EMMANUEL KONDE: South Africa’s post-Apartheid catharsis

Apartheid was a prolonged social war that ravaged and rendered a huge segment of South Africa’s black population less than human by law, social mores, violent brutality, and deprivation (1948-94). April 2014 marked South Africa’s 20th anniversary since the collapse of Apartheid and the establishment of black majority rule.

Barely one and a half years after the death of Nelson Mandela (Dec. 5, 2013) — first black president and acknowledged father of post-Apartheid South Africa — the social pathology caused by nearly 350 years (1652-1994) of black subjugation and dehumanization by white immigrants is expressing itself in black nativist violence against their black brethren who happen to be “successful” immigrants.

Xenophobia is the word that has suddenly sprouted to the fore. It is the word that most Africans have latched onto with something akin to religious fervor. They speak and write it without giving the social problem, the pathology of Apartheid, the kind of serious thought it deserves. Consequently, this deplorable violence has elicited not a calm and measured response designed to understand the catharsis but a similar “brutish” reaction from other Africans aghast at the ugliness they are seeing from afar, and experiencing at close quarters.

Understandably, in a matter of life and death, with about seven killed and 5,000 wounded and displaced and rendered homeless, the reaction of observers must be swift. Nevertheless, I have elected to call what some have correctly but hurriedly designated as xenophobia with a sense of finality “catharsis.”

I call it catharsis not as an apologist, but because since the fall of Apartheid, South Africa undertook to implement a “policy of reconciliation” whose purpose was to prevent black retaliation against white South Africans, but never fashioned a “policy of rehabilitation” for the black masses that had languished under Apartheid’s crushing weight for nearly half a century. Hence, the pent-up anger and frustration, long in the making and triggered by irrational fear and self-conscious inhibition, found an unfortunate outlet for release in violent acts against (black) immigrants.

What is happening in South Africa is the result of neglect: the neglected, impoverished, ill-educated, poor blacks are lashing out at those nearest to them. They are blaming their foreign black brethren for succeeding where only failure has been their harvest. They are probably misconstruing foreign black success as a new form of “black-Apartheid” whose ethos is neither skin color nor place of residence but economic.

In as much as there is no excuse or justification for this cathartic violence meted on foreign Africans by their South African brethren, the enormity of the barbaric brutality has exposed all Africans to the world in the most negative light. Indeed, many South African blacks, especially the affluent, are certainly emotionally buried in shame.

To be sure, this catharsis of violence is not only complex but it also inhabits many black South Africans. It will take decades or generations for this violent episode of bestiality to be wiped out of the memory of black Africa, and even longer to be expunged from the “systems” of some black South Africans. Nonetheless, it is now clear that the unfinished business of post-Apartheid South Africa is social rehabilitation for the majority of blacks who were left behind in 1994.

Emmanuel Konde is a professor of history at Albany State University.