Miss SA issue highlights misguided xenophobia

Now that the Miss SA pageant has passed and a worthy winner in Mia le Roux has been crowned, it is worth the country’s time and effort to look back and ask why a pageant that is meant to bring only pride was allowed to descend to such basic depths that it revealed the worst of South Africans.

The furore that led to contestant Chidimma Adetshina’s withdrawal from the contestant was not this country’s proudest moment.

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The 23 year old had to withdraw after the department of home affairs put out a statement that her Mozambican-born mother may possibly have achieved her permanent residence status by stealing another person’s identity.

The saddest thing is that even though the young woman was brought up in South Africa by her parents, all the adults around her did not do enough to shield and protect her from the vitriol that South Africans felt entitled to unleash towards her, simply because they think she’s a foreigner who deserved to be treated with contempt.

It does not help that no less than Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie felt it necessary to weigh in on her nationality way before home affairs had investigated the matter.

What McKenzie might not realise is that even though his was supposedly a neutral take on the situation, it fed into the frenzy that set Adetshina up as a target of hatred.

South Africa did not make any friends on the continent or around the world for the way in which Adetshina’s case was handled by the authorities and the public.

The fact that Adetshina’s father is Nigerian just simply made everyone observing the hatred visited upon her as something that was always coming, “South Africans are being themselves, xenophobic as always!”

The bigots who always come out to play whenever there is an issue involving the documentation of African foreigners are always at pains to point out that “it is the undocumented ones that we do not want”.

What is sad is that when the furore surrounding the contestant started, none of those who were calling for her to be disqualified knew what the home affairs investigation would find.

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It is worth noting that Adetshina proudly displayed her Mozambican and Nigerian roots in her online presence.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from people frothing at the mouth without having established any facts about her standing at home affairs is that there is an irrational and deep-seated hatred for African immigrants, in particular because such an uproar has never been witnessed when it comes to European or even immigrants of Asian descent.

It is indeed an irrational hatred of those from the north of South Africa on the African continent. Afrophobia.

The likes of McKenzie should be more focused on fostering a sense of pride in being a South African, based on what this country has achieved over the years and what it offers to the world.

That sense of pride must derive from South Africa’s diversity that includes the beautiful tolerance that says “because you look different from me, you will offer a different kind of enhancement to my life”.

That would be “unity in diversity” in action.

The kind of pride that derives from a common hatred of all that is different is what led to the ugly history that most African countries have gone through at the hands of Western countries.

Those countries did to Africa what South Africans did to a 23-year-old African woman, subject her to hatred based simply on the fact that she is different.