By Theresa Rézeau
To be a child of Africa today can sometimes mean carrying both pride and grief simultaneously. Pride in the continent's extraordinary cultural inheritance - its resilience, languages, spiritual traditions, music, philosophies, and artistic histories. Grief because the same continent that once inspired visions of solidarity and liberation can also become vulnerable to division, resentment, and fear directed inward toward fellow Africans.
Recent anti-migrant groups have called for foreign nationals to leave South Africa by the end of June, a demand that has generated anxiety among communities across the region. The situation raises difficult questions that extend beyond immigration policy alone. At what point does a neighbour become an outsider? How does a continent shaped by movement, migration, exile, and shared struggles begin turning against those who often carry similar histories of survival?
Africa's story has never been confined neatly within national boundaries. Long before modern states emerged, movement across the continent shaped trade, kinship, language, religion, and cultural memory. Entire civilizations were built through exchange and migration. Families crossed territories long before passports existed. Even today, African economies, cultures, and communities remain deeply interconnected despite political borders.
Moses Tladi's Rural Domestic Scene offers a striking contrast to these tensions. The painting contains no political slogans, no protests, and no scenes of confrontation. Instead, it presents a quiet vision of everyday life rooted in land, work, family, and continuity. Looking at it today, one is reminded that societies are ultimately built not from political rhetoric but from ordinary people seeking stability, purpose, and home.
Tladi occupies an important place in South African art history. As one of the first Black South African artists to gain public recognition during segregation, he documented everyday life with humanity at a time when Black experience was often marginalized or distorted. His work quietly affirmed presence where others imposed invisibility.
Yet it would be intellectually dishonest to imagine that Africa's history was ever free from conflict, rivalry, or exclusion. Pre-colonial societies experienced warfare, territorial competition, ethnic tensions, and struggles over resources long before the emergence of modern nation-states. Colonialism intensified and reshaped many of these dynamics, but it did not invent them.
Nor are present anxieties in South Africa entirely imagined. Economic hardship, weak governance, housing shortages, crime, and strained public services create conditions in which migration can become politically charged. South Africa continues to face unemployment above 30 percent, with significantly higher rates among young people. Competition within informal trading sectors and pressure on local resources have contributed to frustrations that many citizens experience daily. Acknowledging these realities does not justify xenophobic violence, but it does require honesty about the conditions in which such tensions emerge.
South Africa has also carried responsibilities that are rarely acknowledged in these discussions. Over several decades it has absorbed large numbers of migrants, refugees, students, and workers from across the continent while simultaneously grappling with deep inequality, corruption, and service-delivery failures. The resulting tensions reflect not only questions of migration but also unresolved questions of governance and economic opportunity.
The human consequences are already visible. Reports have emerged of Ghanaian nationals choosing to return home after feeling increasingly unwelcome amid rising anti-migrant sentiment. Behind every debate about borders or policy are individual lives, families, businesses, and futures placed in uncertainty. Political arguments are often discussed in abstractions. The people living through them rarely experience them that way.
Yet division and hardship do not define the continent's only narrative. This week at The Africa Debate in London, conversations about Africa's future were shaped not by fear, but by possibility. As Guest of Honour, John Dramani Mahama spoke of an Africa open for business on its own terms, seeking fair partnerships, industrial growth, and investment that creates value within the continent itself. It was a reminder that alongside the headlines of division exists another vision of Africa: one rooted in cooperation, shared prosperity, and the belief that the continent's greatest strength may lie not in its borders, but in its interconnected future.
South Africa itself carries immense historical trauma. Apartheid fractured social trust, economic equality, land ownership, and collective identity in ways that continue shaping daily life decades later. Many of today's challenges cannot be separated from that legacy. Understanding this context does not excuse hostility toward fellow Africans, but it helps explain why these tensions repeatedly resurface during periods of hardship.
Yet even within South Africa, there remain voices insisting that Africa cannot survive by teaching Africans to fear one another. Among them, Julius Malema has publicly opposed xenophobic sentiment, reflecting an ongoing struggle over what Pan-African solidarity should mean in practice. While opinions about Malema's broader politics remain sharply divided, his opposition to xenophobic violence illustrates the complexity of the debate itself.
Art cannot solve these crises directly. A painting cannot repair economic inequality, create jobs, or reform public institutions. What art can do is preserve forms of human recognition that politics often overlooks. Works such as Rural Domestic Scene remind viewers that beneath every political dispute lies a shared human desire for security, belonging, and dignity.
Africa Day therefore should not exist merely as a ceremonial celebration. It should also be an opportunity for reflection. What does Pan-Africanism mean when fellow Africans fear one another? How should nations balance compassion, sovereignty, and social cohesion? What responsibilities do societies carry toward those displaced by instability elsewhere on the continent?
For younger generations growing up across Africa today, identity is increasingly complex. They inherit multiple languages, cross-border families, diasporic histories, and digital communities that cannot easily be confined within national narratives. Their reality is already interconnected. The challenge is whether that interconnectedness will be shaped by solidarity or suspicion.
This is where Tladi's painting feels unexpectedly relevant. Its quietness resists the speed of outrage.
Moses Tladi (1903-1959), Rural Domestic Scene
Coloured pencil on card
Public Domain
It reminds us that before politics, before borders, and before competing narratives, there were people trying to build homes, communities, and meaningful lives upon the same continent.
Perhaps that remains one of the deepest questions Africa faces today: not simply who belongs within its borders, but whether Africans can still recognise one another as part of a shared inheritance worth protecting together.
If Moses Tladi's painting offers a lesson for our moment, it is that home was never meant to be built from fear. The future of Africa may depend not on how loudly its nations defend their borders, but on how wisely they remember their shared humanity.
0 comments