BY FESTUS ADEDAYO, Ph.D
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A commenter on X, obviously a South African national, with the name Paul, reacted to a CableNews April 27 report that two Nigerians were killed in recent spike in South Africa’s xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans. He said: “They were burnt alive…our country isn’t a playing zone. They (sic) will be more Nigerian criminals to be buried this Saturday.” Paul was writing with the handle, @blewcash.easymoney.referral, with the South African national flag hoisted on his comment. A BBC report had earlier quoted a 43-year-old Democratic Republic of Congo national living in Hillbrow, S.A. as saying he felt lucky to be alive: “My best friend was attacked one morning… He was stoned to death like a dog. Imagine someone runs away from his own land and comes here to find peace but ends up getting killed.”
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A 2017 report cited by Nigeria’s House of Representatives said that 116 Nigerians were killed in South Africa over a preceding two-year period, out of which, roughly 20 were killed in 2016. Though not a recent phenomenon, xenophobic attacks in South Africa have assumed epidemic proportion. As far back as 1994, in the rush for scarce resources, immigrants face stiff push, leading to violent discrimination. Record has it that in 2008, South Africa harvested 62 deaths from xenophobic uprising and attacks. A 2018 Pew research poll reported that 62% of South Africans believed immigrants constituted social and economic burdens and were responsible for crimes. At the moment, South Africa’s rate of unemployment, ranked as one of the highest in the world, oscillates around 33%. Xenophobia attacks increased after Nelson Mandela and a black majority government deposed white rule, inflicted by assailants who allege that job losses result from foreigners’ infiltration.
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Julius Malema, South African opposition politician and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, had a stinging remark against such claims. Last Thursday, at the 14th anniversary of Collen Mashawana Foundation, he took a swipe at xenophobia by saying, “I want to challenge you who say ‘Zimbabweans take your jobs, Nigerians take your jobs’ and you march, close shops, and beat up people. Tell us after doing that, how many jobs have you created?… Unskilled men, with no skill whatsoever, say somebody took their jobs. The skill they know is to drink and want to pretend like revolutionaries.”
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South African politicians, like ones in uMkhonto weSizwe, (MK) led by ex-President Jacob Zuma, latch on this to make xenophobic comments to gain political advantage. Early this year, Zulu king, Misuzulu kaZwelithini, used highly derogatory term for immigrants while calling for their eviction. He spoke by the rocky Isandlwana hill, in a place where history recorded that, 147 years ago, his forefathers, commanding 20,000 Zulu warriors in the Anglo-Zulu war, defeated 1,800 British soldiers in the battle of Isandlwana.
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The 51-year king said: “The kwerekwere must leave,” kwerekwere being a derogatory word for African migrants. His late father, Goodwill Zwelithini, made similar offensive call in 2015, asking immigrants to “pack their belongings”. This led to a rise in vigilante anti-migrant groups, chief of which is the Operation Dudula (Dudula in Zulu language meaning, “to be removed by force”) as well as March on March, with their notoriety flourishing daily.
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There is no way we can locate South Africans’ violence against fellow blacks unless we go into history. In 2019, South Africans unleashed an unprecedented assault on Nigerians which resulted in loss of property worth billions of Naira. To understand this hate, we have to trace its genealogy. It will explain the infliction of horrendous pains on fellow blacks by South Africans.
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Historically, since 1948, Black South Africans have harboured bile, violence and rancid hatred for other races. 1948 was the year Apartheid was institutionalized as a system of white minority rule. It led to acute racial segregation. The Apartheid system also forced non-white into segregated areas, restricted their rights to mingle with whites and took away their voting rights. These further inflicted incalculable damage on their psyche. The National Party, led by such leaders like Pieter Willem Botha, enforced this oppressive policy of “apartness”.
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Today, though Apartheid was defeated by the collective voices of the world in 1994, it has not died. Odour of economic inequality still lingers, leaving wide social and economic disparities created by Apartheid. This includes wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, spatial segregation and unquenchable anger against anyone felt to be responsible for their existential maroon on a spot. Today, you could still see systemic poverty of blacks, carry-overs of the Frederick de Clark era, with a wide gap of unequal access to resources and education.
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While you may see imposing infrastructural relics of white rule in South Africa, its innards are made of up irreconcilable dysfunction, hate and quest for vengeance of 1948 to 1994. You cannot succeed in a psychological download of the mental constitution of an average South African unless you read its books of literature. To escape Apartheid’s mind torture, Black South African writers expressed themselves in stories that were mostly laced with thematic concerns of violence, hatred, revenge and crime.
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If you read the works of authors like Mazisi Kunene, Ezekiel Mphalele, Peter Abrahams, Alf Wannenburg and many others, you will understand why South Africans haven’t purged themselves of their bond with violence. In fact, if you read Can Themba’s The Dube Train, its theme is the ordinariness of death and violence under Apartheid. The narrator of the book prefaces the short story with a description of fellow commuters as “sour-smelling humanity” and exhibits his impatience with this “hostile life” and “the shoving savagery of the crowd.” With this short story, Themba explains the banality and ordinariness of death in the Apartheid era, ending the story by telling the readers that the murder of a tout, called tsotsi, “was just another incident in the morning Dube Train”, with the crowd “greedily relishing the thrilling episode.”
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I have searched frantically for the lure of the gruesome murders of Nigerians and other African nationals at the drop of a hat by South Africans. My findings revealed a retained savagery of Apartheid. Placing stories of blood spillage under Apartheid with the recent ease with which South Africans hack fellow Blacks to death, a knowledge of the country’s historical development will bail you out of wonderment. If you now read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s classic, Lord of the Flies, place the bestiality in the books beside the black-on-black hate in South Africa today and you will agree with white theorists’ submission that the Blackman has within him innate bestiality. Today, South African blacks only need very little provocation to unleash an ancestry of savagery, like Golding’s little boys marooned on an island, whose animalism took the better part of them.
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Like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti sang, quoting Botha, Apartheid indeed brought out the beast in South Africans. Today, fellow blacks have replaced whites in their subconscious. The moment the system castrated the Blackman’s manhood, he became a lot less than an animal, with no difference between his behaviour and those of his ape ancestors. If you read the history of the South African liberation struggle, it is replete with macabre and a number of horrendous murders that would make a civilized world shudder. In the name of the struggle, many of those atrocities were excused and overlooked; indeed, they came to the world’s knowledge seldom. The world focused, on the reverse, on the evil regime of Frederick de Clark and the atrocities of segregating white from Indians, the black and coloured. The dastardly act of murdering fellow blacks they labeled Askaris, who were alleged to have betrayed the liberation struggle, were never heard. Thus, we never knew how ignoble and bloodless the hearts of our South African brothers were.
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You will recall the trial of Winnie Mandela and the allegation of her involvement in the murder of some youths, who went by the façade of a football club. The murdered boys were alleged to be squealing on the liberation struggle. They were summarily tried by the “Winnie Boys”, sentenced to death and executed, similar to how a Nigerian police officer, ASP Nuhu Usman, was captured on video executing a 28-year-old suspect, Mene Ogidi, last week in Effurun, Delta State. Winnie was eventually tried for these murders which constituted one of the thousands of gruesome killings by blacks under Apartheid.
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If you read some of the works of Alex la Guma, like A Walk In the Night, you will encounter District Six, the inner city of Cape Town, home to all sorts of sub-human activities and why horrendous murder became part and parcel of the people’s existence. Mutual knifing, unprovoked arson, murders and all sorts were carried out with a clinical finish that would make a decent man shudder. In Quartet and In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, you will encounter the bestiality that Apartheid wrought on the psyche of our so-called brothers. Many black South Africans lost their humanity in the process.
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Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) founded by Mandela in 1961, perpetrated a lot of criminal activities and mindless murders that were swept under the rug while Mandela was in jail. Several South Africans who were accused of betraying the struggle were tagged Askari or “cockroaches” got summarily executed and nobody ever heard of their deaths thereafter.
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If Gen Z South Africans who hate Nigerians this much, apparently not born in 1994 or are too young to appreciate the roles Nigeria played to get them the freedom that made them fiefs in their own land, methinks elderly South Africans should retell the story to them. After all, my people say if a child was not alive to witness history (Ìtàn) in manifestation, they will at least hear historical narratives (àróbá). In total, it is said that, from 1960 when Tafawa Balewa made Africa the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy, to 1994 during Sani Abacha regime, Nigeria wasted an estimated $60 billion on funding the anti-Apartheid struggle.
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That Nigerian intervention actually began with the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960. Police had opened fire on a crowd of protesters outside a police station in the township of Sharpeville. They were protesting Apartheid system’s Pass laws which required Blacks to obtain passes to move around. 72 blacks were killed and about 184 wounded in one fell swoop. In protest, Nigerian university students voluntarily skipped their lunch for a month, and the proceeds remitted to South Africa. It was called the Mandela Tax. Not only did they make fetish of the evil of Apartheid, Nigerian students mobilized public opinion in support of people they felt were their brothers, with many young Nigerians contributing from their little pocket monies in aid of the struggle.
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In the same vein, many tertiary institutions formed clubs like Youth Solidarity on South Africa. Nigeria then boycotted the 1976 Olympics and 1979 Commonwealth games, leading to national losses. To get South Africa liberated quickly, Nigeria declined selling oil to the apartheid regime. Aside these, Nigeria played a vital role in the anti-apartheid struggle through music, using powerful songs to mobilize awareness and solidarity across Africa and beyond. Artists like Fela Kuti and Sonny Okosun used their voices to condemn oppression, inspire resistance, and amplify the call for freedom in South Africa.
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Apart from frontline states like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia, no nation could rival Nigeria in contributions to the struggle against apartheid. If you read the book, Diplomatic Soldiering (1987) written by Gen. Joe Garba, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister under Gens. Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo, you will have an idea of the quantum of fortune Nigeria sank into the liberation of South Africa and South African states. On many occasions, Nigeria single-handedly picked the bills of programmes associated with the struggle. Thousands of South African youths received scholarship to study in Nigerian universities, nursing schools, polytechnics and colleges of education. Frustrated at some point, Obasanjo, as Head of State, once threatened to deploy all means possible to fight Apartheid to a standstill, including invoking what he called the Blackman’s magical power.
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At some point, Nigeria was home to South African freedom fighters like Thabo Mbeki’s father, Govan Mbeki; Albert Luthuli and other ANC leaders who were here on asylum. Nigeria also richly funded ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Thabo, Mbeki’s son, was also on exile in Nigeria from 1976 to 1979.
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On May 13, 1990, upon his release from a combination of terms in Robben Island, Pollsmoor, and Victor Verster Prisons which cumulatively stood at 27 years, President Nelson Mandela was on a courtesy visit to Nigeria. At the Murtala Square, Kaduna, he affirmed that Nigeria made the highest donation to South Africa’s liberation. To further underscore this, on April 27, on the Freedom Day which marks South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded his country of the debt it owes other nations on the continent who supported their struggle against the racist system of apartheid.
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The children and grandchildren of Nigerians who made those huge sacrifices are now the ones being killed in South Africa today. As Nigerians, we have our own drawbacks, but violence of the South African kind is alien to us.
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My take is that, if Nigerian governments, from independence to 1994, had spent the estimated $60b frittered on South Africa on the future of Nigerians, their offspring would not be hibernating in South Africa today. South Africans may also jolly well still be in captivity. We owe it a duty to both ourselves and country to make Nigeria too a pleasant country, a country which, travelling out of it would be for mere sight-seeing, rather than for economic liberation. The hopelessness at home and the serial plunder of our country by our own kin, the notoriety of which is a tale told in all the four corners of the globe, are reasons we weigh little in the estimation of the world. Again, the criminal lifestyles, drug-pushing and excessive self-underscore that our nationals live abroad cannot but make us objects of xenophobia.
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ADEDAYO is a columnist, journalist, author, lawyer and political scientist. (First published by the Sunday Tribune, May 3, 2026)
