A horde of angry South African black youths break
into a shop owned by a foreigner in Durban, descending upon him with all manner
of weapons, looting all the merchandise in the shop, and leaving the helpless man
in a pool of blood, barely hanging on to life. More than five hundred
kilometres further north, a four year-old boy is left with a gaping hole on his
forehead as another mob targets foreigners in Johannesburg. Another foreigner
is clubbed and set alight by youths chanting expletives and enjoying the
spectacle as if they are having a barbecue.
These are the images that invaded our sight and mind
over the last few days, in a bloodletting reminiscent of what we saw in May 2008.
These are not just criminal acts in a nation with one of the highest crime
rates on this planet, but
these are clearly xenophobic attacks. How ironic that these attacks should
start from a city that hosted the United Nations World Conference Against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR) in
September 2001. Fourteen years later, the horrors that the conference was
supposed to confront are still with us, exposing the worst that sinful depravity
in man is capable of, and shredding to pieces the innocent idealism of the
continent’s pan-Africanism. Is it not a shame that blacks are killing fellow blacks
on African soil simply because they are from another country?
It
is an undeniable reality that the movement of people within and across
boundaries of nations has become a feature of modern societies. Migration has become a salient dimension of
modern globalization. As someone has observed, borders have become bridges, not
only barriers. Globalization implies not only the transfer of financial
resources, products, and trade, but also the worldwide relocation of peoples,
of human beings who take the difficult and frequently painful decision to leave
their kin and kith searching for a better future. In the global society,
states can no longer live in isolation from one another.
It
is this movement of people across boundaries that brings about the problems
between nationals of recipient countries and non-nationals because of
competition for scarce resources, ignorance and prejudice. Writing in the March
2009 issue of African Ecclesial Review (AFER), Rev. Stan Chu Ilo, who then was completing his
doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at the University of St. Michaers
College in Toronto, Canada, said that the May 2008 uprising of South
African blacks against black migrants was a crisis in the making. Rev. Ilo takes note of three
fault lines that have developed since the end of apartheid and the introduction
of Black majority rule in South Africa:
1. The first is the internal crisis and
conflict of identity among the Black South Africans themselves. Many young Black South
Africans, especially those who were born in the late 60s and early 70s, never
had an opportunity to develop their skills or attain any level of educational
or professional competence. Most of them were sired in the revolutionary
anti-apartheid movement of the 70s characterized by militancy and rebellion.
With the end of apartheid, these young men were left in the broken lower ranks of
social progress, stifled as persons in the choking economic dungeons of poverty
and existential carefreeness. The victorious elites of the ruling party, the
ANC, who took the reins of power at all levels failed to address the needs of
these young people and the burgeoning black families who were waking up from
the long night of depersonalization and cultural asphyxiation. So these marginalized
poor and hapless black South Africans are left to bear alone the pain and
tragedies which they have experienced personally or via a memorial re-living of
the sad events of the past. They are cut off from the community because they do
not share in the society’s abundance nor in its emerging multi-racial values.
2. The second
fault line in South Africa is the real anger among frustrated young black South Africans. In the days
of the post-apartheid era, the black South Africans turned against themselves
in what many thought would play into the white bifurcated vision of the black
personality as vaunting, aggressive, violent, and resistant to order and good
governance. So they turned against each other in an orgy of violence and
bloodletting. Their passion and hope for a new and prosperous country was not
balanced with a delayed gratification that demanded the necessary sacrifice and
enduring the inevitable pain that comes with moving from hope to achievement.
3. Another reality that prepared the grounds for the crisis is the violence.
South
Africa is a very violent country, and arguably the most violent country in Africa.
I was a victim of that violence and thuggery two years ago when five armed men
robbed me at gunpoint, leaving me only with the clothes that were on my body.
Only God protected me from ending up as a bullet-riddled corpse and returning
to my grieving family and friends as cargo in a casket. There is ready access
to guns, machetes or various forms of deadly weapons. These weapons are easily
made by the many blacksmiths and local manufacturers who in the immediate past,
secretly produced and armed black South Africans in the liberation battle
against the white supremacists.
Thus,
lacking any education, fuelled by crumbling social structures, deprived of any
sense of purpose, and with no clear signs of progress or self or group
transcendence over the mounting social and economic challenges of the day, the
young black South African of today is understandably angry. A biting absolute
poverty always leads to violence, but poverty does not legitimize violence.
These angry but vibrant young South Africans reveal a thin tipping point of the
searing tinderbox on which the Rainbow nation has been sitting for a long time.
Finding Hope in the Gospel
At
the root of what we have seen in South Africa is the problem of sin. It is the
problem of depravity. The root of all
division and tension, all violence and prejudice, all hatred and selfishness is
sin. Jesus came into this world to deal with sin. To show us that the
people of God will no longer be defined in an ethnic way. A new people that Christ
is calling to Himself is defined not by race or ethnicity or political ties, or
nationalities, but it is a people transformed by His grace and belonging to the
global family from every ethnic group and nation on the planet. “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people
for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” (Revelation 5:9).
In
Christ alone can the phobia of the others unlike you be killed in one’s heart.
You begin to see the other ethnic group or nationality, not as impoverishing
you or threatening your own fulfillment, but as widening your humanity and celebration
of God’s diversity in a rich and infinite manner. John Piper, in his excellent book,
Bloodlines, writes:
The fame and greatness and worth of an object of beauty increases in proportion to the diversity of those who recognize its beauty. If a work of art is regarded as great among a small and like- minded group of people, but not by anyone else, the art is probably not truly great. Its qualities are such that it does not appeal to the deep universals in our hearts but only to provincial biases. But if a work of art continues to win more and more admirers not only across cultures but also across decades and centuries, then its greatness is irresistibly manifested…Thus the true greatness and beauty of God, in the display of his grace through Christ in the gospel, will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish this beauty. His excellence will be shown to be higher and deeper than the parochial preferences that make us happy most of the time. His appeal will be to the deepest, highest, largest capacities of the human soul, awakened by the Holy Spirit. Thus the diversity of the source of admiration will testify to the incomparable glory of the God of grace.
The
seemingly impregnable wall of apartheid crumbled, humanly speaking, as a result
of the cumulative indignation and activism of Africans everywhere supported by
men and women of goodwill all over the world. Today, those of us who want to
see God's incomparable glory of His grace magnified, should
join hearts together and pray that God would rain righteousness upon the
Rainbow nation and uproot this evil of xenophobia.
Great and true analysis
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