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Chimbwa
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A Word to South Africa from Your African Family
I am not South African. But I come from a country that stood with you when the world had turned its back. I am from the soil that sheltered your leaders, the camp that trained your soldiers, the village that fed your exiles when they had no home. So let me speak to you plainly, as a brother.
You are angry. I see it. You look at the land that was taken, the slums you still live in, the broken promise of freedom. That anger is not wrong. It is the fire that once burned apartheid to the ground. But you must be careful where you point that fire.
Let me remind you of a history that some of your young people have forgotten.
When your liberation armies had no base, it was Tanzania that gave them land. When your leaders needed a place to plan, it was Zambia that opened its doors. When your fighters needed a route, it was Botswana that looked the other way. When your people needed a neighbour to defy the apartheid army, it was Mozambique and Angola that bled for you. When your soldiers needed to learn how to fight, it was Zimbabweans—still fighting their own war—who taught them.
We did not ask what ethnicity you were. We did not ask what province you came from. We saw you as our own. Because we understood: your chains were our chains. A South Africa under apartheid was a wound on the whole continent.
And we paid for that solidarity. The apartheid regime bombed our capitals. It funded rebel armies to burn our villages. It destabilised our economies. We lost tens of thousands of our own people because we chose to stand with you. We did it not for thanks, but because we believed in a free Africa.
Now I look at what is happening in your country. I see fellow Africans—from Malawi, from Zimbabwe, from the DRC, from Somalia—being attacked. I see their shops burned. I hear them called “foreigners” as if that word is a curse. I hear young South Africans saying: “They are taking our jobs, our women, our land.”
And I ask you: who taught you to see your own family as your enemy?
Did the white man not use the same trick? He made Zulu fight Xhosa. He made Tswana fight Sotho. He told you that the man next to you was your rival so that you would not look at the man who was really holding the land. And now, without realising it, you are doing his work again. You are taking your anger—rightful anger at slow change, at inequality, at the wounds of apartheid that are still not healed—and you are turning it against people who came here for the same reasons your own parents went to our countries: to survive, to work, to hope.
No, it is not fair that you live in slums. It is not fair that land was taken and has not been fully returned. Those are battles we must fight together—not against each other. But the man selling vegetables from Malawi did not take your land. The woman washing clothes from Zimbabwe did not pass the 1913 Land Act. They are not the ghost of colonialism. They are your fellow African, trying to survive just as you are.
If we forget that, we lose everything.
Your own history calls you to be different. When Oliver Tambo walked the roads of Lusaka, he was welcomed. When your young cadres crossed into Botswana, they were fed. When your families fled to Zimbabwe, they were sheltered. We did not call them makwerekwere. We called them comrades. We called them brothers.
Today, the tables are turned. People from my continent are coming to you. They are not coming to conquer. They are coming because they still believe in the promise of South Africa—a promise that was won with our blood too.
Do not betray that history.
Do not let the fire of your righteous anger burn the very people who once kept it burning for you.
We are not your enemies. We never were. We are the ones who sat in the dark with you, waiting for the dawn. Now that the dawn has come, do not chase us away from the light.
— From your African family, who still believes in you.
English
During apartheid, Tanzania really backed South Africa.
Julius Nyerere let the ANC and PAC set up offices in Dar es Salaam.
Tanzania even had military training camps and land for the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College. They pushed for sanctions and took an economic hit as a Frontline State. This Pan-African support helped South Africa get its freedom in 1994.
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