Sisonke Msimang
Africa is a country | October 22nd, 2014
Any African who has ever tried to visit South Africa will know that
the country is not an easy entry destination. South African embassies
across the continent are almost as difficult to access as those of the
UK and the United States. They are characterised by long queues,
inordinate amounts of paperwork, and officials who manage to be
simultaneously rude and lethargic. It should come as no surprise then
that South Africa’s new Minister of Home Affairs has announced the
proposed establishment of a Border Management Agency for the country. In
his words the new agency “will be central to securing all land, air and
maritime ports of entry and support the efforts of the South African
National Defence force to address the threats posed to, and the
porousness of, our borderline.”
Political observers of South Africa will understand that this is
bureaucratic speak to dress up the fact that insularity will continue to
be the country’s guiding ethos in its social, cultural and political
dealings with the rest of the continent.
Perhaps I am particularly attuned to this because of my upbringing. I
am South African but grew up in exile. That is to say I was raised in
the Africa that is not South Africa; that place of fantasy and nightmare
that exists beyond the Limpopo. When I first came home in the mid
1990s, in those early months as I was learning to adjust to life in
South Africa, I was often struck by the odd way in which the term
‘Africa,’ was deployed by both white and black South Africans.
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