I FIRST heard the name Nelson Mandela when I was four years old, when my now-late father was a student in London. He spoke reverentially of him, in the same vein that he reserved for Muhammad Ali and US President John F Kennedy.
For him, the struggle against apartheid was urgent, personal and moral. As such, the spectacle today would have shocked him to the core.
Let's call the recent wave of attacks, killings, burnings, forced displacements, looted businesses and families sleeping in makeshift camps what it is . . . Afrophobia. That is, Black-on-Black violence dressed up as patriotism.
It is a recurring pattern, sustained by a political class that has never provided moral clarity or effective protection.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s belated apology, delivered yesterday, was simply damage control after the fact.
Africans are not buying it.
The apology reads as a gesture by a State that seeks the prestige of pan-African leadership while its streets and townships practise the opposite.
You cannot preach continental integration at summits and tolerate intimidation, assault and the killing of Africans on your own soil. It is a betrayal of African solidarity.
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For decades, frontline States — Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and others — absorbed raids and destabilisation so that the liberation movement could survive.
Nigeria poured enormous resources into the cause. It provided diplomatic leadership, financial contributions estimated in the tens of billions of dollars and sustained pressure that isolated the apartheid regime.
My alma mater, the University of Ife, provided South African students with free tuition, board and generous stipends.
We accepted it as a sacrifice for a higher cause.
This is not a sentimental footnote. It is a profound moral failure.
The violence did not happen in a vacuum.
Decades of uneven service delivery, elite capture and the failure to turn political freedom into broad economic opportunity have left millions trapped in poverty and unemployment. Consequently, foreigners become a convenient explanation for domestic problems.
South Africa has a right and duty to secure its borders and enforce immigration law. Every sovereign country does. It must do so through law, capacity and regional co-operation, not through mobs and ethnic profiling.
This is not a demand for open borders, but for an end to outsourcing State failure to the most visible and vulnerable outsiders.
The harm has already been done.
Diplomatically, South Africa's standing as a continental leader has been damaged.
Economically, trust has been eroded.
Morally, the Rainbow Nation brand can no longer sustain a narrative of African solidarity.
Turning that history into selective amnesia is a betrayal that no belated speech can erase.
Quo vadis? Time will tell.
