Operation Dudula victimising fellow humans based on colonial prejudice

When Operation Dudula vigilantes use skin colour to decide who should be allowed medical treatment, they entrench colonial patterns. Last week, Operation Dudula stopped fellow Africans from using Tshwane’s Kalafong Hospital. No white people endured Dudula’s gauntlet.

According to reports, the only criterion for deciding “whether to accost patients, check their papers and possibly turn them back, or let them enter unhindered”, was degree of skin colour. Not whether the would-be patients were black or white, but how black they were.

Feeding off long-standing prejudices, the Dudula folk assume darker skinned people are likely to be from countries north of us.

Operation Dudula doesn’t seem to subscribe to Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Sobukwe’s dictum that there is only one race, the human race. In the long view, Sobukwe was correct. When Sobukwe was born in 1924, less than 40 years had passed since the carve-up of Africa perpetrated by European colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.

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As Patrick Gathara writes for Al Jazeera, the Berlin Conference “established the rules for the conquest and partition of Africa”. No black Africans were at decision-making tables. It would be naïve to pretend there were no divisions among people on the African continent at the time.

“The new boundaries cut through some 190 culture groups,” writes Martin Meredith in The State of Africa.

“Europe’s new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion.”

Nigeria contained 250 ethno-linguistic groups. In the Belgian Congo there were 6 000 chiefdoms, says Meredith. But the point here is that the main decisions on partition in Africa were made by European colonisers. Dividing lines on maps of Africa were drawn by Europeans.

South Africa is younger than the Berlin Conference. The Union of South Africa was born on 31 May, 1910, after an Act of the colonial British parliament in 1909. The exclusion of black Africans from decision-making – despite polite pleas to the colonial power in London – led to formation of the South African Native National Congress on 8 January, 1912. That’s now called the ANC.

When the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange Free State were joined together, the dominant influences were white and continued to be so at least until 1994. Even the idea of a nation-state is not old.

In 16th-century Europe, nation states did not exist. Generally, people did not then regard themselves as being part of a nation. “They rarely left their village and knew little of the larger world.”

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France after the French Revolution (1787– 99) is sometimes cited as the first nation-state, although the English might dispute that. In 1871, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany into a nation-state. In the same year, the unification of Italy was completed.

All these ideas – nations, national borders and so on, are relatively recent. And very colonial. So what is Dudula doing? It is victimising fellow humans whom it assumes, on the basis of shades of black, are makwerekwere from places on the wrong side of lines drawn on maps by colonial exploiters. In a less gender-sensitive age, this was called man’s inhumanity to man. It’s deplorable.