It is October 2006 and this month sees the 32nd Somali refugee murdered in Cape Town. Amazing isn’t it? That 32 people can be murdered in three months, from the same area, of the same creed and ethnicity and nothing has been done by the police! Of course, if it was 10 European (white) males, it would have been a totally different story… mostly probably we would not have even gotten to the number 10.

Like it or not, believe it or not, South African society is extremely xenophobic. There are no two ways about it and there is no need to hedge and employ euphemisms concerning this matter. Xenophobia is part and parcel of South Africa and is alive and well in all spheres of South African life. From government offices to the taxi ranks, South Africans do not disappoint with their despicable treatment of ‘people foreign’ Africans.

What galls is that the government officials who continually ignore the plight of foreigners in South African soil, were most probably exiles in our other regions of the continent and very own countries, enjoying state benefits in addition to support from fellow warriors in their surrounding communities. For instance, every taxable Nigerian was taxed in order to educate South African exiles (ANC operatives) in the various Nigerian universities. Ask any Nigerian who experienced this taxation and he/she will tell you that he/she had no qualms with it for it was for the greater good.

A good that seems to have escaped the very people who enjoyed the freedoms and opportunities that our nations bequeathed them, and who have now in turn either crafted or implemented polices to make entry and residence in South Africa more difficult if not impossible. These are the same people who readily perpetuate and reinforce constructions of foreigners as criminals. In the latest saga that was played out at Jeppestown where a gang of robbers killed four policemen, police claimed that a majority of the 10-man gang were foreigners. Afterwards, it was found that only three of them were foreigners. A majority indeed!

At this juncture it is only sound to mention that it is not just any foreigner who is discriminated against. No… carry over effects of the baas syndrome have made it such that only black foreigners are singled out, by black South Africans! Black South Africans have proved to be the worst bigots of all, exhibiting collective amnesia, superfluous doses of inferiority complex, slivers of naivety and extreme ignorance. Such a concoction is deadly especially when spiced with layers of blind ethnicity.

The apartheid system engendered the insularity of communities and with it the valorization of ethnicity. Zulusness was promoted, Suthuness, Xhosaness etc…. all at the expense of a national identity which in any case would have been detrimental and counter the principles of apartheid. As such, we could point a finger at apartheid and charge it with fostering these xenophobic mentalities we now witness. However, the South African black populace has proven unwilling to change and accommodate their fellow African counterparts from Mother Africa. It has been documented that the Afrikaners have made a lot of progress in seeking reconciliation. Yet, on the other hand the black Africans seem to be engrossed in herding the kwerekweres (pejorative term used to describe a foreigner) back to the ‘wilderness’ they emanated from.

It is behind such a background that one sees the famed speech on African Renaissance for what it is. A vacuous piece of rubbish aimed at decorating ones academic stature (as a thinker) and also at reflecting to the world “oh-look-at-us-in-South Africa-and-the-big-dreams-we-have-for-Africa”. Renaissance my foot!

Is renaissance allowing 32 foreigners to be murdered with impunity in 90 days? Is renaissance denying refugees government assistance and instead packing them into derelict centres? Is renaissance arresting foreigners for crimes primarily on the basis of their country of origin? Is renaissance all these and more?

Miyere and many other political asylum seekers are still waiting for a nod from the South African government to grant them asylum. How can a government of a people who’ve been through a struggle and know what it is to be supported and have freedom wherever one is hosted, be so uncaring, insensitive, unmoved and blind in identifying and supporting one of their own? When it is evident that they run the risk of being jacked out by their counties gevernment operatives and snipers supported by the corrupt government's machinery of propaganda. It pains many an African to witness the blatant discrimination of black Africans by black South Africans who were under the scepter of grand-discrimination, that apartheid was. Are these not the same borders that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere urged his country people to endeavour and emancipate from white supremacist rule? Are these not the same people that Kwame Nkrumah, Olusegun Obasanjo, Jerry Rawlings, Muaamar Gaadafi, Jomo Kenyatta, Lij Tafari Makonen, Kenneth Kaunda, Thomas Sankara inter alia sought to support by providing refuge to their MK cadres?

And now in the sunset of the apartheid sun, the black ‘other’ has been elbowed into the margins of nothingness, to exist as the black South African once did, albeit worse, under the yoke of bigotry and hate.

With the 2010 World Cup around the corner, one wonders how the South African government will guarantee safety for the millions of kwerekweres who be will be flocking down to Mzansi (South Africa). We wonder…