I have often heard it said by racists and others that Black Africans are incapable of building a modern, civilised, harmonious, democratic and lawful state. Their argument is based on the assumptions that Black Africans are uncivilised savages whose primitive leanings render them incapable of building a modern state. Francis Fukuyama in his book the origins of political order placed Black Africans last on his categorisation of races. Again, his conclusion was based on the long held assumptions of Black African inferiority. Interestingly; the proponents of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, apartheid, segregation and other forms of racial subjugation and discrimination all premised and justified their actions on the same assumptions. Unfortunately, African nations have not done anything to challenge these long held assumptions. If anything, the plethora of bad news and barbarity often manifested in the continent only serves to vindicate these assumptions.

A case in point is the savage and despicable inhumanity manifested in the senseless xenophobic or “afrophobic” attacks as some prefer to call it on African immigrants resident in South Africa.  Immigrants mainly from other African countries have been burned to death, stabbed to death while their shops have been looted before the gaping and shocked eyes of a global audience. That this could happen in a country once held hostage by White Apartheid leaders for which the rest of Africa rallied for their freedom speaks volumes.  And this would not be the first time such “afrophobic” attacks have occurred. In 2008, similar brutal attacks claimed the lives of 62 people from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi who were likewise slaughtered before the eyes of a global audience. These barbarities no doubt feeds into the long held assumptions of Black Africans as an uncivilised savage race.

That a country such as South Africa with modern infrastructure and functional institutions inherited from the erstwhile Apartheid regime could not prevent the descent into raw hostilities against fellow Africans underscores the beginning of the decline of the South African state. The problem is not helped with the troubling fact that both the Zulu king and the son of the president made inciting remarks against African immigrants that helped in large part to ignite the violence. South Africa is regrettably beginning to go the way of other African countries marked by failed and failing states enveloped in corruption, bad governance and engaged in ethnic, religious and terrorist conflicts. There is not a single modern African state where social justice and the rule of law  reign supreme, all are shambolic states where the barbarities that are beginning to take shape in South Africa is either common place or can erupt at any time.

With recurrent episodes and an evolving culture of savage attacks on African immigrants, it won’t take long before the attackers would find new enemies amongst their own people and like other African countries the floodgates of inter-ethnic conflicts would be opened in South Africa. Justifying blames are today heaped on African immigrants, tomorrow it could be the Zulu or Zhosa amongst other South African ethnic groups that could suffer the same blame and the internalisation of the carnage would begin. Frankenstein’s always turn around to devour its creator and this is a sure path of perdition that South Africa is sure to travel in due course except the government acts decisively. Indeed there is already a precedent as the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi unleashed a wave of violence against other black South Africans just prior to the end of Apartheid (at that time there were no African immigrants to attack), it took a deft political management and negotiation by Nelson Mandela to nip the crises in the bud. The undercurrents of such conflicts remain embedded within the South African society as the xenophobic or afrophobic attacks demonstrate and in time the chickens will surely come home to roost and South Africa will have to deal with a demon it created and allowed to fester.

But South Africa is surely not alone in its treatment of African immigrants, in the 80’s Nigeria organised a mass deportation of Ghanaians in a campaign christened “Ghana must go.” Ghana had earlier done same to Nigerians. In Angola and practically all African countries African immigrants are treated like scum while Asian or European immigrants are worshipped. There is something in the psyche or psychology of the Black African that makes him hate his own kind. There is not a single African country where an African immigrant can settle down, feel at home and be integrated. Ironically, African immigrants can find the peace and settlement they never found amongst their own kind in Africa in faraway foreign lands in Europe or the America’s.

Locally in Nigeria the problem of tribalism is even worse. The Nigeria quagmire reminds me of a polygamous man married to many wives whose children by the different wives are indoctrinated by their mothers to hate, vilify, oppress, marginalise and in extreme cases kill the children of other women. Though the children are all from the same father, their different mothers have created a situation where the children as educated by their mothers would rather patronise, love or help  total  strangers than have anything to do with  their siblings from a different mother. The analogy of the polygamous father with many wives is the tragic situation of Nigeria’s different ethnic groups under one nation with each being taught to hate the other. Though Nigerian leaders fattened by their loot like to pretend otherwise, Nigeria is a deeply divided country along ethnic and religious lines that has frequently erupted in violence. The existence of an ethnic cold war is all too evident in Nigerian forums where all kinds of ethnic vitriol and abuse are hauled by internet urchins.

The recent elections have only further revealed how ethnically divided Nigerians are as different individuals and groups abdicated democratic principles and chose ethnic abuse, threats and intimidation to advance their candidates. From the Oba of Lagos who threatened a section of the country with death if they didn’t vote for his imperial candidate to the many internet urchins on facebook, twitter and other social media outlets that likewise indulged in abuse and threats, it is obvious the nation is poisoned by tribalism. To demonstrate how bad the situation is; Nigeria is the only country on earth where you become a foreigner once you leave your so called state of origin to reside in another state. A nation that exists in name only,  in reality you are  a foreigner in more than 95% of the country outside your home state. Indeed even in the supposedly cosmopolitan former federal capital city of Lagos you are constantly reminded of this fact.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Nigeria has moved from MEND, OPC, MASSOB to Boko Haram while more than 250,000 people have been killed with another 300,000 maimed in decades of ethno religious riots engendered by tribalism and religious fundamentalism. With these sorry realities the Nigerian leadership refuses to accept the necessity or importance of nation building.  Already a failed state, this denial of an obvious truth will ensure that the poisoned chalice of tribalism with which Nigeria is deeply afflicted will more than anything else kill the country sooner or later. Much of Africa is riddled with the same crises from Rwanda to Burundi; DRC to Sudan, Africa suffers from a self consuming dilemma of hate.  The little effort made by the likes of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Dr Nnamidi Azikiwe in Pan -Africanism was not rooted before these noble men passed on and left Africa to the perpetual conflict and chains of tribalism that has ruined the continent.

Africa has consequently continued to vindicate those who say the black race is inferior and cannot build a modern state. With the barbarity in South Africa, tribalism in Nigeria and ethno-religious conflicts in much of Africa the narrative of African inferiority is being consolidated by the day. We all as Africans are guilty one way or the other by the unnecessary tribal sentiments, prejudice and hate we hold against other Africans and fellow nationals. We must look at ourselves in the mirror and realise that the problem and solution lies in us. We must accordingly begin to change our attitude. Harmony and attendant prosperity is in our collective interest the alternative being a continuation of our dilemma of hate and the sure destruction that accompanies it to which the unenviable ruin of the African continent remains a testament.

–

Lawrence Chinedu Nwobu

Email: lawrencenwobu@gmail.com

Globalization, which is a process of interaction and integration among people, companies and governments of different nations driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology, has reduced the world merely to a global village. This means that communication, international trade, immigration and inter-racial association have been made easier than what they were before the advent of globalization.

Though the world had known emigration and immigration long before now, globalization has radically increased the momentum of inter-tribal and inter-racial co-operation.

As would always be appreciated, as no man is an island unto himself, that is how no nation or society can rightly lay claim to isolationist economic independence. This natural phenomenon accounts for the inflow or influx of people of different ethnicities and(or) races into tribes or countries that are not theirs.

The congregation of people of heterogeneous origins into the United States of America is said to be the foundation and strength upon which its development is believed to rank next to none in global context. History has it that Americans, after their eight years of war of Independence or Revolution as it is often called which lasted from 1775 to 1783, resolved to adopt a policy of total and exceptional liberalization in order to move its country to the maximum height of human development. Based on this accommodating mindset of the founding fathers of the American States, every citizen or even immigrant within her geographical boundaries was given maximum encouragement to develop whatever talent or skill he or she possessed to the fullest positive advantage of the American society and humanity in general.

The United States of America came to limelight as ‘the New World’, with excessive imported Black African slaves. Despite its famous liberalization policy, there were early cases of brutal violent discrimination against the blacks, who, the whites, out of racial derogation, overtly discriminated against. The Ku Klux Klan, notoriously known as K.K.K, never hid its extremity of hatred and scorn for the blacks in America whom they disrespectfully referred to as ‘Nigers’. This attitudinal posture would later take a centre stage and become known as xenophobia.

Xenophobia, simply explained, is hatred or animosity that is harboured by a group and, more often than not, violently expressed against another group, driven either by ethnic or racial malice, disdain and(or) dislike.

In contemporary South-Africa, xenophobic attacks by South African youths have become a topical issue. The youths, for more than a fortnight, have been assaulting, maiming, killing and looting the shops and property of immigrant nationals from such countries as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and Nigeria.

As the story goes, the youths are reacting restively to a development in which they have suddenly realized that almost every available economic space in their land has been taken over by immigrant nationals, to their extremely suffocating economic isolation and frustration.

They are more worried to realize that even the meanest of house-hold engagements such as cooks, stewards, gardeners, gate-men and others of that category have been usurped by foreigners and, by so doing, relegating them to an uncommon dangerous background.

It took only the consciousness and sensitization of their highly revered Zulu King; Goodwill Zwelithini, for the South-African youths to wake up from their slumber and occupational laxity and non-challance.

Though the approach adopted by the South-African youths is crude and negates the fundamental human rights of these Africans that have been butchered and dispossessed of their hard-earned possessions, one may still sympathize with the South-African youths for being so brazenly out-smarted in their home-land. Any liberal economic policy that reduces indigenous people to mere economic dependents in their land would certainly ignite reactions that may not be far from xenophobia.

It may be apt to point at this juncture that what is happening or has happened in South-Africa has been an age-long feature of global interaction. It was xenophobia that drove Adolf Hitler of the German Nazi Army to annihilate about Six Million Jews in Poland before and during the second world-war.

Many elites may not have forgotten one incident that took place in Kampala; the capital of Uganda, on the 4th of August, 1972. On that fateful day, the President of Uganda; Field-Marshal Idi Amin Dada, had ordered that all Asian nationals living in Uganda be hounded, arrested and deported while their shops were equally ordered to be looted. As time went on, it was discovered that Idi Amin and his fellow Ugandans had been harbouring irrational hatred against the Asians, whom they had perceived as their economic explorers and exploiters.

The Igbo of Nigeria have always been known for their mobility, ubiquity, enterprise, investment and resilience. Because of these nature-inbued characteristics, they are found all over Nigeria. Their individual enterprise and attendant success have always instigated deep tribal sentiments and hate against them in many parts of Nigeria. So far, they are the most hated in Nigeria and this was why when Salman Rushdie, a British Indian, wrote his book; ‘The Satanic Verses’ in 1988, Northern Moslems in the Northern States of Nigeria descended heavily on Igbos in their States and butchered them in their thousands. This was a clear case of xenophobia.

On August 2, 2013, the Executive Governor of Lagos State; Barr Babatunde Fashola, in a commando-like style and in a mist undemocratic manner cargoed Igbos out of Lagos to Onitsha, as if they were common criminals.

In April 2015, the Oba of Lagos; Rilwan Akiolu, told Igbos that had gone to pay him a courtesy visit that any Igbo man or woman who failed to vote for All Progressive Congress in the governorship election would be forced to drown in the Lagos Lagoon.

Again, it is obvious that the action of Governor Fashola and utterance of the Oba of Lagos could not be unconnected with xenophobia.

It must be stated here that xenophobia does not only take place when indigenous nationals hate foreigners in their land. Xenophobia can equally rare its ugly head when stranger elements exhibit the worst form of Odium against their landlords.

A typical example is the situation in Aba where the stranger elements, a good number of who arrived Aba in a very penurious and distressful condition but who, as it were, have been blessed abundantly in Aba, have sworn never to see anything good in the indigenous people of the area. The Aba residents have even gone into an unholy conspiracy against an indigene of Aba who is the governorship candidate of People’s Democratic Party; P.D.P. in Abia State. Their only grouse against the gentle-man is that he is an Ngwa man and as long as they have a right to vote, no Ngwa man should aspire to be governor in a state that is theirs. They now have arrogated the role of God to themselves. No other reason can account for the incomparable hatred stranger elements in Aba have against the Ngwas other than xenophobia.

Still on Abia 2015 governorship election, the voting pattern already exhibited shows a clear case xenophobia. Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu, who is from the Ukwa/Ngwa zone of Abia State got his votes mainly from his old Aba zone. Even though it is the turn of the people of Ukwa/Ngwa to produce the governor by this election, the people of old Bende, who have already ruled for sixteen years, still went ahead voting for the brother, Mr. Alex Otti. This is, again, a manifestation of xenophobia.

For the problem of xenophobia to be properly addressed, certain measures must have to be put in place. The first is that countries which nationals migrate in large numbers to other countries should resolve to tackle the problems of corruption and inequity associated with their leadership. This would stem the rate of unnecessary migration. Besides, immigrants or stranger elements should realize that treating their hosts with disdain is capable of igniting situations that could lead to explosion of xenophobia.

Chief (Sir) Don Ubani, Ksc, JP

(Okwubunka of Asa)