On King Zwelithini's “foreigners must go back home” statement: A draft criticism

(By Pius Vilakati, writing as Mr Pius Rinto)

One of King Zwelithini’s sons, Prince Mandlesizwe, was trained in Swaziland by its army and graduated there on 21 March 2014. King Zwelithini is also married to two women from Swaziland. Meanwhile, he makes a xenophobic call that all foreigners must go back to their countries instead of competing with South Africans on the few economic opportunities available. He wants all foreigners kicked out whilst he alone marries foreigners and sends his children to train in other foreign countries whose people he despises.

King Zwelithini will be well aware that Swaziland has fewer economic opportunities compared to South Africa. Surely, this should not be used as a basis for his son’s deportation so that one poor Swazi citizen could be trained instead? If we had to strictly rely on his anti-immigrants theory surely his two wives would have to be deported. Not so? Perhaps his own life should on its own be a lesson that he should not be uttering such irresponsible statements!

The backward king goes on to fabricate history when he makes a wild guess that South African exiles did not set up businesses in the countries in which they settled. If the king had dared to lift a single finger and fight against the apartheid regime, his royal mind would been opened to the fact that surviving in exile would have been well-nigh impossible if the exiled comrades had not set up some small businesses or scouted for jobs in the countries of exile. How else does he think they made money, acquired clothing, and funded their education? It was through tactically setting up businesses, getting jobs, and the donations received from progressive governments such as the Soviet Union, that they were able to survive and fight the apartheid regime! Well, His Majesty was not fighting against the apartheid regime, hence he knows nothing of such survival tactics!

Evident in his shallow analysis of the “problem” of foreigners, the king makes the catastrophic failure to make a simple analysis of world history, particularly of Southern Africa. South Africa’s economy cannot be analysed, and thereby resolved, without making a thorough analysis of the Southern African region’s political economy and the trends thereto. If the king had bothered to remove the royal fog in his eyes, he would have been conscientised of the stark spatial inequalities between South Africa and its Southern African neighbourhood. This is not a random element but a systematic feature that remains a deep-rooted legacy.

The South African Communist Party (SACP), in its document The South African Road to Socialism” expanded on the above point as follows:

“Another key feature of our CST [Colonialism of a Special Type]-based economy is the predatory role of South African capitalism in our region…For the major part of the 20^th century, South African capital treated our neighbouring countries largely as migrant labour reserves and as zones of mineral and energy extraction.”

Sadly, His Majesty’s loin skins have sealed these facts away from him (Bayade!).

Lastly, it is important to note that the king attacks only the working class and the poor. He does not point his daggers against the owners of big industry, most of whom are of foreign (European) origin. When he calls upon “those from outside to please go back to their countries,” he does not refer to the foreign owners of the mines, the giant factories and the farms, but the working class and the poor who have fled strife and extreme poverty in their countries. In a nutshell, the fight is against the working class of the world; to divide it and thereafter to suppress it. But the working class has no country. The borders of African countries, including South Africa (from which King Zwelithini gets millions of Rands in monies annually), are a product of colonisation. They were drawn by colonialists, something which the colonised people had nothing to do with.

Thankfully, the government of South Africa has not followed King Zwelithini’s narrow and backward approach, nor has it shown any signs of doing so in the future. We look forward to a world where there will be neither alien nor foreigner, but human beings.