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Taken and edited from, the messengers of a nation.
There is a palpable sense of emergency in the streets today, a rainbow nation wandering around avenue corners hoping to lure out African immigrants.
Many people allude to the left when they intended to the right.
Everybody appears clustered to their locale—the quasi-South African situation at play, with many economic despondents behind the insurgency and misconduct.
The instigators have caused a stir today, and everyone is in arms. The target, the invaders! The motive? Well, to each their own.
It feels overdue, particularly with how social media has portrayed these people, the rumours and other forms of Hocus Pocus making rounds.
The immigrants seem to be forming some defence, and it looks pretty robust, although makeshift. The stakes are higher on one side today, and this is the bout we’ve all anticipated, between Africans and, well, other Africans!
For the first cohort, the locals, their defence seems weakened. Half of the populace has no business being there since they have no quarrels with the latter.
But today seems more about who can shout the loudest; in this fog of economic oppression, the secluded, i.e. despondents, seem to have found their stage.
Everyone else tags along because they confide in their spirit or simply due to procrastination.
Some screening is happening, with the light-skinned amongst the turmoil grouping themselves under the South African banner. It has always been our pride as locals how we are generally lighter in complexion than the rest of the continent. Who knows why? My guess is that whiteness has been a standard we’ve welcomed into our homes. I suppose that we don’t use the mirror for its full purpose.
Meanwhile, no Chinese, Europeans or Indians are within sight here today. I hoped they could at least acknowledge our efforts in conserving them against our relatives!
Eventually, a standoff ensued, and the grimmest image appeared, painting what I had just described above. It was never about Xeno-phobia per se, just the Afro version of it.
The situation has reached emergency levels, and it is more evident today with the refugees and immigrants weighing in on our fractured economic scale. For the first time ever, we see despondents evolve into delinquents out of sheer hopelessness; no country ever has to bury its young in this way!
During my schooling days, I studied human behaviour and how it adapts to economic fortunes. Today I bare to witness the worst-case scenarios of that human condition.
It is also worth noting the lesson unfolding in parallel to the main one, the lesson of misconduct and our incline to act with impunity when the cameras are off—some locals seem to be hurting these foreigners and stealing their valuables in the process. Then I remembered that hunger keeps score. Hunger knows no boundaries.
Hunger always keeps score; what an anomaly that is.
Eco-social bondage is still widespread amongst the black population today, and locals venting out on their neighbours is a purely classist thing to do.
Picture an EPL league, picture a low-ranking team, such as Southampton, and picture them domineering a club such as Liverpool. What are the odds of that? It is sort of the same with us and white people(on average). It is sort of the same everywhere where we have permitted racial inequality to exist.
So a few hours went by, and the intensity in the streets was still palpable. Immigrants began to come out in numbers for solidarity. There was an ocean of them.
If the poor old pan-Africanist souls were to witness this, I could only predict their utterance.
Meanwhile, I also wondered how tough the job of the police officer would be right now; this had chaos written all over it. Whoever declared us as the United States of Africa did us a great disservice.
The issue with Pan-Africanism is that it remains largely an ideal, and it seems it will stay that way for some time. It has the same weight as ‘thin air’!
It remains cultivated more by scholars than grounds people and does not fit with the current state of disenfranchised people, albeit in a democratic dispensation.
Pan-Africanism declares that Africa is for Africans. If only it were apparent to know who those Africans were!
During the turmoil, A lady uttered: ‘This is my land too’ as she latched on to a stick in self-defence. There was a hijack of languages, some intermarriage of words between the groups; this went ignored, though!
At first, I failed to distinguish between the two groups until a female journalist ironed it out, and even then, it felt comedic, with some immigrants masquerading as locals. The light skin issue was a debacle in the end. It felt like there were no rules to this turmoil, and all of us were chasing the wind.
In addressing them, the journalist used a local language, and to my surprise, they(the foreigners) responded, albeit in their own, which I could somewhat decipher.
If ever I doubted that the Bantu were a people, I may have had to reconsider now.
Some people claim that we are not Bantu but rather the NTU, the Banto or whatever they can concoct in their adorable minds. Such tales are what this continent is about, though, always been. Storytelling seems commonplace here; we share that, but unfortunately, one tragic storyteller introduced Afrophobia, and the crowd got hooked.
Afrophobia may be mushy at times, mainly when there are vendettas to settle. It usually happens in Townships, squatter camps, or any regions where the most marginalised live. These economies are carry-overs, meaning that the community members often loan or grant items to each other to help survive.
Most of it happens behind the scenes, but during public displays, like when the media houses are broadcasting riots or Afrophobia, the carry-overs also spill over, making the entire thing mushy.
All in all, Afrophobia is not much of what locals think of day in and out. I had to clarify that.
Afrophobia may be a consequence of sharing space, seeming to happen in the regions where black people live. Africans live around Africans; that is how it goes.
Reports claim that the first batch of immigrants touched this soil during the mining boom days.
And many have since remained, distributing their language and genes in the process. That means we have many partially mixed descendants. Similar to fifty per cent this, or twenty-five per cent that or five per cent this and that.
And unfortunately, that could be any one of us now. There is a real chance of admixture in many of us.
Who, then, do we rid ourselves of? The mining boom days started one-to-two hundred years ago, and the average child-to-parent age gap is twenty years. So there is a factor of ten variations that could have happened from then until now, net in one family chain.
But you may ignore what I just said; that is me having one of my ‘sound cute’ moments.
What I said above, although variably true, does not translate to what we see in the streets today.
It always has to be the darker ones, as we say, the darker ones, as we continue to say.
Thanks for reading.
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