Insulted+in+my+own+country+by+policemen,+Kimani+Ndungu,+The+Star

The Star, Johannesburg, Letters, September 28, 2006 //Edition 1//
=Insulted in my own country by policemen=

On the morning of Sunday, September 24, I had an interesting but disturbing encounter with the police and hence the reason for writing this letter since this incidence goes to the heart of the problem of the rampant xenophobia that continues to bedevil South Africa.

While passing through Park Station on my way to the office in Braamfontein, I found two uniformed police officers and one of them motioned for me to stop, then asked me for my passport.

Somewhat taken aback, I posed briefly, took out my ID (I have permanent residence status) but before I could hand it over to him I said: "Why do you ask me for my passport and not for my ID?"

To this, he replied as follows; "I can tell that you are not a South African."

On this, I became extremely angry and retorted back asking him "how can you tell that I am not a South African? How can you, while standing here, decide on who is a South African and who is not?"

His colleague, who appeared to be the more senior of the two then interjected to tell me that "he has been trained to do that, we have been trained to tell the difference between South Africans and foreigners".

Whether police are trained in such xenophobia-laden tactics may or may not be true, but what we should all be worried about is that such tendencies do exist in practice. So what is one to make of this?

Shouldn't we perhaps be reviving or jerking up the Roll back Xenophobia and similar campaigns initiated by, among others, the South African Human Rights Commission?

We really are not going to win the battle against xenophobia when the ordinary police officer on the street deems it his or her sanctimonious duty to spot and pull off non-South Africans from an overwhelmingly homogeneous black crowd of people.

Such practices crush a person's dignity, to put it mildly, and for me, having been in this country for almost ten years now, all of which I have spent articulating and defending the fundamental rights and freedoms of the most marginalised members of our country, I felt dehumanised.

No doubt this would be the same feeling for another non-South African, or even for a South African who gets mistaken for a "foreigner", caught up in a similar situation.

I wonder when we will manage to build the all inclusive society so eloquently held forth by the Freedom Charter as well as by our country's constitution.


 * Simon Kimani Ndungu**
 * Senior Researcher**
 * Labour Market Transformation**
 * National Labour and Economic Development Institute**
 * Braamfontein, Johannesburg**


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3458489**