Human Rights in the Time of Xenophobia

I find myself sitting in a café on Durban Road in Cape Town and wondering whether or not I am in the same country as the terrible xenophobic attacks. Coldplay’s “Yellow” is playing in the background, the “Food Network” is playing on the muted televisions, and everyone is absorbed in their own conversation with the occasional eyeing of what is happening on the street or in the café.

I have always wondered if money can buy you happiness, and thought that the principle was too black or white. What I have come to realise by being in this café and watching couples walk in for their lunchtime date, or friends walk in laughing at raised volumes, or watching the homeless person on the road battling the cruel cape winds, is that money can buy you blindness.

I am flicking down my Facebook news feed and almost breaking out into tears in public (something I never do) because of the images some of my friends are posting about the attacks in Kwa Zulu Natal, and I am surprised by the number of ‘Likes’ these posts are getting.

LIKE vs SHARE

Too many people are willing to Like as a means of saying ‘I believe in this post’ or ‘I agree’ or whatever, but not many of us are willing to carry the images on our own timelines. After attending a conference where we were trying to mobilise our youth in Africa to carry a hashtag about our own livelihoods, I am well disillusioned about the fact that we (in the most grand generalisation) just don’t care. The fact that the hashtag trended was largely due to being carried by foreign media. Where are our voices?

I get sprinklings of messages of support for the work I do and the opinions I share on my social media accounts, but I still – without being all Sweet Brown ‘aint nobody got time for that’ – wonder why we just don’t fight the African fight online.

Human Rights Concern vs Activism

Many people shun the killings and say they are appalled but very few say anything about unity and breaking down these walls of ignorance. I am struggling to see where we are going to go if we are allowing a generational problem to “trickle down” the socio-economic ladder. I get that we can’t all do something, but what are we offering ourselves if we simply sit and say that “it’s such a problem”?

I spoke with some homeless people in Cape Town and I found that they are living harmoniously with their foreign counterparts. Is losing everything what we all need to go through in order to realise that we all just really want the same thing: to live?

I am a conscientised member of the class of society which can go on holidays via aeroplane, eat out every day and party scantily dressed because I have a long winter coat to protect my sexiness from the elements – yet I am also friends with the person who shoos away the car guard for asking for more than we are willing to give him. “People think we’re here because we’re lazy, but we can’t work because we have no identity” said one woman I spoke to who had had her documents stolen.

I’m not saying we must divorce our casual friends but we really need to invest in adults the same way we are (wanting to be seen) investing in the youth.

Conditionally Compassionate

I learned that it’s high time we stopped living our individualistic lives where we are conditionally compassionate – I gave money to cancer so I won’t care about being mean to the waiter or cleaner. We need to find inroads with the people who just don’t care. The African who doesn’t know that there was a massacre in Garissa, Kenya, and now an outburst in Durban, needs our collective help.

We can’t keep complaining about western media not broadcasting our issues either, because we are able to be our own media agents in the era of internet and the world wide web. Let us work on broadcasting our realities, our struggles, our concerns. If you can be made to care what colour a dress is, then you should be able to make someone else care about children being slaughtered because they are born to parents who came into a country illegally.

How do I fight for our collective LGBT rights when we are still failing at upholding basic human rights which minority rights are housed within? I can’t. I’m not saying my rights don’t matter but when I could just be killed for carrying a blue passport, I have something more pressing to handle – staying alive to fight another day. Let’s be conscious about what we broadcast.  I call for my fellow human to be exhausted by constantly fighting against injustice rather than rapt in Instagramming the best parts of their lives. I currently do not care about what you ate, or how pretty you are. I care about how much you care about your fellow human being. It REALLY could be you in the next second. Let’s really look at our neighbours as valuable people in the balance of our own lived experiences and futures.

#UnitedAgainstHate

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