Brotherphobia is not Xenophobia

By Biko Agozino

Brotherphobia or sisterphobia is an ancient problem that should not be confused with xenophobia. Europeans attacked and killed fellow Europeans for centuries over who should get the lion's share of the colonization of Africa. The Semitic people are still at each other's throats even though they all claim to be the children of Abraham. Nigerians have been slaughtering fellow Nigerians like rams since the genocidal war orchestrated by the British against the Igbo for no other reason than that they speak what South Africans would call an incomprehensible kwerekwere language, probably a corruption of 'Igbo Kwenu!' For such excuses as they steal our jobs and take our women or they sell drugs and commit crimes, black South Africans loot the poor shops of fellow Africans and lynch their fellow Africans, inciting revenge attacks against multinational South African businesses in other African states. 

South Africans have been massacring one another in the struggle over crumbs from the table of apartheid colonizers since the reign of Shaka Zulu and especially during the confrontations between Inkhatha and ANC supporters. White farmers are fleeing in large numbers as they are targeted by those from whom they stole the land. Tanzanians and Swazis have been butchering each other to make money medicine or 'muti' just as Nigerians have been doing juju for get rich quick and some try to intimidate others especially when cattle is used as a modern 'colonization' scheme backed with weapons and charms of all sorts by people who claim to worship the same God. Somalis and Rwandans are still at it just like Sudanese, Egyptians, Libyans and Algerians as a result of the imposition of the genocidal state on neocolonial Africa by Europe. Africans trying to escape the quagmire are allowed to drown in their thousands in the Aegean sea.

The solution is Pan Africanism and the erasure of the borders that colonialism imposed on Africans. South Africa and Nigeria could follow the lead of Ghana and Ethiopia and invite the African Diaspora to return and be given dual Africana citizenship. With the coming of the African passport and the policy of free trade and open borders, Africans can travel where they choose and settle, marry, study, work, trade or run for office in any part of Africa just as the Americans do in the US. The African states recalling their ambassadors from South Africa should realize that US states do not have ambassadors in other states but are all represented outside the US by the Department of State. The US should extend this democratic experiment to the whole of the Americas who want to join the United States of the Americas instead of kidding around about buying Greenland.

Intellectuals and activists can help by thinking beyond their national consciousness as Fanon urged and realize that the people have voted with their feet in utter disregard for the artificial lines that colonizers drew on the sand to divide and weaken Africans as Azikiwe observed in his London 1962 speech on Pan Africanism.

The government has a role to play here by going beyond job creation towards the funding of cooperatives that would train Africans from wherever and grant them funding to start enterprises in partnership with fellow Africans. The Igbo have perfected this though their individual efforts in apprenticeship but with huge grants from the governments across Africa, there would be annual enterpreneurship grants to support emerging apprentices to set up their own shops in partnership with others to create wealth across Africa as Biko Agozino and Ike Anyanike argued in their influential paper, 'Imu Ahia: Traditional Igbo Business School'.

Achille Mbembe has a proposal on a borderless world but sees it as a utopia to be recovered. It was actually the indigenous map of the world and not a utopia. The world existed without borders when Africans discovered all other continents and populated them millions of years ago without passports and visas and with asylum for all who ask for one. One Peoples Republic of Africa or United Republic of African States for all Africans at home and abroad! Forward Ever! Organize, Do Not Agonize!