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The Solidarity That Was Never There
African solidarity was never real at the street level. It lived in OAU speeches and liberation-era diplomacy between presidents, not in taxi ranks or job queues between ordinary people. South Africa's current attacks on African migrants are just the latest proof, not a one-off betrayal.
This has happened before, multiple times elsewhere in the continent actually. Ghana expelled \~200k Nigerians in 1969. Nigeria expelled \~2 million migrants (many of them Ghanaians) in 1983, basically paying it back. Côte d'Ivoire built an entire citizenship doctrine, Ivoirité, to exclude immigrants from political life, and it helped trigger a civil war. Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Indian merchant class in 1972 for the same underlying reason. Different decades, different countries, same mechanism.
The pattern is almost always thesame: weak state + economic strain + a visible "other" = violence, while the actual power structure stays untouched. Whoever is closest and most visible eats the anger: a shopkeeper, a trader, an so on. Never the people who wrote the bad policies or were responsible for its implementation.
Calling each new violent rise up a "betrayal" of brotherhood gives the continent an easy excuse. You can't betray a solidarity that was never built into courts, rules ignored, etc, in the first place. Shared history was never a substitute for working institutions. South Africa right now is just the most recent country finding that out the hard way.
I am curious what others think about this
#local
African solidarity was never real at the street level. It lived in OAU speeches and liberation-era diplomacy between presidents, not in taxi ranks or job queues between ordinary people. South Africa's current attacks on African migrants are just the latest proof, not a one-off betrayal.
This has happened before, multiple times elsewhere in the continent actually. Ghana expelled \~200k Nigerians in 1969. Nigeria expelled \~2 million migrants (many of them Ghanaians) in 1983, basically paying it back. Côte d'Ivoire built an entire citizenship doctrine, Ivoirité, to exclude immigrants from political life, and it helped trigger a civil war. Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Indian merchant class in 1972 for the same underlying reason. Different decades, different countries, same mechanism.
The pattern is almost always thesame: weak state + economic strain + a visible "other" = violence, while the actual power structure stays untouched. Whoever is closest and most visible eats the anger: a shopkeeper, a trader, an so on. Never the people who wrote the bad policies or were responsible for its implementation.
Calling each new violent rise up a "betrayal" of brotherhood gives the continent an easy excuse. You can't betray a solidarity that was never built into courts, rules ignored, etc, in the first place. Shared history was never a substitute for working institutions. South Africa right now is just the most recent country finding that out the hard way.
I am curious what others think about this
#local
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