MEDIA STATEMENT
Date : 18th July 2025
Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia calls on South Africans to reflect on the statements made by Nelson Mandela during the treason trial which ended in 1962 as we mark Mandela Day with the rest of the world. In the last part of his address to the court Nelson Mandela focused on inequality in South Africa and humanised Black South Africans in ways that Mandela argued the country’s white population rarely acknowledged:
“Whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own. They do not realise that we have emotions, that we fall in love like white people do, that we want to be with our wives and children like white people want to be with theirs, that we want to earn money, enough money to support our families properly.”
Today we see vigilante groupings like Operation Dudula and political parties like Herman Mashaba’s Action SA and Gayton Mckenzi’s Patriotic Alliance treating African who are international migrants together with other migrants as a “separate breed”. They do not look upon them as people.
If we do not take a stand against Xenophobia then we should hang our heads in shame as South Africans- as we allow Operation Dudula to bring back the system of the dom pass in demanding that predominantly black people show them their Identity documents- an act that constitutes a criminal offence.
We should be holding the government to account for its failure to arrest the widespread corruption and mismanagement that is destroying the public hospitals and clinics.
We should be joining in solidarity to demand that more money be allocated to public health care and to public education. We have to stand up as a united force as opposed to pitting the poor against the poor.
It is only in solidarity that we can address the injustice of inequality, poverty and homelessness in our country and Southern Africa.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Mike Ndlovu
Media Organiser
+27685522510
media@kaax.org.za
