In the eyes of Western journalists, Africa’s fortunes always seem to fluctuate between gloom and doom and rebirth and departure, with a pessimistic attitude weighing heavily on the balance.
As a journalist, I have always resisted giving in to the temptation to shape Africa in all these ways. After all, it is the second largest continent in the world, one of the most complex, and that includes a wide spectrum of different destinies.
In the eyes of Western journalists, Africa’s fortunes always seem to fluctuate between gloom and doom and rebirth and departure, with a pessimistic attitude weighing heavily on the balance.
As a journalist, I have always resisted giving in to the temptation to shape Africa in all these ways. After all, it is the second largest continent in the world, one of the most complex, and that includes a wide spectrum of different destinies.
Recent developments involving South Africa’s relationship with the rest of the continent, though, have made me think about the great opportunities that Africans are wasting by failing to think more fully about their shared fortune.
With the world taking little notice, a few weeks ago he used to the disappointing events of African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, sending planes to Nelson Mandela’s country to repatriate their citizens. They have found this necessary due to the endless hostilities and sporadic violence that migrants from across the continent have faced from South Africa. Early June, Mozambique he said that five of its citizens had been killed in recent “xenophobic attacks”. (South African police have confirmed two deaths.)
The reasons why I find this disappointing are inseparable from why the behavior of South Africans and their government has been shocking and self-deprecating.
South Africans seem to have forgotten that they were only able to throw off the shackles of apartheid, the system of formal white rule and forced inequality, in the 1990s due to the support they received from other African nations throughout their liberation struggle. This includes countries near and far that paid a heavy price for a host of anti-apartheid efforts, while Western countries largely supported white supremacy.
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Namibia each faced a combination of military attacks, support for rebellions against their governments, covert rebellions, and economic punishment from Pretoria because they supported liberation from apartheid and democratic rule in South Africa.
Many more distant countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria, were important sources of material aid and political refuge for the South African liberation movement as well as training for the armed forces of the struggle against apartheid.
Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah he got it right when he said, when his country gained independence from Britain in 1957, that no African nation could be considered truly free until all Africans were free from the colonial rule systems. Few other African leaders of his time were willing to follow Nkrumah very far in fulfilling his ultimate vision, which was to unite Africa through deep, regional and regional, political and economic cooperation, which could one day lead to a continental governance system. But where the majority of Black South Africans were concerned, the support given to them by weak and poor African countries was impressive and unprecedented.
Nkrumah was the most important promoter of his era of the concept of Pan-Africanism, referring to intra-African solidarity and strong ties between Africans and members of the continent’s vast diaspora. It is important to note that Nkrumah did not make any distinction in this on the basis of race.
One would have to be deceived, not to see how some countries continue to discriminate against Africans on the basis of race. This has been brought to my attention by the actions of the United States during the second term of President Donald Trump. Time to use African countries as a dumping ground for the evicted from other parts of the world and almost shut down African immigration to the United States, Trump has made a big show of expanding asylum and asylum to South African whites. under false pretenses that they are the oppressed minority.
The point here is that Black South Africans and, by extension, their country’s government, are making a mockery of themselves by treating their fellow Black Africans with such hostility—or in the case of Pretoria, a complete failure to protect them. If he could have heard about this, Nkrumah would surely be rolling in his grave.
The South African government is linked to this epidemic in ways that go far beyond the current situation. In fact, its shortcomings date back to Mandela’s time. By the time he became the country’s first post-apartheid president, Mandela, an early liberation leader and long-time prisoner, was unusually aware of the price other African nations had paid to support freedom in his country.
When Mandela came to power in 1994, South Africa stood out as a highly endowed country in a continent full of economically troubled nations. This was not only in the sense of relative wealth for everyone. South Africa then boasted a variety of large companies, with capital, and capabilities in various areas such as power generation; construction of roads, railways, airports and dams; and many productive industries, such as mining and agriculture.
Much of the country’s wealth, including its productive capacity, was then, and still is, in the hands of the white minority. But for a long time I have believed that the white people of South Africa would welcome the campaign led by Mandela to strengthen economic relations with the rest of the continent and develop new markets and cooperation with other African countries. South Africa’s location was undoubtedly one of its main competitive advantages in the world economy, compared to more powerful nations such as China that would eventually work eagerly to generate business in Africa.
Instead, Mandela chose an attitude of caution and humility. He was anxious, above all, not to give the impression that he thought that South Africa had any basis for leadership on the continent: not to lecture, not to show its strength, not to step on toes. Modesty has its virtues, but the results for South Africa and the entire continent, especially its southern half, have been disastrous. Other Africans were always forced to immigrate to South Africa in greater numbers after apartheid. By not engaging with the entire continent in a strong and immediate way, Mandela lost the opportunity to shape this process and ensure that it was a win-win.
There is no reason to believe that the principle that economists say applies to the rich world does not also apply to African countries. The idea is that liberalizing human migration greatly promotes economic growth in both source and receiving countries. It often takes political courage to implement this, but the rewards stand to be rich.
Instead of being open-minded and courageous, South Africans have adopted the worst Western attitudes toward Africans, treating them as undesirables—people who have come to “steal” their jobs or commit crimes. Over time, the effect on the country tends to be similar to cutting off the nose to disfigure its face. It is hoped that it will not take long for the South Africans to realize their error, but perhaps they will when the Europeans and finally the Americans get the idea of mass immigration from Africa as the best solution to the great economic problems that await them due to the rapid aging and decline of the population.
South Africans have an advantage that their Western counterparts do not. Unlike Europe or the United States, where concerns about immigration are inseparable from concerns about race, the young and powerful fighters arriving from across the continent are, by and large, the same color as the people they would reject.
