Africans must reconcile, resist the divisions among them

THE single most interesting fact about borders in Africa is that no one consulted Africans when they were created.

There were no consultations; some of the Europeans involved in this process had never even set foot on the continent. Africa for them was a terra nullius; land available to be seized. The consequences of this splitting was bloodshed, muddling up of cultures, erasure of languages, but most of all, it destroyed the kinship that people of African descent had.

The ties that bind were ruptured, and the recent treatment of the zama zama miners is a manifestation of this. A wound left untreated for a long time festers.

The anxiety around the zama zama miners is not so much that black South Africans are concerned that illegal immigrants are threatening their jobs or their participation in the economy.

Though they may use that as a way to legitimise their rejection of the immigrants, nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that levels of unemployment are unprecedented in what is supposed to be a better country for all, but the reality is that black South Africans have never been part of the economy.

This is not an attempt to exonerate immigrants from the criminal acts that they commit. Those who commit crimes should be held to account, but I am much more interested in the conditions that make it possible for all these things to happen. Where crime is a means to survive, violence a mechanism to get by, corruption a livelihood and hatred the motif.

Back to the zama zamas. The history of mining in South Africa reveals that the industry was not only built on the backs of black South Africans.

Immigrants were part of the exploited black labour that sustained it. People from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Lesotho became the backbone of the industry.

I mention this to illuminate how, within the mining context, there were no real antagonism between black South Africans and those from other countries. Perhaps there were contradictions, but all of them were reconcilable.

The emphasis here is that the conditions of the zama zama mineworkers are akin to those of an ordinary black South African mineworker. In the eyes of the world, what matters is all these workers are exploited and fungible.

Let us think about how the Marikana massacre was testament to the fact that the lives of black South African miners are cheap. Then think about zama zama miners, whose lives are always fraught with danger and an imminent possibility of death.

The thread here is that there is so much commonality between these miners, regardless of where they come from. The white-owned mining companies see labour that is available to be used and violated; for them, they see black people, not nationality. The enemy is still comfortable after having shot and killed miners and after decades of exploitation. At stake here is whether we are going to accept this.

What could also be useful is a psychoanalytical reading of the zama zama situation. What David Marriot might refer to as the psychic bond between black people and white people. For Marriot, one thing that black people and whites have in common is the hatred for the black imago. This bond was created during colonisation because in the main, the basic project of colonialism is to make the black person hate himself.

To make him see himself as inferior, as dirty, as evil and eventually as nothing. The black person began to believe these things and product was self-hate. So, what other people might refer to as xenophobia or Afrophobia could also be just classic self-hate.

When a black South African sees another black immigrant, what they are seeing is an image of themselves or what they could possibly become.

There, at that moment, the selfhate erupts and the result is the violence on the other, on the image of the self, on the immigrant, on the kwerekwere.

Pambo is the EFF head of presidency and MP