MYTHS THAT FUEL XENOPHOBIA IN SOUTH AFRICA

Xenophobic incidents have become an almost daily occurrence in South Africa, from inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric to physical attacks.

African immigrants are among those targeted most, with many describing the trend as Afrophobia. It’s fuelled by false claims about ‘floods of foreigners’ propagated by politicians and sections of the media.

African Stream’s Clinton Nzala breaks down some of the myths and how they scapegoat immigrants for the social and economic challenges facing the country.

CAN YOU SPOT THE RACISM?

In this video, a woman launches into a tirade against a black man parked outside a McDonald’s. This might not be immediately obvious to everyone. She repeatedly and pointedly uses the words ‘boy’ and ‘son’ - both of which (when used to address Black men) are derogatory, rooted in the history of racial oppression in the US. The terms were commonly used during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws to belittle Black men by suggesting they were inferior, immature and not deserving of the respect typically accorded to adults, particularly White men.

The word ‘boy’ in this context was used to deny Black men their full personhood and status as adults, reinforcing racial hierarchies and the notion of White supremacy.

Continued….. It was a way for White people to assert dominance and remind Black men of their supposed ‘place’ in society, which was seen as subordinate.

It is not clear what caused the dispute but it is clear then as the dispute got on its way the woman in the video went straight to this in terms on insults, pretty obvious why.

Video Credit: @slimgrim67

SENEGALESE DEMAND UKRAINE & FRANCE EXPULSION

The Pan-Africanists of Senegal have had enough. They want both Ukraine and France out of their country, and they’re moving toward that with a newly launched alliance of several Pan-African groups under the banner of ‘The Front for the Removal of French Military Bases.’

During a rally on 22 August, the front demanded the expulsion of French military bases, and it also called for the expulsion of Ukraine’s ambassador. This is in light of the Ukrainian ambassador, Yurii Pyvovarov, reportedly posting a comment video on his Facebook page that supported a terrorist attack against the Malian army, as well as Ukrainian military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov publicly declaring on television that Ukraine aided separatists in northern Mali.

Continued….. Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye came to power in April on an anti-imperialist wave of support. Many hoped that the West African country would follow the steps of its Sahelian neighbours, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The three countries expelled the French military and united under the banner of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). This new anti-imperialist confederation shares a policy on defence, economics and foreign affairs, and seeks to unify Africa.

However, concern is growing in the region as Diomaye Faye recently declared that he does not believe in immediate ruptures with any country when asked about expelling the French. He also stated that Senegal will not join the AES, but hopes it will consider reuniting with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a Western-backed regional bloc that the three states left after ECOWAS sanctions and invasion threats encouraged by the West.

Will Senegal expel the Ukrainian ambassador and boot French troops? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Video credit: @ajplus (IG)

SOUTH AFRICA’S SCORNED BEAUTYQUEEN ENTERS
MISS NIGERIA

A model forced to pull out of Miss South Africa after xenophobic abuse has set her sights on being crowned Miss Universe Nigeria.

Chidimma Adetshina, 23, quit the pageant in Pretoria following a backlash amid claims she wasn’t South African enough. Even though she was born in the country and eligible to compete, she faced online abuse over her Nigerian father and mother who has Mozambican roots.

However, Chidimma’s now competing for the noscript of Miss Universe Nigeria, after an invite from organisers. She’s representing Taraba State, her father’s region in the country’s north east.

It’s been a traumatic few weeks for the 23-year-old who says no one should face the backlash she’s experienced.
At the time, she called it ‘Black on Black hate’ but Chidimma believes her ‘powerful story’ can help unite, rather than divide Africans.

Continued….. Well, she certainly has charisma, as you’ll see from this interview in Lagos. If she wins the contest, she’ll represent Nigeria at the Miss Universe Pageant taking place in Mexico in November.

Side note putting women in competitions and judging which one looks the best is not something African Stream endorses. We do however endorse Chidimma strength and resilience after everything she has been through and we definitely endorse her message of African unity.

OBAMA IS A NEO-COLONIALIST

Barack Obama is not our friend, and he certainly is not our liberator. That’s what Pan-African organiser Dedan Wa Waciuri explained in this video.

The Mapinduzi (@mapinduzi_252 on IG) organiser explained how the first Black US president has more in common with Blaise Compaoré, the Western-backed former president of Burkina Faso (1987-2014) who is responsible for revolutionary president Thomas Sankara’s (1949-87) assassination. Waciuri also raised the name of Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-97), the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who helped oust the DRC’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba (1925-61). Waciuri also referenced Kwame Nkrumah (1909-72), the first president of the Republic of Ghana and a staunch Pan-African leader, who wrote a book noscriptd, ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.’ 

Continued….. ‘The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,’ Nkrumah wrote. ‘In reality, its economic system and, thus, its political policy is directed from outside.’

Neocolonialism requires African leaders who look like their people to lead African countries while doing the bidding of the imperialists.

Barack Obama was also a neo-colonialist. During the Obama era, people were excited to rap along to lyrics like Young Jeezy’s ‘My president is Black, my lambo is blue.’ But who did Obama actually answer to? Not to the Black communities suffering a water crisis in Flint, Michigan, or militarised police violence in Ferguson, Missouri. Yet, he did seem to make the Pentagon happy. Obama led the largest US military expansion across the African continent in history. He led a NATO invasion of Libya that murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011), destroying the once-prosperous North African state. He multiplied the drone bombings raining down on Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Libya.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Video credit: @bigklfa600 on TikTok, @dedanwaciuri on IG, @waciuri_dedan on X

Please follow us on Telegram, Link in Bio

Africa should be colonised again - that’s the view of the founder of the infamous Blackwater (now Constellis) mercenary group, Erik Prince, expressed in an interview last November. The private military contractor’s business model is, of course, parasitic on neo-imperialism - meeting the need for manpower to put down any resistance. In September 2007, Blackwater contractors in occupied Iraq killed 17 unarmed civilians at a roundabout in Baghdad. If Prince’s wish came true, it would mean eliminating Africa’s best leaders and replacing them with puppets.

Continued….The precedent was set during the Cold War, when visionary pan-Africanists like Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara and others were either killed or toppled, replaced by stooges like Mobutu Sese Seko and Blaise Compaoré. Prince claims Africa is incapable of governing itself. False. Witness the Sahel trio Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger redefining what is possible. Could it be the prospect of an Africa free from neo-colonialism that Prince wants to nip in the bud? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL

Young Emmett Till had his life violently cut short on this day (28th August) in 1955. Racists lynched the 14-year-old.

This happened after he was falsely accused by Carolyn Bryant of whistling at her and threatening her. Two men, one of them her husband, kidnapped Emmett, tortured him to death, mutilated his body and dumped it in a river.

Even after the men confessed to the murder, they were acquitted by an all-White jury.

Emmett’s vile murder shaped the Black civil-rights movement in America. 250,000 people attended his funeral. Close-up photographs of his face and body, and the television coverage of the funeral, turned his lynching into a global symbol of racial injustice.

But even in death, racists won’t leave Emmett alone. White nationalist and supremacist groups over the years have found ways to desecrate his memorial marker - located at the place where his swollen and disfigured body was discovered.

Continued…..
Who knows what a life this beautiful boy would have gone on to have. His fate is a cause of great sadness and a reminder of the atrocities our people have had to endure. May he inspire our continued resistance.

Continue to rest in peace, Emmett Till.

NIGER’S UNKNOWN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

Niger is a country that made headlines in July 2023 as a military coup shifted the status quo. Thousands of Nigeriens took to the streets to demand the departure of French and US troops as well as unification with neighbouring states, Burkina Faso and Mali. More recently, Niger’s government has been following calls from the people to end control of French uranium exploitation in the country. 

But where does this radicalism come from?

It turns out Niger has a deep history of revolutionary struggle waged on the part of the ‘talakawa’ meaning the ordinary people in the Hausa language. These talakawa masses formed the Sawaba Party in the 1960s to fight for socialism and Pan-Africanism. A courageous freedom fighter named Djibo Bakary led the party.

Today, many Nigeriens remember Bakary as Niger’s foremost revolutionary. This is his story. 

TRUMP NOT SORRY FOR WANTING INNOCENT BLACK TEENS DEAD

Donald Trump is seeking a second stint as US President. The businessman-cum-politician is known for his controversial statements, and Africans in particular have been on the receiving end of some of Trump’s most derogatory vitriol - for example, his branding Haiti and African nations ‘sh*thole countries.’ He’s pledged to curb immigrants from countries he deems beneath America’s dignity, never mind that the US is the biggest neo-colonial imperialist around:

Continued….. it has more guns than citizens, 600+ mass shootings per year, nearly 2 million locked up in prison, is the biggest weapons supplier to Israel, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, and the wrecker of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam...

In this clip, we get a taste of Trump’s deep disrespect for, and devaluation of, Black lives. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in several newspapers to advocate for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of assault and rape in New York’s Central Park. The Central Park Five, as they became known, each served between five and 13 years - before being exonerated in 2002, when the actual attacker confessed.

SOUTH AFRICA BELONGS TO AFRICANS

Imagine someone stole your house at gunpoint, kicking your entire family out and keeping generations down the line out. Now, your family remains homeless. At what point does that house rightfully belong to the thief’s family?

That’s what’s happened to many Africans in South Africa during European colonialism. However, decades after apartheid was dismantled, Afrikaaner nationalists have built a white-majority town, Orania, stirring the country’s debate on the lingering impacts of colonialism.

Lunga Mantashe told us Orania’s existence is possible because South Africa’s constitution and Freedom Charter are missing a critical component.

Continued……Mantashe, a member of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (@mypaconline), was a guest recently on ‘This Week in Africa,’ African Stream’s livestream collaboration with @authentic_african.

Those who criticise the Freedom Charter hold an unwavering commitment to Indigenous land rights, as gen*cide, violence and poverty have accompanied land dispossession.

‘We regard it as the sacred duty of every African state to strive ceaselessly and energetically for the creation of a United States of Africa from Cape to Cairo and Madagascar to Morocco,’ said Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.

Is Mantashe on to something, or do settlers have a legitimate claim to occupy land without submitting to the African majority? Let us know in the comments.

Head to our YouTube channel and find the complete livestream under our playlist for ‘This Week in Africa.’

THE FIGHT FOR THE FORESTS IS A FIGHT AGAINST IMPERIALISM

Imperialism, as Lenin argued, is the highest form of capitalism. Capitalism, the dominant global economic system, is premised on viewing the planet as a resource to exploit - its overriding objective being to maximise profits from that exploitation as rapidly and extensively as possible. This goes a long way towards explaining the ecological collapse facing the world today, marked by climate-change extremes, such as droughts and flooding. The one natural line of defence - trees - has been decimated over centuries on the altar of profit over humanity.

Imperialism is like an arsonist - and we are left to fight the fires it starts: witness the suffering imposed on Congo and Sudan for their resources, such as cobalt and gold.

Continued……Pan-African icon and Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader (1983-1987) Thomas Sankara fought against this, including on the environmental front. He marshalled a nation to halt the spread of the Sahara, launching a massive tree-planting drive to ‘re-green’ the country, halt soil erosion and foster sustainable agriculture. His ‘fight against the desert’ was both ideological and existential, a means to empower the impoverished nation and guarantee its survival. The initiative required every household, village, school and business to plant saplings and tend to tree nurseries.

He also understood the importance of a united African front to achieve this endeavour, saying, “Today, the desert is creeping into Burkina Faso, but tomorrow it will be Ivory Coast’s turn and then Liberia’s.”

His ideas live to this day. Despite slow progress, at least 20 countries in the Sahel belt are participating in the creation of a ‘Green Wall,’ a belt of vegetation at the edge of the Sahara desert to halt its spread. It faces major challenges, such as insecurity, insufficient funding and a lack of political will.

Do you think Africa needs more leaders like Sankara?

LOWKEY EXPOSES ISRAELI LINKS TO BRITAIN’S FAR-RIGHT

In this interview with African Stream, rapper and activist Lowkey runs through the links between far-right groups in the UK and Israel.

Recent riots that swept Britain targeted minority groups after misinformation was spread over the fatal stabbing of three children. It was wrongly claimed the attacker was a radical Islamist illegal migrant, and the false narrative was used to stir up racial hatred.

Lowkey believes the riots that ensued were part of a wider effort to push the Muslim community from political activity. Many people, he says, are unhappy at the political mobilisation of Muslims ‘off the back’ of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. He goes on to outline links between Israel and far-right groups, such as the English Defence League and its co-founder Tommy Robinson.

Lowkey was speaking to African Stream CEO Ahmed Kaballo during our flagship podcast Pan-African Attitude.

Have a listen and gives us your view on his assessment.