Are South Africans Xenophobic or Patriotic?....

Since last month, nothing has stirred up the usual supremacy battles and online wars between the giants of Africa; South Africa and Nigeria, like the controversy surrounding South Africans denying Chidimma Vanessa Adetshina, known as "Chichi," the chance to become their Miss South Africa.

This was out of their concern that she doesn't represent who South Africans are with her two Nigerian names.

Keep in mind, the Miss South Africa winner is always obliged to represent her country in the Miss Universe and Miss Supranational globally, so sending a representative who embodies a South African heritage to the world stage is a MUST..

For this reason, up to 14,000 South Africans signed an online petition against Chichi's participation until authorities intervened to verify her citizenship. This later on revealed that, at the time of her birth 23 years ago, her Mozambican mother used another South African woman's name to register Chichi's citizenship. As for one to become a South African according to the laws, at least one parent must be one.

This revelation pleased many South Africans since their concerns were validated because allegedly other Africans usually enter their country illegally, hence steal their jobs and overcrowd their social services while accusing specifically Nigerians for being conmen and drug sellers in their country. Sadly, it is the same means that made Chichi live her whole life as a South African with citizenship founded in fraud.

Unfortunately, Chichi withdrew herself from the competition since the matter was shifting from pageantry to the legal one. With her move, South Africans won and Nigerians lost but this was untill Mia le Roux, a white South African, won Miss South Africa 2024 last weekend. This made Nigerians mock South Africans for rejecting their fellow black Africans and accepting a white African to become their global representative, which to me isn't fair because,

South Africa has always been known as the rainbow nation due to its racial diversity. That's why even their last two Miss SA representatives, were White and Indian because these people have been living in South Africa since 1652, when Jan van Riebeek set his foot in Capetown from the Netherlands.

So Mia is possibly the 10'th generation of her lineage, which makes her more South African than any other black African who is a first generation South African like Chichi..

We can choose to dwell on the history of South Africa to make this look bad, but post Apartheid South Africa was led by Nelson Mandela, a black South African who spent 27 years behind bars yet opted for reconciliation rather than kicking white South Africans back to the Netherlands, which means the majority of South Africans has accepted other races as their fellow countrymen. ..

And we should not ridicule them by putting forward the concept of "Africa should be for Black Africans," because this concept was only brought up in the independence era, led by the likes of the late Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkurumah who advocated for the powerful United Africa, but before that, Black Africans, were divided in terms of kingdoms, tribes, and ethnicities.

That is why the Rwandese genocide was a conflict between the Hutus and Tutsi who are pure black Africans yet their fight was founded on the issue of ethnic superiority. Similarly, the Semites and cushites like Somalis, often consider themselves superior to the Bantus. Worse enough, in ancient times, some African tribes and Kingdoms such as Ashantis sided with European slave traders to sell their fellow black Africans oversees.

And even as you read this article,? the same Nigerians who accuse South Africans of being discriminative, they are still highly divided in terms of tribes and religions....

So the concept of blackness is only used when other races are concerned, but beyond that, there are ethnicities, tribes, and religions among ourselves. I'm not against the strong United Africa movement because unity is good, but we should not ignore the present national boundaries, which we strongly embrace currently, especially for citizenship formalities..

But one thing this movement should be applauded for is reminding Africans to remove that mentality of embracing immigrants from America, Asia or European countries as investors or workers while acting xenophobic to our fellow black Africans from other nations when they do the same in our countries.

End of the day, we have more in common than our differences, so we should create an environment for all of us to flourish beyond our national boundaries because there is no other part of the world that we can call home than in Africa, the same way Europeans or Asians do in their ancestors lands.

Above all, I believe in humanity as core of our existence beyond anything else. Therefore, Africa is for Africans, regardless of race, ethnicity, tribe, religion, or political orientation, as long as one genuinely identifies with the continent, embraces its heritage and history while working hard to bring about positive change in the country of their choice, he or she is genuinely an African.