On African Unity vs South African Xenophobia and Afrophobia

AFRICA, 20 Jul 2026

Fritz Pointer – TRANSCEND Media Service

Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop and Dr. Kwame Nkrumah Views

13 Jul 2026 – Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, physicist, historian, anthropologist and politician, must be rolling and tumbling in his grave, along with Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon, as we witness the Xenophobia or Afrophobia taking place in South Africa these days in 2026.  These giants of Black intellectual preeminence championed the project of a continental state of Africa. For Diop, “a continental federation is an urgently vital necessity for the totality of African peoples…it is the precondition for our collective survival” (Great African Thinkers, Ed. Ivan Van Sertima, Transaction Books, Oxford, p. 252).

My forty years marriage to Liziwe Buitumelo Kunene, a South African Zulu woman, gave me intimate knowledge of the subtle and overt chauvinism of too many Zulu people. In spite of our genuine love and abiding companionship, when I began research and writing a biography of her father, Dr. Daniel Pule Kunene, our relationship nearly unraveled beyond repair.

One evening in Los Angles, at the home of one of her three brothers, I was “ambushed” in the kitchen by Liz, her siblings and a sister-in-law. I was pummeled and derided with humiliating remarks and questions about the value and worth of my effort: “Why are you doing this?” “What’s your purpose?” “Can you do it another way?” “Don’t you think someone has already done what you’re trying to do?” “What about the copyright? Don’t you need a copyright to do this?”  “What if I had your sister, June’s (one of the Pointer Sisters) published material, and some unpublished songs that were on raw tape footage found in her home or storage, would you and your siblings be okay with me putting together a collection and sending it out to potential publishers?” These queries came from individuals who had never published a paragraph or a sentence for that matter.

I stood there, facing the five of them, shocked, traumatized, and began to cry. That evening we left Los Angeles; and for the five-hour, 400-mile trip back home to Novato, Liz and I did not speak. Not a word. The deep, numbing rage in me rendered me speechless. I hadn’t heard one positive or encouraging word. I knew and understood clearly the chauvinistic place their attitude and questions were coming from. I kept silent. Fearing what I might say and how I might say it.

I recall one of our trips to South Africa.  After visiting with family and relatives in places like Kroonstad, Odendaalsrus, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Liziwe and I spent our last five days in Durban, in a luxury –  condo, overlooking the Mediterranean, rented by a friend of hers she had met in Novato. Jacinta, we’ll call her. She turned out to be an aggressive, loud-talking fellow Zulu who seemed to think that volume was indicative of veracity.  In conversation with her on the spacious outdoor veranda. We broached topics of post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Steven Biko, and the book she was going to write about her experiences as an au pair that brought her to America – which never materialized.  As the conversational heat began to rise, Jacinta blurted out with sincere confidence, “We were better off under apartheid. These crooks we have now or worse than the whites!” I had had enough: got up and left her company: remembering Nkrumah’s quip, “If Africa’s going to be a mess, let it be a black mess.” Indeed, Africa and the world have had enough of Europe’s white mess.

Upon returning home, to Marin County, Novato, California, we went to dinner at Jacinta’s and while sitting around the kitchen-island with several of her South African immigrant “friends” and her white husband – Jacinta asked, concerning Black Americans – “Why do they stay in the ghetto? I wouldn’t live there.”  Then added, “They can go to Community College, practically free, and they won’t even do that.”  Surrounded and outnumbered, I kept quiet, until we got home, and I said to Lizzie, “I don’t ever want to visit or see them again. Jacinta is not good for you and she’s not good for our relationship. She does not respect Black Americans, and she can go to hell.” The two of them continued to go out to lunch, periodically.  I could not and would not ever see Jacinta again.

So, I got a good taste of the so-called “born-frees” as this generation of  chauvinistic South Africans call themselves; who believe that they are exclusively and solely responsible for ending Apartheid. To me they are  blissfully unaware and profoundly ignorant of the continental and global support South Africa received: welcoming and succoring its emigrants and fighters. The support and comradeship South African exiles experienced with Black Americans and organizations like Trans Africa. Diop and Mandela must be taking another tumble in their graves. Undaunted, I finished and published my third book, The Biography, Daniel Pule Kunene with Africa World Press.

In a broader context, Cheikh Anta Diop was haunted by what he had foreseen as the “South-Americanization” of the African continent- with coup after coup; haunted by Simon Bolivar’s failure to unite the South American continent into a single bloc. Diop avers that what has been lacking are national leaderships which could set an example. “Political selfishness” he states, “is killing Africa; it’s the basis of the problem. Once African interests become merely a pretext for individual selfishness, instability necessarily rears its head (Van Sertima, p.149). One might recall the Zulu chauvinists Gatsha Buthelezi of the 1980s and the corrupt and still trouble-making former President of South Africa Jacob Zuma, in the 2000s, whose Zulu mob-followers are, apparently, behind the March-and-March movement to expel migrant workers and small shopkeepers from Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique and other African countries.

It also appears that one of Jacob Zuma’s many children is a leading semi-literate spokesperson for the March-and-March vigilantes. I recommend that she and her throng of misled renegades read the works of Njabulo Ndebele who points a finger at the “real” problem. For example, Ndebele states concerning current South African reality that:

Whites are still in government; they control the army and the police: they still enjoy what must be one of the highest standards of living in the world; they still manage the economy, although they will grudgingly let in competent blacks: they still dominate the privileged universities and research institutes. Their overall power is still pervasive (A Passion to Liberate, Fritz Pointer, Africa World Press, p.236).

In other words, the end of apartheid seems to represent for the white minority a defeat in which they have lost nothing. Now that this destructive mob has vandalized, brutalized and even killed their small shop owning African brothers and sisters their lives should be measurably better. Right?  Well, we shall see.

Dr. Diop asserts that “Continental citizenship is a must. No African should need anymore than an I.D. card for travelling to and from any part of the continent” (Van Sertima, p.253). Diop shares with Kwame Nkrumah this goal of continental African unity.  Both understood that America and its western allies will use any and every device to halt and disrupt the growing will among the masses of Africa’s populations for unity.  Dr. Nkrumah states that:

Just as our strength lies in a unified policy and action for progress and development, so the strength of imperialism lies in our disunity.  We in Africa can only meet them effectively by presenting a unified front and a continental purpose (Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, PANAF, London, 1963 xvi).

Nkrumah, like Diop, understood that when the African colonies were originally created, at the Berlin Conference of 1864, the rights of indigenous Africans were completely disregarded.  Territorial boundaries were arbitrarily created by people who never set a foot on African soil. The boundaries had no relation to ethnic realities. In many cases boundaries cut across cultures and even villages. As Nkrumah notes, “Problems resulting from the cynical parceling-out of Africa still remain and can only be settled by continental union” (Nkrumah, p.7).

Diop also addresses the divisive issue of North versus sub-Saharan Africa.  Former President of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser articulated the idea of the formation of a federation of North African and Asian-Arab states as a single political and economic entity. A project, at first glance, in conflict with that of a federal continental African state.  For Diop, however, “there already exists a continental African consciousness” (Van Sertima, p. 259).  At the same time, he still understands that “For lack of a precise Pan-African project…certain North African Arab countries might be tempted to group separately with Asian Arabs” and that “North African Arab states might indeed be instinctively tempted to seek fusion with their Middle Eastern brethren” (VS, p. 259). Nevertheless,

Africans to the north and south of the continent must think in terms of uniting because it is in their global interests to do so. If we can overcome prejudices and fears through information and open discussion, then the advantages of a continental federal state are apparent…. To begin with, there could be a federation of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) on the one hand, while on the other hand, a federation of all the sub-Saharan African countries. A confederation of these two federations could be envisioned.  With time, both entities could fuse so as to arrive at a true continental federal state (VS, p. 259).

The myopic, xenophobic, Afro-phobic embarrassing malaise on display today in South Africa is totally oblivious to this vision, or any Pan-African or global vision at all. It is rather an atavistic, backward narrow-minded tribal consciousness in need of immediate reeducation and excision.

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Fritz Pointer is a retired professor of English and African American Studies.  He is the vice president of Democratic World Federalists and has published numerous scholarly articles such as African Oral Epic Poetry: Praising the Deeds of a Mythic Hero (2013).  Being the older brother of the popularly known singing group, The Pointer Sisters, he has co-authored Fairytale: the Pointer Sisters’ Family History. Pointer’s main interests include combating racism, advancing human rights, ending war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and nonviolent solutions to global problems.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Jul 2026.

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