It is very easy to type and deliberate about Xenophobia from a smartphone and tablet computer on social networking forums. But the truth is that the people who usually take steps of these attacks that are labelled as xenophobic are the lumpen proliteriate who are in the dire straits of total economic strangulation that this plutocratic capitalism our continent is harnessed by metes out to them.
In our capitalist society, the working class has been pitted against each other; and whatever difference which exist between people will always be a point of volatility. This case it is origin of people based on colonial borders, but on another day it could well be the different ethnicities within South African boarders as it has happened before. The Zulus and the Xhosas? Xenophobia is just another term of violence that takes places on a daily basis among black people. Only now a specific group of people is being targeted. When that specific group is from within the same colonial boarder jurisdiction, then the violence will be termed tribalism and ethnic genocide. And when the violence is happening on an everyday haphazard basis it is called crime….
The truth of the matter is that violence is an ongoing occurence in black spaces called townships, townships are like cages where you lock dogs together in their multitudes and they are forced to compete for a few resources. It is a no-brainer that they will at one point or the other start devouring each other in one way or the other. Unfortunately in dog mentality, it is the other dogs, who happen to also be victims of being locked in a cage of poverty, who get attacked, not the sadistic plutocrats who lock these dogs up precisely to set them up against each other.
It is not about saying no to xenophobia, we must look into the reasons behind such attacks. Because it would be foolish to say the dog that attacks another for food is stupid when it is hungry, survival comes before intelligence. Plutocracy is our problem, it has pitted the lower class against each other, and like two dogs fighting for crums that fall off the master’s table they will devour each other so long as the source of the problem is not dealt with.
You don’t end violence with hashtags and photos urging people to stop. You address the source of the problem, the same way you will address the problem of a flooding room by stopping the leaking pipe instead of trying to mop out the water while more water comes out.
