March and March might just be a manifestation of a bigger problem

The ongoing marches in South Africa against what had been dubbed illegal African migrants reveals many things beyond the discourses of xenophobia and Afrophobia. 

At the centre of this is the question of migration which is said to be a global problem and the issue of the Nation-State which is expected to contain what Nandita Sharma termed "the people of a place" called citizens as opposed to "the people out of place" called foreigners. This is just one layer of issues to think through. 

The second layer is that migrants into South Africa are not only from African countries but from many parts of the world, it is not yet too clear why the popular anger is against the African migrant, why they are the soft targets, why they are vulnerable at home away from home, why their businesses indeed capital is not wanted, and which looting their stocks is being normalized and they are not protected by law like others who enjoy sanctity of property rights. 

No one even checks who is the owner of malls, their nationality and legal status in South Africa. We have an inquiry there. 

The third layer is that of African liberation time solidarities and pan-Africanism on the one side and narrow and exclusionary nationalism on the other. These have reached a tipping point. Liberation and pan-African visions are on trial. 

The fourth layer is that of South Africans on the march against illegal African immigrants and the factors that drive them to do this vis-a-vis the factors in other countries which push African people to migrate to South Africa and try to settle illegally and legally. 

This takes us to postcolonial and post-apartheid conditions for African people, the failures of governance, uneven inherited development dividends, corruption and other postcolony issues that make settlement highly contested and competitive within the African continent and beyond. 

Here lies the question of responsibilities of political elites in charge of postcolonies in Africa and failure to look after their people. This makes mobility and migration to be survival strategies besides being human traits. 

The fifth layer is that of identitarian politics of who is who as a conflicted-generating phenomenon which takes such forms as degeneration of nationalism into what Frantz Fanon termed nationalism's most detastable forms of chauvinism such as tribalism, nativism, and others. 

This has provoked non-revolutionary violence of the poor against the poor. The question of political consciousness and forms of postcolonial and post-apartheid subjectivities and ideologies emerges poignantly. 

In the 1960s, leaders like Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah were aware that pan-ethnic and pan-African identities were to be created out of a people who had been tribalised, subjected to invented traditions, and what Mahmood Mamdani termed "define and rule." 

Universities were expected to play a leading role in the inculcation of pan-ethnic and pan-African identities. 

What happened? 

Universities themselves succumbed to ethnicity, regionalism, patriarchy, sexism and narrow nationalism. 

Gradually they lost the "univers" part and under pressure of neoliberalism capitalism they shifted and tried to produce what are termed "entrepreneurs"-- turning all our children into capitalists without capital! 
The other layer is that of masculinity, patriarchy and sexism which reflects what Horace Campbell once termed "dodaism" (indoda sibili, that President Mugabe once expressed) which guards women and actively teaches them who to love and who marry, thus infantalizing them and taking away their agency. 
Even though many women are involved in March and March and are leading as well the patriarchal script is showing its ugly head in its most detastable forms with such insinuations that they play a role in exarcebating the problem of illegal migrants in South Africa. 
All these layers take us to the difficult subject of borders, bounded citizenship, ethics of living together, capitalist political economies, ecological crises, technology, and a globalization underpinned by lines of race, gender, class, nationality and many other divisions. 
In short, we have elephants in the rooms, March and March might just be a manifestation of it not the problem!