The dog whistle: What is the national psyche of South Africans?
What is the national psyche of South Africans? The xenophobic attacks cycle keeps repeating itself.
Before the current one, there was 2008 whereby no less than 62 people were necklaced, lynched & stabbed simply for being foreigners and black. No other race was touched. It was black on black violence on steroids.
The propensity for mob violence on defence less ones who look like them takes the breath away.
When there was looting and general pandemonium in the July riots of two years ago in Durban, Phoenix suburb and the businesses of those of Indian descent were not touched, because they were prepared to put up a fight to defend themselves and the mobs knew it. And the mobs are cowards
As of the rest that put their trust in government, over four hundred of them did not live to find out that they might as well as have trusted a stone as trust government to protect them
The monumental failure by government to deal decisively with that situation came with a tab of close to a trillion rands to the economy.
And then there is churnalism instead of journalism, that has kept this fire burning by giving these charlatans a platform to spread their hate unchallenged, the police escorts of the mobs demanding proof of identity as though they were the police and immigration rolled into one whilst randomly whipping people on the streets
The lily livered populism with its coded words whereby undocumented immigrants really means all black immigrants, has quickly won over the politicians (never lazy to take a scapegoat) when as a matter of fact, everyone knows that the majority who sought refuge at a Durban police station recently, had their papers in order. They were kicked to the kerb nonetheless.
Now we’re told by the same notorious mob that has served government with notice for a June 30 uprising if they don’t take certain unspecified action, that Ubuntu is suspended until further notice. Really?
Then let’s talk about Orania, a whites only enclave in South Africa you don’t see them marching on that
And yet a mock ‘king’ who got enthroned by his Nigerian community in the Eastern Cape, who asked for no recognition by government, who set up no parallel structures to rival those of civic society, who never set up their own monetary system and raised no foreign flag on their soil (all the things done by the denizens of Orania), resulted in wholesale violence, looting and arson by the same mob.
One would be excused for being sceptical of South Africa filing a complaint in ICC apropos of the situation in Western Asia when they themselves are failing to call to order mobs terrorising innocent civilians at home. Hypocrites.
