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“There was a country” is a book by the late Chinua Achebe, may his soul rest in peace.

It is a book about the Nigerian civil war, otherwise known as Nigerian-Biafran war.

It is a personal account from a man who was fighting on the side of the Biafran secessionists.

We are not going to dwell much on that story, that history.

But there is a certain mood that is evoked in that book – a mood of desperate war and division and destruction.

The carnage depicted in the book appears to have found some match in one African country called South Africa which is now in the media for the senseless violence against foreigners.

Yes, it’s a war.

We may have titled this piece after Achebe’s book -only South Africans themselves appear to tell theirs is different – it is a cow-ntry.

No, we have not yet thought of the significance or symbolism of such.

South Africa is burning, in ways more than one.

Let’s look at the xenophobic violence, which is essentially afro-phobia as it is only targeting blacks from other parts of the continent.

South Africans are strange people.

They believe that South Africa is not part of the continent.

There is South Africa and then there is Africa, they reason without any sense of irony.

They think they are a special species of people who face extinction because of foreigners who have begun by stealing their jobs, their girlfriends, wives and husbands.

And there is even a contradiction in that, too.

One comment doing the rounds is that it is only in Africa where you get an illiterate person – and there are many – believing that an expatriate doctor is in South Africa to steal his job!

It is unbelievable.

South Africans may believe that foreigners are fouling their heaven.

They will be surprised.

South Africa for all its impressive infrastructure that is mainly there to serve white interests, there is nothing great where the ordinary people live.

A visitor from Zimbabwe will be surprised at the number of shanty settlements in that country – something that we have never seen in this country even before Murambatsvina.

Go to Tembisa, Alexandra Park, Diepsloot and Honeydew – all in the vicinity of mighty Johannesburg taken aback by the kind of poverty in these shanty areas, often existing side by side with marvellous houses and mansions mainly owned by whites and black elites.

It is the same everywhere you go right to the Mother City of Cape Town where an infamous Khayelitsha is home to poor South Africans.

They drink and make love in those shacks.

Generation after generation have lived in these settlements and have never had the decency of a proper house – not even the ones you have in the rural areas.

It is said some South Africans have never seen, or used a modern toilet and it was reported a few years ago that there was untold joy when Blair toilets were built in some part of Cape Town.

Yes, the Blair toilet we take for granted here.

The people largely relieve themselves in buckets, which enables them to throw that horrible stuff at government offices or cars when they are sufficiently unhappy.

They are called poo protests.

The same which that guy did to kickstart the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

So they live with that festering excrement.

It is so symbolic: they are living with anger which finds an outlet in violence.

Violence against foreigners and violence against each other.

South Africa is considered one of the most criminal, violent countries in the world where murders are committed willy-nilly and women are raped and innocents robbed.

To be honest, this makes South Africa a hell rather than heaven.

People go there expecting greener pastures only to be confronted by a parched, cold earth – in most cases.

Those who decide to stay in that Godforsaken land do so with the hope that things will get better, which won’t.

And months upon months become years.

Some become too embarrassed to come back home empty-handed.

They count their loses in this land of fake promises.

Sometimes this kind of violence allows one to find a scapegoat to come back home empty- handed.

I left all my things as I fled for my life, how is that for an alibi?

But that is even better because life is more important.

An angry nation

South Africa is an angry nation – a tortured soul.

Apartheid left deep scars in the country and the rainbow came rather too early before the rain had sufficiently exhausted itself.

Now, the rainbow is not only a material mirage, it is a cause for fatal cataclysm.

The people are poor and angry.

They are illiterate.

They are full of hate and envy.

Only they do not know how to deal with their deficiencies.

They think blacks from other countries are the problem.

That is what racism does to the psyche: the cook hates the “garden boy” and the “garden boy” envies the cook and they both do not see that their common enemy is the white man.

Yes, the whites are the enemy in South Africa ever since they came to our shores to steal and plunder and pillage.

They are holding on to those ill-gotten gains to date.

They have the mines, the land and the factories.

They exploit the blacks, including foreigners.

The system that they put in place in South Africa is to benefit them to the exclusion of the majority blacks and the infrastructure is to facilitate the continued milking of the fat of that African land.

It is that system that must be confronted and dismantled, which 1994 failed to do.

Which Mandela failed to do.

There is no reason to expect that the present government will do anything to dismantle the evil system.

President Zuma was told by one Julius Malema: “You don’t have what it takes to lead the struggle for economic emancipation of the black majority particularly Africans. You are extremely scared of white people, particularly white monopoly capital.”

It is this ghost that the blacks of South Africa must be able to confront and exorcise.

Interestingly, they will only get support from the people they are murdering and burning now – just as it was during the time of xenophobia.

False heroism

Let us attempt to dissect the South African psyche again.

It would seem the people of that land consider themselves heroic.

They are not.

They failed to liberate their country and they are still under colonialism of the white enemy who sold them a dummy of independence and gave them a broken man called Nelson Mandela.

Somehow, the South Africans think that it was their toyi-toying and street violence and singing that ended apartheid – which has ended, anyway.

It gives them pleasure to no end for them to re-enact this spirit of protests. They do that at the click of a finger.

And they think it is revolutionary.

Countries that went to real wars against the white man and defeated him know better.

The white man knows his place.

Now you have to pity the South Africans especially when you see their leaders singing “revolutionary” songs at public forums.

What revolution?

What liberation, which did not free the land and mines and the people?

Moeletsi Mbeki this week hit the nail on the head when he told us that South African “revolutionary” parties demanded to be co-opted into the capitalist system but never to free the land, a no square inch of which they got.

He goes on to recall how an American diplomat counselled Egypt after its war with Israel, should not expect to win on the negotiating table what it lost in the war.

That’s realpolitik.

South Africa must now consider a real revolution to free its people from colonial domination even if it means suffering for it in the short term.

Revolution is pain and pain is revolution.

Perhaps President Zuma must now show that he is not afraid of white people.

Otherwise, the country is sitting on a time bomb.

It’s not yet uhuru, as Letta Mbulu put it in a song by the same name.