972, we are here in South Africa—born and bred here—but now fully aware that our allegiance is to Mama Africa and each and every black person on the face of the earth as one African people.
It is in this spirit that we are building the Uhuru Movement in the townships of South Africa and we are looking for Africans from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana and anywhere else that can connect our struggle back to the lands where we are formed and create a life-line both politically and economically all throughout this Continent of ours and the rest of the African world.
The real foreigners are the SETTLERS and their neocolonial pigs!
Africa is One!
We are NOT South Africans! We are Africans!
