Malema says xenophobia is self-hate, you chase Zimbabweans but call white foreigners investors Julius Malema stood before the Botswana National Front conference in Jwaneng on Sunday and named the disease eating at African solidarity. Xenophobia, he argues, is not really about foreigners at all. It is self-hate. Africans connected by history, culture and family, married […]

Malema says xenophobia is self-hate, you chase Zimbabweans but call white foreigners investors

Julius Malema stood before the Botswana National Front conference in Jwaneng on Sunday and named the disease eating at African solidarity. Xenophobia, he argues, is not really about foreigners at all. It is self-hate. Africans connected by history, culture and family, married to each other in his words, turning on one another while the real exploiters walk untouched.

His argument has been consistent for years, and it cuts deep because it is true. When the mobs move in South Africa, they chase Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Somalis and Mozambicans. They never chase the white foreigner, the Indian businessman or the Chinese contractor. The African migrant is branded makwerekwere while the European is called an investor.

Shops owned by Black Africans burn while foreign supermarket chains that actually swallowed the township economy expand in peace. If the anger were truly about foreigners taking opportunity, it would not be sorted so neatly by skin. That sorting is the fingerprint of something planted long ago, a colonial lesson that taught the African to see his own reflection as the threat and his coloniser as the guest of honour.

Malema’s deeper point is the one this page has argued all along. The borders Africans kill each other over were drawn in Berlin by Europeans who never asked us. Convincing Africans they were strangers to one another was not an accident of history. It was the strategy that made conquest possible, and every attack on a fellow African keeps that strategy alive rent free.

There is a symbolic weight to where he said it, too. Malema was banned from Botswana for over a decade, declared a security risk. That ban is gone, and his return to preach African unity across the very border once closed to him is its own small proof that the walls between us are political choices, not natural facts.

Hold his standard up honestly, to everyone including him. Unity is not a slogan for conferences. It is measured in whether the Zimbabwean in Johannesburg, the Ghanaian in Cape Town and the South African in Gaborone can live without fear among their own. Until then, the self-hate Malema names will keep doing the coloniser’s work long after the coloniser went home.