Home Affairs’ white paper to restrict refugees is racist, colonialist and anti-Pan Africanist

Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi recently proposed a revision of South Africa’s legislation on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection.

Regarding the refugee protection laws and policies, the Department of Home Affairs proposes a withdrawal from the United Nations and African Union conventions and protocols relating to the protection of refugees, of which South Africa is a signatory.

Home Affairs is proposing that after withdrawing from such international agreements, it intends to re-accede to the UN and AU conventions and protocols with reservations and exceptions. 

At a time when the African Union, various Africanist, Pan-Africanists and anti-neocolonialist movements are calling for a united Africa and free movement of Africans within the continent, the minister’s proposal is discouraging.

The department suggests South Africans have been calling for anti-immigration legislation because of recurrent “… clashes between foreign nationals and citizens…”. The minister also frames relations between South Africans and non-South Africans as “… tensions between South African citizens and foreign nationals…” 

I think the minister is not only wrong, but also uses a strawman argument tactic by framing South Africans and non-South Africans as at war – while the reality is that foreign nationals are the victims, while South Africans who engage in xenophobic violence are the perpetrators and oppressors. 

Refugees and migrants, a majority of whom are poor and powerless black African communities, have never engaged in active tension or war with South Africans, but have been the victims of anti-black African violence by South Africans who harbour anti-black African xenophobic attitudes.

Motsoaledi’s proposal to revise South Africa’s refugee protection laws and policies is racist because the proposal disproportionately negatively impacts black Africans.

Despite being termed “refugee protection”, refugees in South Africa are largely black Africans, and any law or legislation regarding refugees in the country affects black African refugees in large measure.

The white paper proposal to overhaul refugee laws in South Africa should be framed as “refugee laws regarding black African refugees in South Africa”.

The minister appears to be in cahoots with anti-refugee global trends and particularly anti-immigration movements targeting black and brown refugees in the Western world.

At a time when hate-filled, racist, right-wing and anti-non-white immigration social movements and political parties in white-majority countries in Europe and North America are growing, it is pitiful to see South Africa following in the footsteps of such racist anti-black sociopolitical movements. 

The minister’s anti-[African] refugee proposal is therefore colonialist in its assumptions as it sees traditional colonial borders established by European colonialists as a given, eternal, sacrosanct and sacred.

All African political borders are the imprints of European colonialists. As a relatively more industrialised country, South Africa was supposed to be a beacon of hope for the dismantling of colonial political borders that compartmentalised African societies.

Motsoaledi’s proposal is also anti-Pan-Africanist because it is a direct affront to the current momentum and discourse of an integrated, united and consolidated African continent, which Pan-Africanism espouses, and the African Union, inspired by Pan-Africanist and Africanist philosophies and aspirations, adopts as its vision for Africa.

The minister claims that ‘‘the principle of Pan-Africanism does not promote illegal entry into the countries that are signatory to the 1969 OAU Convention’, but the spirit of Pan-Africanism entails otherwise.

Pan-Africanism does not assume colonial African borders as sacred political demarcations; instead, it sees these borders as colonial artefacts and calls for their abolishment or usurpation and the formation of a united political body, where all Africans despite their racial, ethnic and national differences exist as a unitary political community. DM