Many people have tried to criminalize the peaceful protests against illegal migrants by March and March in South Africa over the past week. However, the only reason people have tried to criminalize them is because they were undertaken by Zulu people, whom many try to portray as savages, in the same way they have done with EFF marches.
This surely is selective outrage and discrimination after white people marched with guns, blocked roads with farming implements, overturned police vehicles, and even stormed a court in Senekal, yet no one portrayed them as violent protesters, despite their history of genocide on the continent.
The fact is that March and March undertook some of the most organized and disciplined marches we have seen in South Africa, despite the crowds having the propensity to become violent.
I do understand the negative historical context of Zulu men dressed in traditional ensembles, bearing traditional weapons, and visiting pogroms upon fellow blacks. However, these protests were peaceful and carried out with shocking military precision and discipline that prevented violence.
The groups were clearly armed and bellicose, but they did not resort to violence. Clearly they understood that violence would dilute their message by recreating a July 2021 situation where KZN sparked riots that led the state, private security companies, white and Indian citizens to use violence against poor black people, to restore order.
The leaders of these marches—Jaunita Ngobese of March and March, Ngizwe Mchunu, and Phakelumthakathi—gained my respect because of the discipline, organization, and clarity of purpose they displayed. Their message was also clear: we don’t want illegal immigrants.
Could the same group become violent in future? No one knows, but they surely cannot be denied their right to protest, on the fear that they might become violent, yet they weren’t now.
Of the people I saw being beaten, the majority were overzealous local protesters who fell out of line trying to be violent, which the organizers and marchers clearly were not going to tolerate. Once in a while, we saw the occasional migrant who remained on the streets as the protesters passed being manhandled and chased away by the march leaders, because they did not want combustible confrontation between locals and migrants.
I might not agree with these misdemeanors but they worked to keep the protests peaceful. I also detest the notion that Africans are illegal immigrants in Africa, but according to the colonial laws adopted by South Africa and all African countries, anyone entering a country without proper documentation is designated an illegal immigrant.
In Zimbabwe, our government regularly arrests and parades illegal immigrants from Africa. So these South Africans are marching for a valid cause within the confines of the dehumanizing colonial laws we chose in Africa.
We may speculate that the marches were sponsored, but that would just be deflecting and minimizing the grievances of South Africans.
These protests carry even more meaning for me when considering that the majority of migrants in South Africa (43%), are from Zimbabwe according to the last census. Many were displaced by 24 years of illegal western sanctions, but we also have to admit that many of these refugees did not apply for asylum which makes them illegal migrants according to South African law.
We may debate whether that designation of illegal immigrants is aligned with peremptory human rights law or the Refugee Convention, but there is little valid excuse for our people not applying for asylum and regularization in line with the laws of the country they want to migrate to.
Another issue is on April 2024, my organization ZASM successfully removed the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe. As a result, Zimbabwe has become the fastest-growing economy in SADC over the past two years, and some Zimbabweans have begun returning home. However more still needs to be done for us to rebuild Zimbabwe to a point where we begin reversing outward migration.
South Africans have been patient with us, with the ANC supporting our fight against sanctions, granting us the ZEP permit, and not deploying the military to round up and deport our undocumented people. This has cost the ANC votes, and they have endured that to give us Zimbabweans a chance to get back on our feet.
But instead of using these two years since sanctions were removed to speed up reconstruction in our country, the Zimbabwean President and his state-capturing cohort have continued misappropriating public resources, enriching themselves, and now, in an effort to protect their primitive accumulation, they have embarked on a violent campaign to force through a constitutional amendment. All this is being done to prolong President Mnangagwa’s stay in power as a means of preventing the next person in the line of succession from ascending, in order to protect the President’s business interests.
Mnangagwa has arrested opposition members, brutally beaten those opposed to the constitutional amendment, burnt their offices, created violent gangs like Mafia for ED, and even threatened pro-government supporters—like myself—for denouncing these human rights abuses and attempts to mutilate our Constitution in order to entrench a Mnangagwa dynasty.
Albeit, when we challenge these excesses that could lead to civil unrest, more sanctions and more displacements, the paid cheerleaders of the President and his state-capture cabal, tell those who don’t like these derelictions to leave the country. As a result, despite the end of sanctions, a new wave of Zimbabweans being displaced into South Africa and other countries as refugees and illegal migrants is imminent because of the greed and avarice of one man and his “Guptas.”
Then, when South Africans complain that illegal immigrants are taking up space in their hospitals, schools, and jobs, we blame them, yet leaders like President Mnangagwa deliberately misgovern, misappropriate our resources through gold smuggling, abuse and harass those who oppose them, and risk another coup or even civil war that will once again spill refugees into neighboring countries, all because they feel that South Africa will take in their displaced citizens.
What March and March are saying is that we Zimbabweans and other Africans must hold our governments to account in order to stop the chaos caused by leaders who are destroying our countries and displacing refugees without papers into South Africa. And the reasons why the ANC government is not stopping these marches is, firstly, South African citizens are within their constitutional rights to protest peacefully. Secondly, they want their African counterparts to get the message that they can’t continue to misgovern and not deliver services for their people, on the notion that they will pass their burden of disgruntled citizens to South Africa.
So, if we don’t hold our leaders to account, March and March are saying that, going forward, we should expect them to increasingly hold us [the ones who migrate] accountable for our own inability to hold irresponsible leaders and their greedy allies to account.
Even if we want open borders in Africa, there is no way those borders can open so long as some countries have greedy and selfish leaders who are busy enriching themselves and feel no responsibility to deliver services for their citizens because they feel their citizens will migrate to countries that deliver for their people.
