We Are All Somebody's Foreigner

My grandfather was called kaffir by a mouth that had never tasted his mother's cooking and I am told to hate a man from Zimbabwe because his hunger arrived here before mine. What a beautiful inheritance. They took a whip to our backs, we took the lesson, then practised it on each other. A white man once said, YOU CANNOT LIVE HERE. Now I hear Black men shouting, GO HOME. Same sentence. Different throat. Apartheid gave us the blueprint, tribalism added surnames, xenophobia checked passports, colourism adjusted the lighting, classism checked the shoes at the door. Hatred has excellent customer service. It always finds a way to make the victim feel VIP while standing in the same queue for slaughter. Zulu. Xhosa. Sotho. Venda. Tswana. Nigerian. Zimbabwean. Coloured. Indian. White. Black. Look how easily we turn God's nouns into bullets. We are so busy asking: WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Nobody asks: WHO BENEFITS WHEN THE POOR HATE THE POOR? A man with no land will burn another man's shop while corporations own the street. A man with no job will beat another man for taking work neither of them created. A politician will light the match, the township will become the ash, and everybody will go home calling it patriotism. Then Sunday comes. We dress the hatred. Iron it. Perfume it. Take it to church. Sing: I AM BECAUSE WE ARE. Monday morning: NOT YOU. You sound wrong. You look wrong. Your name is wrong. Your God is wrong. Your tribe is wrong. Your country is wrong. Funny. The bullet never asks. The coffin never checks. The graveyard has never had an immigration office. And when the earth opens its mouth for the body we called foreign, I wonder if the soil laughs. Because underneath all this noise, under the flags, under the tribes, under the borders, under the beautiful lies we inherited to make hatred sound like heritage, we all become exactly the same thing. Something the earth takes back.