Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Why do South Africans hate Nigerians?

[Hetty ter Haar]

Why do South Africans hate Nigerians?

An acclaimed Nigerian novelist on the difficult relationship between
the two African nations

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Monday October 5 2009
The Guardian


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/05/chimamanda-gozi-dichie-nigeria-south-africa


Last week it was reported that Nigerian officials were trying to ban
District 9 ? a science fiction film set in South Africa, but in which
the biggest baddies are Nigerian ? from being shown in the country's
cinemas. The row highlights old tensions between South Africa and
Nigeria, writes the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie



Some years ago, on a visit to Durban, a woman at a roadside market
spoke to me in Zulu. I had romanticised ideas of Shaka Zulu's brave
battles in my head and was pleased to be mistaken for Zulu but I had
to explain why I could not respond. "I'm Nigerian," I said. Her face
fell. And the possibility of friendship, it seemed to me, disappeared.
I would learn later that Nigerians were generally thought of as
fraudsters, drug dealers and cheats, that Nigerian men were "taking
away" South African women, that Nigerian immigrants were "worse" than
Zimbabweans and Malawis and Mozambiquens.

But South Africa continues to draw Nigerians. Because it is not as
recognisably "African" in its infrastructure and opportunities, it
ranks much higher than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa on the scale of
cool. Wealthy Nigerians own property there. Companies shoot
commercials there. Young men in my hometown dream of going to find
jobs in what they call "SA". South Africa represents a kind of
"doable" ambition, steps below Europe and the US, but still the sort
of place that impresses your village relatives when you come back home
at Christmas.

There are obviously Nigerians involved in drugs and fraud in South
Africa, just as there are many more doing honest work, but for the
estimated 1.5 million Nigerians who now live in South Africa, to be
Nigerian is to walk under a cloud of negative stereotypes. The reasons
are economic and historical. A system as viciously brutal as
apartheid will, it seems to me, take at least as long to undo as it
lasted.

South Africans and Nigerians (and indeed other African immigrant
groups) have simply not had the time or the neutral space to grow an
organic understanding of each other. The Nigerians arrive with their
different, more distant colonial experience, with their mercantile
spirit, with none of the conditioning of the South African menial wage-
earning experience and ? yes ? with that swagger. They arrive in a
vulnerable country where the legacy of institutional exclusion still
thrives. They create spaces for themselves in whatever way they can
and, of course, they arouse resentment.

And these are people who, like me, grew up in a Nigeria that was
fiercely anti-apartheid. We all sang Free Mandela. In primary school,
we collected money to free the brothers in South Africa. Perhaps this
is the reason I found South Africa a disconcerting place to visit, in
the end. I felt incapable of truly understanding it, ill-equipped to
grasp meaning and nuance, in a way that I have not experienced
anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. It cracked my pan-African
idealism.

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009