Pityana Condemns Anti-Migrant Violence, Says World 'Watching in Silence'

On the first day of the Africa and African Diaspora Conference in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, Barney Pityana stood before delegates and said that the world is watching suffering in silence. Pityana is regarded as one of Africa's leading intellectuals. He is a former vice-chancellor of Unisa and a former chair of the National Lotteries Commission.

The conference gathers delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia under the theme "The return to Africa." It describes itself as an independent, unifying platform for advancing African sovereignty, reparatory justice and sustainable solidarity between Africa and its diaspora.

Pityana began close to home. He condemned the recent wave of anti-migrant violence in South Africa, which has left people dead and caused millions of rand in property damage. He said it may look as though we live in a different world, or as though all our energies, efforts and struggles have come to nothing. Looking around, he said, one sees blatant and stark racism, and in South Africa, strong anti-immigrant movements that want to throw people out of the country in their suffering, for whatever reason.

The protests he referred to have been led by groups such as March and March, which have been staging demonstrations across the country calling on people who are in South Africa illegally to return to their home countries. Some of those protests turned violent. Cars and property said to belong to foreign nationals were attacked and set alight. In one incident, a foreign national died after being attacked.

The government, labour federations and some NGOs have condemned the protests. Their argument is that foreign nationals cannot be made scapegoats for the socio-economic crises confronting South Africa.

Pityana then widened his view to world affairs. He pointed to war, and to a head of state and his wife being taken from their home in one country and jailed in another, in the United States. He also mentioned a war in Iran. He was referring to Nicolás Maduro, the former Venezuelan president, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were captured in a US military operation in Caracas on January 3 and flown to the US. They remain held at a detention facility in Brooklyn, New York. Russia, China, France and Colombia criticised the raid as a breach of international law, while the US defended it as a law enforcement and counter-narcotics operation.

He also spoke of what he called genocide in Gaza for three years now, and a continuing genocide in the West Bank. It seems to some, he said, especially to the victims, that the world is watching in silence. He extended the criticism to the churches, saying there seems to be no World Council of Churches and no evangelical movement of the kind people have come to trust, and that the voice of the church does not seem responsive to the pain and suffering seen day by day.

His closing point was that nothing will bring peace to the world except dealing with these issues as effectively as possible. The conference is due to produce a declaration and action plans, and it ends on Friday. Those documents will show whether the talk of African and diaspora solidarity turns into concrete steps.