May 27, 2008

Silence stokes xenophobic violence in SA

If we do nothing we have blood on our hands, writes Isabella Morris

Today my family and I helped to feed the displaced people from Marathon Squatter Camp in Germiston. Most of the people who stood in the line in front of our two rickety tables hadn’t had a meal for three days.

One man’s head still had the dried blood on it from an attack on Friday night. His blue jersey was a stiff, bruised purple, saturated with dried blood.

Another man who has lived in South Africa for 21 years waved his son’s death certificate at us in anger — how could we be serving food when his son was dead, waiting in the Germiston morgue to be buried. Then he apologised for his anger. He simply had nobody else to tell about his loss.

A 15-year-old boy carrying an empty, white backpack with broken zips sobbed without shame and accepted whatever food and drink was thrust into his hands, but he walked away without gobbling it down like his compatriots. Nobody knew who he was or whether he had any family, or whether he spoke Shangaan or Portuguese.

A man in a magnificent, black overcoat with a robust demeanour marched his beautiful family up the street to the gate at the Germiston police station where they sat in disciplined silence. We motioned to the man to come and get a meal for his family but his forceful hand movements and his taut face told us to leave them alone. The indignity of being ousted by his neighbours from the home he’d built for his family was too much for him; he could not take the risk of placing his faith in anyone else.

A tall man’s face was heavy from the swelling of the beating he’d received. He wore only khaki trousers and he had been discharged from the hospital immediately after they’d stitched up his head. He did not have the co-ordination to remove the foil covering from the yoghurt we gave him; he did not have the energy to release a full sob. His pain and anger were strangled in the dry moans caught in his throat as he sat shaking on the pavement.

You can hand people food in a conveyer-belt fashion or you can talk to them and listen carefully enough to find out if their name is Lizette or Yvette.

You will discover that some of the people are from Mozambique, but most are from Zimbabwe. Everyone ends up speaking a pidgin African lingo seasoned with smiles in the hope of being understood. It works.

Ali and I make the tea and Lizette fetches water; our diners wait patiently. One man asks Mark if he can have tomato sauce. We tell him we’re not McDonald’s and everyone laughs.

We try to make a point about giving mothers and children priority, but many of the men haven’t eaten in favour of their women and so I open the tins of baked beans and give them to the men with a request that they share it with someone. Some do and some don’t. I don’t say anything to them, just as I don’t say anything to the friends who didn’t reply to my request to help at the feeding station. I understand that some people do nothing because they think they can only do a little. If only they knew how much that “little” can help.

When politicians are asked to react to this violence they look to unemotional tables and figures and experts. The human catastrophe is transformed into a numerical exercise.

Is this war about xenophobia? Is it about the haves and the have nots? Is it about empty bellies? Is it even about politics?

If you pare this untenable situation down to its basis, surely it’s about humanity vs inhumanity. If South Africans sit back and tut-tut over the news reports then surely we might as well all have a panga in our hands or be hula-hooping around one of apartheid’s legacy of smoking tyres.

By doing nothing, by saying nothing we are colluding with our fellow South Africans who are behaving badly. The government will provide plots and graphs and million-page consultant reports to justify the it’s-not-my-responsibility attitude. If that is all the government is going to do, then ordinary South Africans are going to pay dearly for the incalculable loss.

What price the cost to a boy who will never again speak because of the trauma he has witnessed, not only when he left Zimbabwe, but when he fled from Marathon Squatter Camp, South Africa?

What will be the cost to your business when the orders stop coming from overseas companies who won’t do business with racist South Africa? What is the cost to every South African who joined hands when the rainbow nation was formed and promised to be a shining beacon to the rest of the world?

While the politicians pore over numbers and excuses, will South Africa, like Rwanda, Kenya and Zimbabwe, become the newest member state of savage Africa? Have we already done so?