A TWO-BEDROOMED house, clay grey or ceramic clay in colour, stands out in a vast swathe of open land with seamless horizons dotted with sparse trees and grass among scattered homesteads in the desolate area.
The place looks like a semi-desert; a dry expanse characterised by sparse vegetation, albeit with higher precipitation.
Construction of the flat-roofed house is almost complete. Only windows are still being fitted. A slim male figure in dark clothes and a cap stands by the window making the fittings. Next to him is a lady wearing a red top, milling around with an overwrought face, close to yet another equally slim guy in overalls with a white and yellow hat.
Besides the newly built house is a pile of red bricks, solar panels, a chair and a car parked at a distance from the residence constructed for a family that has just moved into the yawning area. Amid all this, veteran radio presenter Ezra “Tshisa” Sibanda arrives to talk to the family about the house and the widely reported tragedy that befell them in April.
This is the new home of Zimbabwean immigrant Elvis Nyathi’s widow and her children located in Ntabazinduna, 40km outside Bulawayo along the Harare highway.
Nyathi was brutally killed in the poverty-stricken Diepsloot township in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 6 April by a rampaging mob of mind[1]less brutes.
The gruesome way he was murdered through savage attacks and being burnt alive by a xenophobic mob for merely not having an identity card sparked a storm of outrage and raw emotions at a time when the anti-immigrant Dudula Movement was whipping up xenophobic sentiments and stoking tensions.
Nyathi, who worked as a gardener in Fourways in Johannesburg, was buried in Bulawayo days later amid an outpouring of grief and anger.
Fourteen suspects were arrested in connection with his murder as demands for justice intensified. While Zimbabweans in South Africa did not mobilise mass action against the murder of Nyathi to show solidarity and vent their anger, at community level people came to the party to help his wife and family to overcome the shock and angst, while also finding a new life without their breadwinner.
Sibanda, who is breaking new ground in community journalism in Zimbabwe, led the Nyathi story coverage and efforts within communities and civil society to mobilise resources to help out the family.
Community journalism is a locally-oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on specific communities either in rural areas, urban neighbourhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, provincial, national or world news. If it covers wider topics, it concentrates on the effect they have on local communities.
Community reporting encourages journalists and news managers to find ways to capture citizen priorities, concerns and perspectives on different issues of importance to them as opposed to other places or the broad national context.
In a low sombre tone, Sibanda approaches the house, greets the family and starts interviewing Nyathi’s widow Nomsa Tshuma who left Johannesburg in a huff after the murder of her husband.
He starts by asking how she is feeling and then congratulating her on the new home before she responds with gratitude amid anxiety.
She ex[1]plains they now have a two-bedroomed home, although she says it’s too small for the whole family and a bigger one would be needed going forward.
The sorrowful conversation, punctuated with spasms of cautious joy, shifts from Tshuma to Nyathi’s friend who actually built the house, Prince Mkhwebu, a survivor of the traumatic experience on the day of the grisly murder.
Sibanda’s narrative is both heart-rending and celebratory against the backdrop of the Nyathi murder tragedy. After a fairly long conversation under a lingering shadow of murder and sprouting hope, everyone seems to embrace the Shakespearean logic: All is well that ends well.
Despite the murder and emotional rollercoaster, the family now has a home, kids are going to school and the future can only be bright if solidarity with Nyathi’s widow and children is sustained.
In his social media update on the story he has doggedly covered, Sibanda exudes solidarity: “I want to take this opportunity to thank good and kind people who helped us build a home for the late Elvis Nyathi’s family.
The two-roomed house has been completed and was constructed by Elvi’s best friend Prince Mkhwebu who survived being killed on the night his best friend was bru[1]tally murdered by Dudula hyenas.
“A million thanks to individuals, social media groups, Asakhane, Facebook friends and many other groups for donating funds to buy building material. We have done half the job good people.
“She will need a bigger house in future and also start a project to help sustain herself and look after her children. MaTshuma is getting much better after the counselling, but needs more courses so is Prince who needs medical attention to operate his ear raptured by those Dudula thugs.
Elvis’s children are finally all in school.
“I thank Nhlambabaloyi Secondary School, its head and teachers for accepting Khumbulani Nyathi as a new student to their school. He is now a happy boy. The other siblings Sandisiwe and Mike Nyathi are doing amazingly and coping well at Nhlambabaloyi Primary School and I appreciate the teachers for working so hard in in[1]tegrating and giving counselling to the two kids.
“The older brother Melusi completed his ‘O’ Level and needs a job to work and look after his mother and his siblings. Any donations of any kind, including clothing, blankets, food etc, will always be appreciated. Thank you Slice Pizzeria for the treat, they loved your pizza and it’s the best in town!”
The biggest lesson from the Nyathi tragedy is that solidarity makes a difference in people’s lives. Whether people are confronting the Covid-19 pandemic, global warming, income inequality, gender-based violence, racism or xenophobia, solidarity to tackle the problems depends on how individuals and communities come together for a common cause.
Community solidarity defines how people understand and share responsibilities to, and relationships with, each other to deal with issues affecting them individually and collectively. While solidarity may be a fundamental human need, its meaning can sometimes be elusive.
It requires values, relationships, networks and activities grounded in explicit cultural, ethical and collective commitments. At local level, people can come together to build a church, a road or school for communal utility.
They can also join forces to help one person, a group or the whole community with anything that is needed to improve a particular situation.
At a higher level of consciousness, solidarity assumes a different dimension and meaning. In his work, Decolonisation and the Pedagogy of Solidarity, University of Toronto scholar Professor Rubén.
Gaztambide-Fernández says the concept of solidarity is often evoked within projects of decolonisation. More recently, however, the failure to construct solidarity relationships that seriously engage the demands posed by decolonisation has provoked scepticism as well as suspicion regarding the viability of solidarity.
A consideration of the genealogy, as well as the multifarious uses of the concept of solidarity reveals some of the ways in which the concept re-inscribes colonial logics and operates to obscure complicity and continued colonisation.
At the same time, it is possible to articulate a set of parameters for solidary relations through which to imaginatively construct new ways of entering into relations with others for the common good. In fact, when informed by the failures of responses such as multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism to the problem of human difference, solidarity remains an important possibility.
Possibilities of relational, transitive, and creative solidarity as a strategy for recasting not only human relations, but also the very notion of what it means to be human is crucial for decolonisation.
The Nyathi story carries lessons of solidarity at community level and the need for it as a catalyst for decolonising the mind among the poor in South Africa’s poverty-stricken townships and slums where black-on-black and poor-on-poor violence still reigns supreme.
While xenophobia in South Africa is now more characterised as Afrophobia, the reality is that the violence and hate are concentrated mainly on poor against poor. Solidarity is needed to defeat lingering community divisions, Bantustan isolation legacies and vestiges of colonialism that still haunt com[1]munities and immigrants in South Africa.
Everyone is part of the human family and people are all interconnected and interdependent. The “us” versus “them” mentality in this context is a legacy of colonialism which should be eradicated, although real issues of illegal immigration, crime, drugs, human trafficking and prostitution, and cutthroat competition for jobs and opportunities in South Africa should be addressed seriously.
Operation Dudula is a manifestation of the frustration of ordinary and mainly poor South Africans who have waited forever for jobs, the tackling of inequality and change of life in vain.
Immigrants have become an easy and convenient scapegoat for ordinary people, businesspeople and politicians in South Africa. Solidarity, a recognition that people are “all in this together”, is needed to ensure change as was shown in the Nyathi case — a commitment to strengthen communities and promote a just society. Living out solidarity is at the heart of the mission of development and peace: to stand against injustice in society.
“Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all,” Saint John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 38, once said.
Pope Francis, at the World Meeting of Popular Movements 2014, put it this way: “It is a word that means much more than some acts of sporadic generosity. It is to think and to act in terms of community, of the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few. It is also to fight against the structural causes of poverty, in[1]equality, lack of work, land and housing, the denial of social and labour rights. It is to confront the destructive effects of the empire of money: forced displacements, painful emigrations, the traffic of persons, drugs, war, violence and all those realities that many of you suffer and that we are all called to transform. Solidarity, understood in its deepest sense, is a way of making history.”
- This article was written by The NewsHawks, courtesy of veteran radio presenter Ezra Tshisa Sibanda’s body of work on the Nyathi murder story.
