My Take On the Increasing Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa + Why Blame Slavery, Apartheid or the White Man For This Too?

So South Africans are killing other African immigrants—simply because they claim these foreigners are taking their jobs.

I have heard arguments that other African countries helped South Africa liberate itself from apartheid and as such they cannot do that to these same Africans.

Even if we did not help South Africans, they do not have any right to kill other Africans in their countries for whatever absurd reasons they are asserting.

Maybe, we should award the Europeans and American whites for their tolerance and hospitality, because, look at what we are doing to ourselves on our own continent—yet we flood into Europe and America and we don’t get lynched, at least not in this century.

Africans are becoming more brutish as the day goes by!

Now we are blaming white people, Apartheid and Slavery for the increasing Brutish nature of Africans—and the violence against other Africans in South Africa huh?

Screw that; what has slavery or apartheid or the white man got to do with this? Even if these things are silent factors, the salient factors are there and I will mention them.

1. All of us Africans lack the spirit of tolerance because of our selfish and closed minds. Hating and killing other Africans on your land is no different to hating Gays and sometimes killing them. It’s simply an extension of the hatred we harbor against minorities and our f**king lack of tolerance for groups we are not part of.

2. We can’t think beyond our noses—and most of us have locked our thinking faculties out of the rim of reason. We follow religious dogmatism which on the face may say love your neighbour as yourself but deep down will ask you to cut your brother off if he stands in your face or take with force that which belongs to another. Worse, you are allowed to enslave, women are inferior human beings and good at entrenching bigotry—and violence. So our ideologies are full of such crap. Instead of thinking logically, we follow all manner of nonsense—buried in tradition, culture, religion and whatever; these things are the master forces of bigotry. We have failed to embrace globalisation and we will pay for it dearly as the years go.

3. All human beings are inherently Brutish as Thomas Hobbs argues in his State of Nature. But to be frank, Africans are becoming savages as though we still live in the Paleolithic era. We think as such and we follow instructions from that age. If a person can easily believe that a black cat turned into a woman in Lagos, don’t you think it would be far easy for the same person to believe another is taking his job so the best and only option is to kill that person and the job will be free?

What is happening in South Africa is a bigger reflection of the way we think, act and behave in our little corners as Africans. We are shocked because it’s being done to us; but trust me, we do the same to other groups or at best, we believe in the things which perpetuate such violence.