How South Africa’s Myopia Is Harming the Entire Continent

As a reporter, I have always resisted giving into the temptation to frame Africa in either of these ways. After all, it is the world’s second-largest continent, one of great complexity, and that includes plenty of scope for divergent fates.

A recent development involving South Africa’s relationship to the rest of the continent, though, has had me thinking about the enormous opportunities that Africans are squandering by failing to think in more holistic terms about their common fortunes.

With the rest of the world paying scant notice, the past few weeks have served up dispiriting scenes of African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, sending airplanes to the country of Nelson Mandela to repatriate their nationals. They have felt that this is necessary due to the unremitting hostility and occasional violence that migrants from the rest of the continent have faced from South Africans. In early June, Mozambique said that five of its nationals had been killed in recent “xenophobic attacks.” (The South African police have confirmed two deaths.)

The reasons why I find this dispiriting run deep, and they are inseparable from why the behavior of South Africans and their government has been myopic and self-defeating.

South Africans seem to have forgotten that they were only able to throw off the shackles of apartheid, a system of formal white domination and enforced inequality, in the 1990s by virtue of the help that they received from other African nations throughout their liberation struggle. This included countries near and far that paid a high cost for hosting anti-apartheid efforts, while the West by and large supported white rule.

Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Namibia each faced some combination of military raids, support for rebellions against their governments, covert subversion, and economic punishment from Pretoria because they supported emancipation from apartheid and democratic rule in South Africa.

Numerous countries farther afield, such as Ghana and Nigeria, were important sources of material aid and political refuge for South Africa’s liberation movements as well as training for the armed wings of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah got it right when he said, upon his country’s accession to independence from Britain in 1957, that no African nation could be considered truly free until all Africans were free from colonial-era systems of domination. Few other African leaders of his time were willing to follow Nkrumah very far in the realization of his ultimate vision, which was to stitch Africa together through deep, region-by-region integration, both political and economic, that might one day lead to a continent-wide system of governance. But where South Africa’s Black majority was concerned, the support extended to them by fragile and relatively poor African countries was impressive and unstinting.

Nkrumah was his era’s most important promoter of the concept of Pan-Africanism, meaning both intra-African solidarity and stronger links between Africans and members of the continent’s large diaspora. It is important to note that Nkrumah brooked no distinction in this on the basis of color.

One would have to be deluded, though, not to see how sharply some countries continue to discriminate against Africans on the basis of color. This has been brought home to me sharply by the actions of the United States during President Donald Trump’s second term. While using African countries as dumping grounds for deportees from other parts of the world and virtually shutting down Africans’ immigration to the United States, Trump has made a great show of extending refuge and asylum to white South Africans under the false pretext that they are an oppressed minority.

The point here is that Black South Africans and, by extension, their country’s government, are ridiculing themselves by treating fellow Black Africans with such hostility—or in the case of Pretoria, utterly failing to protect them. If he could hear about this, Nkrumah would surely be rolling in his grave.

The South African government is implicated in this tragedy in ways that go far beyond the present situation. In fact, its failings date to the time of Mandela. By the time that he became the country’s first post-apartheid president, Mandela, an early liberation leader and longtime prisoner, was unusually well aware of the price that other African nations had paid to support freedom in his country.

When Mandela assumed office in 1994, South Africa stood out as a relatively well-endowed country on a continent full of economically struggling nations. This was not merely in the sense of relative per capita wealth. South Africa then boasted a wide variety of large, well-capitalized, and capable companies in areas as diverse as electricity generation; road, rail, airport, and dam construction; and numerous productive industries, such as mining and agriculture.

Much of the country’s wealth, along with its productive capacity, was then in the hands of members of the white minority, and it still is. But I have long believed that South Africa’s white population would have welcomed a campaign led by Mandela to strengthen economic links to the rest of the continent and develop new markets and partnerships with other African countries. South Africa’s location was arguably one of its key competitive advantages in the global economy, compared with more distant powers such as China that would eventually work eagerly to generate business in Africa.

Instead, Mandela chose an attitude of caution and humility. He was eager, above all, not to give the impression that he imagined that South Africa had any basis for leadership on the continent: not giving lessons, not exhibiting its strengths, not stepping on toes. Humility has its virtues, but the result for both South Africa and the rest of the continent, especially its southern half, has been a disaster. Other Africans were always bound to migrate to South Africa in greater numbers after apartheid. By not engaging with the rest of the continent in a vigorous, proactive way, Mandela squandered the opportunity to both shape this process and ensure that it was maximally win-win.

There is no reason to believe that a principle that economists say applies in the rich world doesn’t also apply to African countries. That idea is that freeing up human migration strongly promotes economic growth in the source and recipient countries. It often requires political courage to implement this, but the rewards stand to be rich.

In lieu of open-mindedness and courage, South Africans have emulated the worst attitudes of the West toward Africans, treating them as the rankest sort of undesirables—people who have come to “steal” their jobs or commit crimes. Over time, the effect on the country is likely to be similar to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It hopefully won’t take South Africans long to realize their misguidedness, but perhaps they will come around when Europeans and eventually Americans warm to the idea of greater migration from Africa as the best available remedy for the severe economic problems that await them due to rapid aging and population shrinkage.

South Africans have an advantage that their counterparts in the West do not. Unlike in Europe or the United States, where anxiety about immigration is inseparable from anxiety about race, the young and energetic strivers arriving from across the continent are, by and large, of the same color as the people who would turn them away.