When I told my Nigerian parents that this summer I wanted to go to South Africa, I did not receive an elated response. Instead, I was met with a confused and slightly irritated “Why? Why don’t you just go somewhere like London?” When it comes to travel, my father, especially, has always had a Western focus. He sees the West as pillars of stability and safety. Pillars, which, from his firsthand experience growing up in Nigeria, he believes that the rest of the Sub-Saharan continent typically does not possess. And to an extent, he’s right, with the lingering structural inequalities of colonialism in Africa and the legacies of apartheid in South Africa, there are undoubtedly areas that are not safe and opportunitst crimes are in surplus. However, I also know that my parents have a flair for dramatics. So, I took everything they said with a grain of salt, keeping it in the back of my mind but not letting fear alone steer my decisions (especially since the US Travel Advisory is safe, and I knew I was going in a group).
As the trip grew closer, my understanding of my parents’ unease with my going to South Africa grew clearer. “They are killing Nigerians in South Africa,” they proclaimed. When I asked why, they cited xenophobia and locals having resentment towards Nigerians in the country for “taking the jobs and resources.” Living in Trump’s America, this flawed anti-immigrant logic unfortunately sounded familiar to me. He continued by providing anecdotes about how Nigerian’s were mistreated in, killed in, and expelled from South Africa. Thus, before coming to South Africa, my parents repeatedly told me, “DON’T TELL ANYONE YOU’RE A NIGERIAN!”
I didn’t know this frustration with South Africa was so widespread until the June 11th Mexico vs. South Africa World Cup game, where I saw TikTok after TikTok, and several social media posts, about how Africans, against all assumed ideas of “Pan-Africanism,” were rooting for Mexico and not South Africa. Some went as far as to say that if it were South Africa playing against South Africa, they would root for the stadium (LOL.) Upon investigation of why that was, it was all once again attributed to xenophobia and the mistreatment of non-South African African peoples in South Africa.
While I was previously unaware of this often contentious relationship between South Africa and the rest of continental Africa, now that I am here, in Cape Town, engaging in dialogue and taking everything in, I am beginning to see evidence of this contentious relationship everywhere. On Youth Day, on June 16th, I heard beautiful voices echoing from the sundeck of Protea Hotel. Like my professor and some of the hotel staff that were also on the sundeck, I thought it was a Youth Day Parade. However, it was an anti-immigration protest—hate masked in beauty. Today, June 18th, we attended the World Refugee Day Symposium hosted by the Human Rights Media Centre, and similar conversations arose as we discussed statelessness and the struggles of immigration. While I was at this symposium, I jotted down two quotes interesting and related: the first being Lumumba Chia’s idea that “South Africans are not inherently xenophobic…circumstances cause people to act the way they act…people are speaking through their traumas…they are also in pain;” and the second being from a person in the audience who stated “We take on the failings of the systems that we inherit as our own personal failings. It becomes the way we value ourselves.”
In the same way that many refugees may inherit systemic failings as personal ones, I think many continental Africans externalize South Africa’s systemic failings as cultural ones. Building on Chia’s thought, xenophobia in South Africa is a product of poverty and insecurity; it arises because of the government’s inability to distribute resources equitably and the fear that the few resources received will be externalized to “foreigners.” Consequently, there seems to be resentment on both sides: South Africans vs. the rest of continental Africa.
While there is no doubt that these anti-immigration sentiments exist elsewhere, especially in places like the United States and the UK, I especially find it interesting in the context of South Africa and the rest of the continent because we are sold pan-Africanism as something that exists unambiguously. But what is pan-Africanism if Africans don’t root for each other in something as light-hearted as soccer? And more importantly, what is Pan-Africanism when there are contentions on both sides about the politics of immigration, one in uproar about resources, and the others in arms about the livelihoods of their kin? I am interested in exploring these questions more and understanding the dynamics of ethnicity, race, and migration (one of my majors 😉 ) across the continent further!