Opinion: What Soured South Africa’s Umqombothi, By Festus Adedayo
In the year 1990 or thereabout, at the University of Lagos – trust students and their creative inclinations – we named some folks Umqombothi. They were students on exchange programme from Apartheid South Africa. The name sounded pejorative but that was all we could dream up to capture those young ladies who wagged their big mid-body members in very provocative swings down the sidewalks of the university. They usually got drunk, especially in the evenings.
While we understood why Mandela had to go after the jugular of dictator Sani Abacha, Nigeria couldn’t reconcile why violence against Nigerians and other black Africans nationals should become almost a South African foreign policy. Since about 2015, a bloody wave of attacks against blacks stirred up unprovoked.
Anyway, Themba, a drunk of renown, literary prodigy and journalist with the Drum, alongside Nat Nakasa, were one of South Africa’s journalists who blended journalism with creative writing. They were part of Black young writers of the Apartheid era who lived by the weird dictum, “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.
I have searched frantically for the lure of the gruesome murders of Nigerians and other African nationals by South Africans at the drop of a hat, the looting of their property and the animal instinct latent in these acts and my findings revealed a retained savagery of Apartheid. When you place stories of blood spillage under Apartheid with the recent ease with which South Africans hack fellow creations of God, knowledge of the country’s historical development will bail you out of wonderment.
, you will encounter the bestiality that Apartheid wrought on the psyche of our so-called brothers. Many black South Africans lost their humanity in the process and became a little higher in psyche than animals. In A walk in the night for instance, you will encounter District Six, a suburb of Johannesburg, home to all sorts of sub-human activities and why horrendous murder became part and parcel of the people’s existence.
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