Who wants to be African in South Africa?

I have been trying to remind myself that the South Africa I first reported from, back in 1989 and 1991, is not the one currently in the news for all the wrong reasons.

It is a different country from the one I lived in as a foreign correspondent from late 1992 to 1994. The country is also much changed from the one in which I did my last stint as a correspondent back in 1999. I have since then done short trips to the Rainbow Country but I cannot claim to have the intimate knowledge that I used to have of the events and personalities that make the news there.

I recall with particular pleasure the trip I made to watch the finals of the World Cup in 2010 as a VIP guest of a special friend of mine who is currently at the top of the political ladder in the country.

I had the privilege of watching the Republic in all its current glory and seeing old friends who have metamorphosed from lean and hungry liberation fighters to slightly overweight middle-aged political and business executives.

But somehow no matter how hard I try, the images that are coming to my mind in the midst of the current upheavals are the Apartheid era images.

What was then called “black on black violence” when there was a deadly fight between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC and white supremacists manipulated black South Africans to butcher each other.

I have been hearing a lot of outrage about how the rest of Africa helped South Africa in the fight against Apartheid and the South Africans should therefore show some gratitude and be hospitable towards Africans from the rest of the continent.

My recollection of the atmosphere towards the end of Apartheid and during the transition in South Africa is slightly different. The day after Walter Sisulu and six others were released from jail after 27 years, I was among the delirious crowds in Soweto with my tape recorder. I did not find anybody under the age of 35 who had any idea there was a country called Sierra Leone or Liberia or Benin. The older ones would react to Ghana and it was to say: “Gha—na, Na-krumah, oh you support PAC”.

Misconceptions To the uninitiated, PAC was the Pan African Congress, the breakaway party from the ANC, which was said to be more Africanist in outlook and wanted South Africa renamed Azania. Among the black South Africans then, if you were a Ghanaian, their firm conclusion was that you did not support the ANC but the PAC.

The black South Africans did not have any access to news about the rest of Africa except from the Apartheid government controlled, South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).

You needed a police permit to own a shortwave radio and that meant the few blacks who owned one did so illegally. I was told about people who hid their shortwave radios in the most unlikely places in the townships and listened to the BBC and ANC broadcasts in secret.

I was once invited to give a talk to the Shortwave Radio Club in Johannesburg and they were mostly English-speaking white South Africans.

The information that was available to black South Africans about sub-Sahara Africa was a starving mass of primitive people who lived in unstable and underdeveloped countries.

A particular statistic was pulled out regularly: the Republic had more kilometres of paved roads than the sum of the paved roads in all the African countries.

We might have been shouting ourselves hoarse in the rest of Africa about fighting against Apartheid; those who lived there were not hearing us. Those of them who lived in exile in countries in Africa could not get over how poor their host countries were and what a modern city Johannesburg was that they had left behind.

When South Africa started opening up after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, it was the white South Africans that had the means to travel the world that had been closed to them. The black South Africans mostly stayed at home and the rest of Africa descended on them to see the new South Africa.

The first few years after the 1994 election were a steep learning curve for all of us. The first black hairdressing salons and dressmaking shops were mostly staffed by West Africans even if the business was owned by indigenous black South Africans.

The concept of the corner shop did not exist in the black areas and the first tentative ones were established by Nigerians and Zaireans, or DRC as they were later rechristened.

The South Africans were happy, of course, to be accepted in the world of international organisations, the Organisation of African Unity, later to be transformed into the African Union, provided a magnificent platform for the new nation.

Identifying with other Africans Thabo Mbeki, first as Vice President and later, President, had a passion for Africa and his African Renaissance campaign lulled the rest of the continent into thinking South Africa saw itself as an African country. On his project to make South Africa an African country, I am afraid I am not convinced that President Mbeki carried the bulk of his people with him.

Like our North African Arab countries who count themselves as African nations for the sake of votes at international organisations and sporting competitions, South Africa was happy to be able to be part of the Africa Nations Cup competition and get votes from Africa.

The tensions soon came to the fore. White South African business owners appeared more comfortable with people from “north of the Limpopo” than with their own black people.

My view was that these people did not pose any challenge to the entrenched position of the whites, who could then continue with their spurious theories of “you are not like our blacks”.

As I have been recalling many of the old stories, I am forced to the conclusion that we should find a better reason to use to appeal to the South Africans to accept us in their country rather than having helped them fight Apartheid. There is a whole generation that is totally unimpressed with that argument. They have always regarded that stretch “north of the Limpopo” as unknown and unpleasant.

There are South African businesses that are making good money “north of the Limpopo”, and might be susceptible to pressure. But it is probably only Nigeria that would have the clout and would be bloody- minded enough to make South African business suffer in retaliation. The rest of us would end up shouting ourselves hoarse and come home to watch DSTV.

I remember a conversation with a group of young Afrikaaners in Bloemfontein in 1991. They said to me what they feared most was that the rest of Africa would come and dismantle the country they and their forefathers had built.

Somewhere among my old recorded material I am sure I will find a strong Afrikaans accented voice telling me: “Our black people will discover that they were better off when they were not part of Africa; that day they will turn on the black Africans, it will not be pleasant ”. Maybe that day has come.