Punishing the symptoms, exonerating the problems

When Yaasir of Somalia and Xiluva of Mozambique set up their shops in the middle of Soweto, it was the negotiated result of Sowetans giving them access to and use of their property; a landlord doing business with a kwere-kwere.

But Yaasir and Xiluva often have their shops looted and their bodies butchered for providing needed services and making a living in this manner. They are taking our business, we say.

When Oke of Nigeria and Michael of Congo set up clothing and phone repair shops in Small Street in Johannesburg, their tenant status was approved by a South African municipal official; a transaction with a kwere-kwere tenant.

But Oke and Michael are often forced to flee to safety for participating in the economy in this way. They are taking our business, we say. Before “foreigner” Africans and Pakistanis came, malume Zondo and ntatemoholo Makgetha had already closed down their general dealers. The shopping mall phenomenon brought big money retail tenants in the township.

But Zondo and Makgetha did not loot the malls, let alone shutting them and torching the managers. They are taking our business, we should have said. Not once have we pelted stones at the locals who shop at those malls and centres. And more of them are being built without facing any form of organised community resistance.

When Bastirai of Zimbabwe and Chiwa of Zambia accepted the farm and factory jobs at a cheaper wage rate, they are forced to deal with getting to work on time and evading disgruntled mobs plotting another attack on them.

They often face overt and covert resistance, humiliation and violence from genuine South Africans who had nothing against Tony and Cynthia the migrants who go and return from England and Germany as they please. Not once have they blockaded the gates of the factory, let alone torch the property of the business owner who took the decision to replace South Africans with Malawians.

Alfredo is from Italy and Anastacio from Greece. Their restaurants and clothing shops nestled in the sprawling top-end malls swallow and spit out black and white customers and, whether or not they replace Tshidi and Andile with Sambulo of Swaziland and Yornella of DRC as workers, all the abuses they perpetrate towards their employees and violations to existing laws remain just a low key talk around tables.

Alfredo and Anastacio will never be forced to close their shops, let alone having them looted, by disgruntled South Africans working or wanting to work there. What we will know is that Sambulo and Yornella are stealing jobs of South Africans!

There is Radovan in Bedfordview. He is filthy rich selling drugs and killing his competitors and non-paying debtors. We ignore that. We admire his first-class life. Anastacio’s employees in a restaurant fall on themselves trying to impress Radovan. He is there to plot more crimes. He eats the food and drinks wine harvested from farms owned mainly by Europeans.

Godoba and Stitch, who carry out his crimes for quick hundreds of rands, and for consistent stints in and out of jail, are a menace to the very people who are huddled in the townships to make space for sprawling farms, suburbia and industrial buildings. The townships which have butchered their self-esteem, are a stage for them to butcher those who live there, including the “foreign nationals.”

But we shrug and remark in hushed tones, ‘he (Radovan) came in driving that Maserati in the parking lot; f*** white folks are damn rich jong!’ We dig into our pizza and pasta, pleased with ourselves that finally we have escaped the village and township days of eating cabbage and papa every day.

You are staying down the road. The 2-bedroom townhouse has a defenceless security official at the gate and private garden (it’s a lawn) by the doorstep. Your family house in Tembisa, in Botshabelo, in Lusikisiki, in Malamulele, in Nkandla, has nothing on this splendid dwelling in the leafy heart of Joburg. You are secure from bandits who rule Hillbrow, Berea, Alex and Diepsloot, or so you believe.

The landlord is Alfredo’s father. They are partners in the import clothing shop. You are wearing Armani jeans with Diesel t-shirt today. You paid for them with the peanuts you haven’t earned yet, to keep up with your friend, who makes a living through not selling any product or service but renting her name to BEE deals.

You have not heard from your cousin in years. Rumour has it that she is selling her wares downtown. She has no idea that Radovan literally owns her, and the coke she is snorting to bear the onslaught of her trade. Your cousin is working her body to death, to keep up with what looks like success attained by you. Your success, elusive and punishing as it is, amounts to the peanuts which Radovan and Anastacio pay you as owners of the company you are working for. It is legit because it is on Rivonia Road. You are being paid in order for you to stay in the (town) house owned by Anastacio’s father.

But your cousin’s whereabouts don’t bother you. The fact that she could not go to university like you, because the textile factory which her father worked for in the Eastern Cape closed down as soon as China opened theirs, does not bother you. People like your cousin did not want education. They are lazy just like those criminals roaming the township streets without any liberally constructive plan for their lives! Your logic.

You literally own nothing. Yes. You. Me. I am owned just like my whoring cousin and my “foreign nationals” who are crowding my space! I belong to the industrial dream. I need the job it owns, to buy the food it is hoarding; to buy the clothes it is importing; to buy the media narrative it calls edu-tainment; to buy and drink alcohol it is doling out so that I can make my sorrowful existence bearable; to borrow the cars it is manufacturing, through which I kill while trying to get to the plantation (work, a party, a borrowed dwelling I call home) in a flash! Time is precious when you are an educated whore.

I know now that the township folk are lazy and that suburb dwellers are hard-working, thanks to my newspaper reading prowess. I denounce the fervent attacks the “lazy ones” mete out to other Africans (the symptoms of their plight); yet I quietly believe that the (exclusively African) “foreign nationals” are the problem; that they must just return home to stand up to rotten Black Colonialists (presidents) they fled from. I have no qualms, despite the “good education” I allegedly received, and reading material freely available to rescue my colonised mind, to call this act of protest by the wretched brethren, a xenophobic attack!