AfricaIs aCountry

It has come to this

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

It has come to this

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

The victim politics peddled on blogs by a section of expatriate white South Africans--often with positive results for them.

Elon Musk, who migrated to Canada from South Africa, interviewed by Chris Anderson at TED2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

A white South African who had overstayed his work visa in Canada applied for refugee status, claiming that if he returned to South Africa, black South Africans would “persecute” him. He was granted refugee status by an immigration board tribunal in Ottawa last week. According to media reports, the tribunal chair ruled that there was “clear and convincing proof of the state’s inability or unwillingness to protect him” and added, “I find that the claimant would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his color in any part of the country.” This is taken seriously.

The problem is that poor black South Africans make up the majority of violent crime victims. Will Canada grant them refugee status, too?

As for the second point, that white people “stand out” in South Africa, this claim is so nonsensical that it hardly warrants comment.

The claimant, Brandon Huntley, also told the tribunal: “There’s a hatred of what we did to them, and it’s all about the color of your skin.” I must have missed a race riot or any retributive violence against whites in the 15 years since the end of Apartheid. Instead, poor black South Africans have turned against other black South Africans (immigrants, neighbors) and largely hold the state and ruling party—both majority black—responsible for their struggles.

This is the kind of rhetoric peddled on blogs by a section of expatriate white South Africans. That it was taken seriously by a Canadian court is mind-boggling.

What is also odd is that, from reports of the case, violent crime, which, as I said already, affects black people disproportionally, is defined as a race war against whites.

This is all surreal, yet some in and outside South Africa will defend this.

In another case, a family of white South African applicants claimed there was too much sun in South Africa when they applied to live in Canada. They won their case.

Further Reading

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In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.