Not “xenophobia”! Call the current murders of non-South African Africans in South Africa for what it is: African-run state in South Africa, headed by Cyril Ramaphosa, murders African peoples from elsewhere on the continent domiciled in South Africa so savagely

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THE CYRIL RAMAPHOSA African-led South African regime and its clearly state propped up armed bands of South Africans have continued their unrelentingly mapped out murders of African peoples from elsewhere in Africa who live in South Africa. Twelve Africans have so far been “registered” murdered in the past few days but full casualty figures are sure to rise as more reports from gory crime scenes from particularly the Gauteng province that embraces both Pretoria and Johannesburg, the red cross, hospitals and other emergency services are published.

(1. African-led Cyril Ramaphosa regime in South Africa vs African  émigrés in South Africa, 14 February 2018-present)

IN THE past decade, the South Africans have murdered hundreds of African  émigrés in their country especially those from Biafra, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The murderers have looted and destroyed the émigrés’ homes and have forced hundreds of thousands of survivors sent into horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their various countries.

The near 26,000 Biafra émigrés in the country, who had themselves fled the ongoing 53 years of the Igbo genocide in occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist in Nigeria, have borne the brunt of this savage campaign including the very latest. Since February 2016, over 120 Igbo in South Africa have been murdered as thousands of desperate survivors seek alternative countries for refuge. Observers have been shocked and outraged over the obnoxious obstacles placed recently by the South African immigration services at the main Johannesburg airport on the spirited effort made by Allen Onyeama, the Igbo businessperson, whose “Air Peace” airline services have provided free special evacuation flights for Igbo survivors out of South Africa (Vanguard, Lagos, 11 September 2019).

(Allen Onyeama’s “Air Peace” airline services evacauting Igbo survivors of raging murders of African émigrés domiciled in South Africa, carried out by the country’s African-led regime [saharareporters.com, New York, 16 September 2019]) 

What “xenophobia”?

ALL along, as this murder campaign rages, the South Africa state categorises this  heinous crime exclusively subjected at African  émigrés in its country so quaintly and outrageously with the essentially sanitising euphemism, “xenophobic attacks” – an outrage of a designation readily picked up, re-packaged, re-broadcast, often uncritically with relish, across the world by the usual expressly anti-African lives’ broadcasters and other news organisations and commentators.

Instead what the world is witnessing presently in South Africa is a carefully state-planned murdering campaign against targeted African émigrés in South Africa and executed by organised South African death-squads. It must be called by its name: murder. There must be no obfuscation in presenting this crime for what it is.

According to the latest UN statistics on “people from other countries” or “foreigners” domiciled in South Africa indicating clearly what countries they had been born, there are a total of 33 countries – from across the world, Americas to Australasia, with a population of approximately 4 million (moastarblog.wordpress.com, accessed 12 September 2019). Sixteen of the countries are from Africa and the rest are from Europe, Asia and the United States (moastarblog.wordpress.com).

Zimbabwe nationals constitute the highest number of “people from other countries” or “foreigners” in the data with approximately 650,000, followed by Mozambique, 380,000 (moastarblog.wordpress.com). There are 124,000 British nationals who live here and the figures from just a few of the other 33 countries that follow underscore the range of geographical diversity of “people from other countries” in South Africa: 94,000 Germans; 45,000 Portuguese; 40,000 Indians; 39,000 Italians; 33,000 Dutch; 20,000 Irish; 13,000 French; 13,000 Belgians; 12,000 Australians; 40,000 Indians; 39,000 Chinese; 17,000 Americans; 27,000 Kenyans; 17, 000 Pakistani; 11,000 Ghanaian (moastarblog.wordpress.com, accessed 12 September 2019)

THE WORD “xenophobia” in English means “dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries”.  From the definition, “against people from other countries” is the key principle applicable to any geography of reference in the world that this meaning is solicited and this is crucial in our focus here. No English dictionary defines “xenophobia” in some restricted racialised/regionalised format as “dislike of or prejudice against people from African countries”, for instance, or “dislike of or prejudice against people from other African countries” or “dislike of or prejudice against African peoples from other countries” as the sheer horror of the operationalisation of this South African state-sponsored murder of African émigrés, stepped up more aggressively during the African-led Jacob Zuma regime last decade, has been perversely portrayed to the world by state propagandists in Pretoria.

(2. African-led Jacob Zuma regime in South Africa vs African  émigrés in South Africa, 9 May 2009-14 February 2018)

POINTEDLY, Zuma’s and the present Ramaphosa regime have carved out and designated the residential districts of nationals from predominantly 16 African countries resident in South Africa for murderous assaults on them, as the regimes deem fit, out of the rest of the nationals of the remaining 17 countries of the world resident in the country, principally from the United States, Europe and Asia. These African-led regimes have turned the African émigrés’ populations in South Africa into “hostage” emplacements or South Africanised-adapted lebensraum (borrowed and adapted from the studies of a range of German racist geographers and other “theorists” of the 19th century which were executed on the ground most catastrophically in Africa, firstly, and latterly in Europe by follow on German genocidist practitioners of the 20th century) to enable those groupings of its African South Africans, very pessimistic about their future prospects in the country, to commit regularly orchestrated murder and pillage as their own primary source for social existence.

This is a hardly disguised state diversionary preoccupation. The South Africa state engages in these murders as part of the explosively contentious contemporary politics in South Africa where it has exhibited singularly demonstrable failure to transform the country for its peoples after 342 years of the pan-European conquest, occupation, and subjugation – despite the “breakthrough” of 1994 which occurred, most importantly to stress here, with incomparable several decades’ of unflinching support and solidarity from particularly the African World, from Barbados to Biafra.

African World must now break with South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA has not murdered any non-African national during the course of its so-called xenophobic attacks” on “foreigners” in the country. Neither the Zuma regime nor indeed Ramaphosa’s would dare attack American citizens or any in the range of European citizens domiciled in South Africa (as the list above shows) with such gross callousness that has characterised these anti-African death campaigns and hope to survive in office in weeks. We mustn’t fail to note that the latter foreign national residents, especially from Europe (British, Dutch, German, French, Italian), come from the same countries which originally conquered and occupied South Africa and still exercise expansive interests and control of the economy of the country presently.

The African World faces a killer African-led regime in South Africa which murders African peoples from elsewhere on the continent living within its frontiers with impunity. The silence from the African World to this raging inhumanity at display from African-led South Africa is unconscionable. Africans, worldwide, must now break with South Africa in response to this unmitigated horror starting right away in the following arenas: political/diplomatic relations, businesses and trade, academic/intellectual exchanges, cultural ambassadorships/enterprises, social travels, sports engagements, etc., etc.

African peoples’ lives matter. Or don’t they? If these current Zuma, Ramaphosa et al African-led South African regimes who murder other African peoples in South Africa in the 21st century so flagrantly were led instead by a European in previous eras such as a Hendrik Verwoerd, B J Vorster, Marais Viljoen, PW Botha, Jan Heunis or a FW de Klerk, there would surely have been a thunderous outcry from across Africa and its diaspora to these executions. But it appears Africans appear to “tolerate” the agency of such catastrophic violence on African peoples if the band of perpetrators is African-led. It is precisely because of this morbid silence from African publics that African-led regimes, not from Europe, not from the United States, not “the white man”, not from any extracontinental African aggressor state, have murdered 15 million African peoples in genocides and wars across Africa (west, north, northcentral, northeast, eastcentral, southern regions) since that Nigeria-based Yakubu Gowon-Obafemi Awolowo bubonic genocidist dyarchy launched the Igbo genocide on 29 May 1966. The dyarchy murdered 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, in this gruesome, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa during phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 May 1970. The genocide goes on, phase-IV, 53 years, and subsequent African-led regimes entrenched in Nigeria have murdered tens of thousands of additional Igbo since.

FOR PEOPLES who denounce anti-African violence and racism in all their forms, especially when directed against them from European peoples or from others (rightly so), Africans, wherever they are, must now know that they stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they continue this deafening silence over the defiantly, openly waged march of gruesome, irrepressibly driven murders of African émigrés in South Africa. The murders are carried out by African-led regimes of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa in the country. Zuma and Ramaphosa are no less enwrapped in this state’s cataclysmic laughter of African peoples as hitherto European-led liquidating South African regimes whose names, among others, are, on record, as Naudé, Fouché, Diederichs, Verwoerd, Vorster, Viljoen and Botha.

(Chris McGregor and Brotherhood of Breadth, “Davashe’s dream” [personnel: McGregor, piano, African xylophone; Mongezi Feza, pocket trumpet; Harry Beckett, trumpet; Mark Chaig, cornet; Nick Evans, trombone; Malcolm Griffiths, trombone; Dudu Pukwana, alto saxophone; Mike Osborne, alto saxophone, clarinet; John Surman, baritone saxophone, soprano saxophone; Ronnie Beer, tenor saxophone, Indian flute; Alan Skidmore, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Harry Miller, bass; Louis Moholo, drums, percussion; recorded: UK Neon Label, London, 1971]) (alto saxophone and trumpet solos: Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza respectively) 

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s latest books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe