Rejecting EPAs and consolidating regional economic communities may well be the first step in Africa’s move towards regaining independence, writes Owen Sichone.

Responding to Glenn Ashton's , Owen Sichone points out that riots are not necessarily driven by xenophobia.

Regarding Stephen Marks’s article , China's (or Korea's or Britain's, for that matter) plan to secure future sources of food and raw materials for its people makes a lot of sense. What we need to figure out is the behaviour of Africa leaders who give away land, take in toxic waste by the shipload and condemn their own citizens to slave wages. What exactly are they doing?

In response to , France can never redeem itself in Africa so dont mind them. The onus is on Kagame and Museveni to show that they have outgrown gunslinging and can make genuine peace.

The 1994 Rwanda genocide was not the first nor sadly was it the last. We know the Franco-Belgian legacy in Central Africa but it is our own gun men (people for who political power can only grow from the barrel of the gun) that are killing us now. Is Africa ready to put militarist murderers on trial or must we just forgive and forget as usual?

Owen Sichone responds to Pius Adesanmi on the issue of black South Africa's xenophobia towards other Africans

I was quite amazed by Pius Adesanmi's description of South African xenophobia mainly because it was such a non-African perspective. At the end I was left thinking "They've got you my brother, they've got you."

Everyone knows that xenophobia is a problem in South Africa so there is no need to differ with him on that point. However, the Biafran war alone should prove that xenophobia in Nigeria has a presence, even without mentioning the mass expulsion of the Ghanaian teachers and other guest workers once upon a time.
In a paper celebrating the cosmopolitan nationalism of the FRELIMO fighters he had visited in the liberated zones of pre-independence Mozambique, Yoweri Museveni (then a student at the University of Dar es salaam contrasted this revolutionary nationalism with the tribalism of the Ugandan peasants and Makerere intelligentsia:

"The peasants in western region of Uganda, for instance will refer to people from the Northern region of the country as Banyamahanga (foreigners) or as Abadokori (somebody whose language is not intelligible). (Y.T. Museveni 1972. 'Fanon's Theory of Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique' Department of Political Science, University of Dar es Salaam) so there. It is not only the South Africans who call foreigners babblers or barbaroi. And it is not always an insult either, but that is a topic for another discussion. It does not seem that anyone, either on the street, the taxis or KFC outlet called him Ikwerekwere but he nevertheless describes it quite well:

"… we took a bus and headed back to Georges Hérault's residence. I still don't know what it was about us that gave us away as foreigners but the other passengers, all Blacks, lapsed into an uneasy silence as soon as we entered. I looked at the faces around us and thought I saw hostility." I do not doubt that he saw something that looked like hostility but why didn't he say Sani bonani nonke" and see if anybody would bother to return his greeting? Is that not what we do in Africa?

"The tension was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife. Harry confirmed my worst fears when we left the bus. I had just experienced, firsthand, South African xenophobia and I was to experience it again and again throughout my three-month sojourn in that country. Harry explained to me – with the coolness of someone used to it - that the Black South African passengers on the bus had identified us as makwerekwere, hence the naked hostility." Yes they have got you. They have got you so bad that you are paranoid. In contrast when Adewale Maja-Pearce came to Johannesburg he was not jumpy and do you know why? Because he was not wearing American blinkers. If he had not been intimidated by Lagos, he reasoned, nothing that Jozi could throw at him would shake him. Oyinbo man needs to look at Africa with the Open Minds that Fela once sang about and not fear his own shadow.

In many accounts of the Rwandan and Burundian genocides, killers have discovered that they killed one of their own would lament: "We thought he was Hutu" or "He looked like a Tutsi" and judging identity by the appearance method is unreliable – to the say the least but so is judging hostility by level of fear felt.
Yes Makwerekwere is the derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe non-South African blacks but amaXhosa may also call Basotho the same, and vice versa. Yes Black immigrants from the rest of Africa, are called makwerekwere but NOT especially Nigerians who are put both by police and citizens into a special category, one that evokes fear. But judging Nigerians by their appearance (tall and dark) or their favourite activity (419 activities of one sort or another) will invariably yield Cameroonians, Ivorians and Liberians etc.

So why is Pius "confounded by the fact that Black South Africa had begun to manufacture its own kaffirs so soon after apartheid" ? Like the Biafrans, they have been let done by their leaders. Just look at post-elections Kenya and see the petty bourgeois selfishness that Museveni criticised in his own country and you will understand that South African leaders have not just keep silent about the support they received from the Frontline States (including Nigeria) but that they have not shared the national cake equitably. The inherited Brazilian style gap between rich and poor always creates violence in society. There is still apartheid in post apartheid South Africa and it is not just the foreign Africans who suffer. Indeed the Nigerian doctors and other professionals are more likely to be beneficiaries of the end of the apartheid system than the poor workers whose factories closed down because of the flood of cheaper Chinese goods onto a previously protected market and now have no hope of ever earning wages again.
So let us not portray South Africans as ignorant, ungrateful or just bloodthirsty. The only way to reverse xenophobia, whether in Nigeria, Russia or South Africa is by exposing its roots in social inequalities and joining the struggle against social injustice.

* Dr. Owen Sichone is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cape Town

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

I would probably agree with most of Wanda's observations on what is wrong with the "New" South Africa and clearly the answer to his question is that NO the struggle for emancipation is not over yet. However, most people would probably agree with that for one reason or another. Even the most comfortable members of the black elite argue for more transformation rather than less. Even the leader of the ANC, president Mbeki publicly and very consistently calls for "a better life FOR ALL".

There may be some members of the ANC who think they have arrived and we cannot condemn them for that. The fact is that we did not all board this train at the same station nor are we going to the same destination. The maximum programme of the black bourgeoisie (a free and fair democratic system where a national bourgeoisie enjoys the right to exploit its proletariat and its natural resources) may well be the minimum programme of the working class whose station is further down the line. As the South African Communist Party says: Socialism is the future. There are even those who say that in a globalized economy a national bourgeoisie's patriotic spirit is of no value because it is now glorious to be rich, and comprador. That is for the capitalists to sort out among themselves.

The mistake that RE Wanda makes is that he soaks the ANC in red wine, as it were, and tries to render it socialist. Just examine the historical inaccuracy of his assessment that:

"It is clear that the ANC has abandoned its core roots and energy - the poor people. The ANC party was born socialist but later adopted capitalism and endorsed the neo-liberal agenda, whose fruit we know is exploitation of the people. The ANC's economic policy emphasis on market liberalization and tight government control on spending has meant that the working class and poor who are mostly black South Africans have to bear the cost of its conservative economic policy."

I am afraid it is not clear at all. In 1912 when the South African National Native Congress (SANNC), forerunner of the African National Congress (ANC), was founded it was a Pan-African movement representing the rights of all colonial subjects. It was led by chiefs, mission educated elites, village shop-keepers, maize and wool farmers and yes, petitioned the British Empire for the rights of the colonial working class as well.

But was the ANC born socialist? No way! If Cecil Rhodes and his cohorts had not been racist, if the 1913 Land Act had not destroyed the black farming elites in the rural areas, if the colonial society were based on class oppression and not mainly racial oppression there would have been NO NEED for an ANC. If Mahatma Gandhi and Sol Plaitjie had not been forced off the first class carriages because of their dark skins, the colonial working classes would have had to struggle for their rights on their own because the black elites would have been too comfortable from the start. Let us forget about the socialist ANC - it is a figment of our revolutionary imaginations, it has never existed.

It is up to COSATU to continue championing the rights of the South African working class. It is up to the Communist Party to complete its political programme and go beyond the bourgeois democracy that was achieved in 1994 and attain that socialist future. And it is up to the anti-privatization and anti-globalization movements to continue reconnecting poor people to the water and electricity mains by any means necessary, but it is not up to the ANC to build a socialist South Africa, that has never been the ANC programme.

So all those who call themselves socialist should focus their energies on strengthening the Communist Party and not undermining the ANC which has ALWAYS been led by the black elites whose maximum programme has ALWAYS been a capitalist democracy in which their agricultural and commercial interests are not undermined by a racist state. Let us know our history or we shall remain trapped in this old waiting room on this disused railway line complaining about the inefficiency of the national airline.