This is a very comprehensive article that describes the climate of fear, intimidation and harassment that anti-immigration protests as well as xenophobic vigilantes have created in parts of South Africa following their declaration of 30 June as a deadline for all illegal immigrants to leave the country, with big marches planned.
The article covers individual acts of intimidation, the marches, the government's response both to illegal immigration and to xenophobia and comments by protest leaders.
Illegal immigration is a problem. South Africa is a poorer country and one can ask reasonable questions about its ability to accommodate undocumented migrants especially given the fact that public services must provide for any person who shows up, regardless of documentation.
But I think this article makes clear that there is line where opposition to illegal immigration slips into lawless cruelty and xenophobia, and many people crossed that line a long time ago.
If the government does not manage the situation properly and push back on vigilantism and xenophobia, 30 June could be a very dark day.
Posted by Top_Lime1820
1 Comment
As a Nigerian, this whole thing is so sad. My parents generation and their parenys sympathized very heavily with the south african people during the apartheid struggle to the point it was common for civil servants and other consciously educated nigerians to donate their paychecks to the anti-apartheid cause.
This whole debacle also tells me that Pan-Africanism will remain a pipe dream for a very long time, although I don’t like pan-africanism anyway, I believe it homogenizes africans and is an ideology becoming more outdated as we get further from european colonialism