Madoda Sitshange
According to Holocaust experts in South Africa, the recent rise in xenophobic sentiments bears similarities to genocides.
“There’s a very natural connection between learning about the Holocaust, thinking about our own country’s past and confronting this epidemic in our country at the moment which is xenophobia,” said Claudia Blythe, education manager at the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre.
Blythe was speaking to publication TimesLIVE at the Mandela Capture Site, Howick, just outside Pietermaritzburg, where the centre was conducting a series of workshops for different schools in the area.
This forms part of including Holocaust education in the Grade 9 and 11 history syllabus, through a museum experience to three high schools in the Midlands: Howick High, Mconjwana High and Sibongumbovu combined school.
Adolf Hilter’s extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe is brought home using the examples of the 1994 Rwandan war between the Tutsis and the Hutus and SA’s own apartheid. Blythe said Dudula is a dangerous movement as it singles out foreigners as a problem that needs to be removed from society.
“Othering” mostly African foreign nationals is diagnosed as reducing their identities to dehumanising labels using a language of genocide such as cockroaches and rodents, as a way of using them as a scapegoat in light of high inflation, poverty and unemployment.
Blythe said she was hopeful the workshops would be more than just a history curriculum but something pupils would be able to take home with them and make them critical thinkers.
“We also want to reflect on these memories because if we don’t reflect and learn then these memories disappear and die out,” she said.
Noble and well-intentioned at face value.
Beyond face value this seems like an exercise that seeks to smash reality into pieces and eat the pieces that you like. Ignoble and ill-intentioned. Missing in contemporary instances of a genocide is a military siege blocking all access to safety in the Palestinian territory.
This means that the horrors of indiscriminate bombings homes where women and children perish with impunity do not provide real example of a genocide for school children in KZN to supposedly “to take home with them and make them critical thinkers”.
Pictures taken as recently as May 2022 of the devastation caused by Israel’s war on a civilian population within Palestine, particularly in the Occupied Gaza Strip, that can easily be matched with those of Ukraine’s cities, curiously do not form part of the Holocaust education in the grade 9 and 11 history syllabus.
Images to especially emphasize the fact that while Ukrainians can at least escape through open borders, Palestinians have nowhere to escape the missiles fired by the most powerful army in the Middle East.
Like apartheid pass laws, entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), including by sea to Gaza, is controlled by the Israeli authorities. Palestinians must produce a passport and immigration slip, to cross between Israel and the OPTs.
Palestinians may be detained on arrival and deported if they are intending to enter Gaza without permission.
Living under occupation brings direct risks to health and life for the 4.8 million residents of the OPT, including violent attacks from illegal Israeli settlers, death and injuries at protests, and the frequent destruction of homes and infrastructure.
These severely limit Palestinian access to basic resources including land and water and basic services including health care and education, and perpetuate a system of segregation and legal and structural inequality between Palestinians and Israelis.
Bearing all these atrocities committed on Palestinians how come is Dudula high up the list of contemporary genocides?
The brainwashing of grade 9 and 11 neglects the fact that many SA citizens have broken the law by enlisting in Israel’s army. If the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre’s message is clear that, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, would expect critical thinkers to know that military service in a foreign army by South African citizens is a criminal offence.
The provisions of the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act 15 of 1998 are clear: enlisting SA citizens in Israel’s army is in violation of the act.
The ANC-led government’s inaction on South African citizens serving in a foreign army is a shocking display of hypocrisy and double standards.
As a political party the ANC is pro-Palestine Liberation Organisation, but the government takes no action in criminally charging citizens aiding the Israel Defence Force that is known to be committing war crimes.
Or accepting a newly appointed Israel ambassador to South Africa Eliav Belotsecovsky, a few weeks after condemning Miss South Africa Lalela Mswane’s participation at the 70th Miss Universe pageant which was held in Eilat, Israel.
Expect no push back from the DA and African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) against a narrative that depicts black community’s mobilisation against illegal immigration as a genocide.
Political parties such as the DA and the ACDP are, as traditional allies of Israel, known to be sheepishly silent on the Zionist regime’s brutal suppression of Palestinian human rights. The leader of the DA will never go on a photo opportunity in the aftermath of Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, but will waste no time exposing Putin’s atrocities in Kyiv.
If the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre presents a fairly balanced narrative in the early signs of a genocide, it would not conveniently omit that since1948 Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to the horrors of indiscriminate bombings being witnessed in Ukraine.
But they do. If the report in TimesLive is to be believed, the Holocaust experts and political parties are selective in condemning a black community organisation that bears no signs of Hilter’s Schutzstaffel (SS), while silent when it comes to a military aggressor whose violations constitute a crime against humanity.
To put it more bluntly, for many critics of community organisations like Abahlali Basemjondolo, Operation Dudula etc. who live in affluent gated complexes and work in air-conditioned offices, a sincere belief in the legitimacy of black organisations looks less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis. Protesting people in townships are simply mad. Experts offering the explanation from the highest of motives are more convincing, and under-privileged folks cannot be taken seriously.
A view that is an alternative to the expert explanation is not merely counter-normative but crazy.
Any protester is portrayed as devoid of all sensibilities and sensitivities that they are on the verge of committing a holocaust, and rub salt in the wound by teaching schooling children from the township that their own parents are wanton murders.
Isn’t it incumbent on the custodians of the children’s education to counter this narrative and set the record straight when racist content creeps through a syllabus that is taught in public schools? Where was the MEC? Where were human rights activists, historians, social scientists, journalists, and the so-called leaders of society when grand lies are fed to impressionable children?
What is the response of Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga when local community organisations are equated to Nazis, and a free pass is given to the Ariel Sharons of this world?
People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives told by schoolteachers, broadcasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense.
Counter-narratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality, for instance how the inclusion of the clause “that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”, in the Freedom Chapter, complicates expropriation without compensation to this day. How can land be expropriated without compensation from its rightful owners?
This is possible because Beata Lipman hand-wrote the original Charter, while blacks whose land was stolen stood-by without taking control of the narrative that they can claim full ownership of.
Counter-narratives to set the record straight on issues that matters the most to poor black communities are not only coerced, but hidden in a new South Africa that is constructed on freedom of expression, conscience, thought, belief and opinion.
If operation Dudula breaks the law and is illegal, they must be held accountable according to the full extent of the law. But the Durban Holocaust and Genocide Centre’s narrative that associates the Dudula movement to genocide is a poor guide to the school pupils, and to the community’s understanding of atrocities caused by other humans.
It is grossly insensitive that the same children from the townships that are most affected by the negative impact of open borders and the mismanagement of immigration, have their plight intensified with an association with an imaginary genocide.
Sitshange is an independent consultant.