Editor,

Allow meto react to the letter, "Why are South Africans attacking fellow Africans?” (The New Times, April 17).

Immigrants are a source of manpower and wealth as has been the case in the USA, Canada, Australia, England and many more countries, but our African countries blame immigrants for their problems.

Recently, Tanzania kicked out teachers and poor farmers from other countries, and there are other examples where Africans with so much empty land and little technology and knowhow are kicking out other Africans who are potentially coming to get them out of poverty by providing labour and experience.

I would have expected South Africans to know and understand better, since they are so developed because of the white immigrants who came from Europe some centuries back. Is this how they pay back those who helped fight apartheid?

Mark Gipindi

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It is high time Africans stopped lamenting and started acting. Without our selfless, full-hearted and multipronged diplomatic, political, economic, social, and military support the South Africans would still be languishing under the heavy boot.

Apartheid was propped up for so long by the very Western countries, the South Africans love and would never have been defeated without the united and selfless fraternal aid of fellow Africans (other than Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi, Mobutu’s Zaire and Houphouët-Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire).

Many African countries whose nationals these thugs are lynching paid a heavy price to liberate their South African brethren who are paying them back with such ingratitude and evil even as they put out the welcoming mat for citizens of the very countries that conspired with their oppressors to keep them under the apartheid boot.

But the rest of Africa is not without the means to make the South Africans come to their senses. We brought down apartheid through our concerted effort. Similar, well-structured boycott action of South Africa (in the economic, cultural, social, political and diplomatic fields) by the rest of Africa would drum into apartheid’s heirs the reality that they need the rest of Africa as much if not even more than the rest of us need them.

Our actions previously helped bring down an even stronger, better organised South Africa, fully supported by powerful Western countries and economic interests. Similar action now would devastate these murderous, arrogant xenophobes even more than their apartheid forerunners.

Don’t agonise; organise!

Mwene Kalinda