I recently stumbled on a YouTube channel documenting a mixed marriage between a Black South African woman and a Nigerian man resident in South Africa. It was not meant to be an anthropological study, yet it quickly became one.
The South African lady narrated her initial fears about entering into a relationship with a Nigerian man. These anxieties, she admitted, were not drawn from personal experience but from prejudice—prejudice sharpened by her interaction with a Nigerian neighbour who had simply sought friendship. In other words, the offence was existing.
This is not an isolated sentiment, nor is it accidental.
Under the white minority government in South Africa, there was a deliberate psychological re-education of the Black majority. Apartheid was not merely about physical separation; it was about mental hierarchy. The message drilled into Black South Africans was subtle but relentless: you may be oppressed, but be grateful—you are better than the rest of Black Africa.
Other Africans were portrayed as culturally inferior, primitive, chaotic. Racist tropes were recycled and weaponised: Africans eat each other; Africans cannot govern themselves; Africans are backward. Yet in a cruel irony, the very same stereotypes were simultaneously applied to Black South Africans by the white minority. It was racism playing chess with itself.
Peter Abrahams, in Mine Boy, captured this brutalisation vividly—economic, cultural, psychological. Black South Africans were crushed on all fronts, yet conditioned to look sideways at fellow Africans rather than upward at their oppressors. Divide, demean, dominate. A familiar colonial trilogy.
That conditioning did not evaporate in 1994.
What remains today is a residue embedded deep in the psychology of ordinary Black South Africans. It surfaces in moments like those described by the YouTube couple. It erupts more violently in periodic waves of xenophobia directed at Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Somalis—any Black African who can be labelled “foreign” while remaining conveniently visible.
Let us be clear: the xenophobia experienced by other Black Africans in South Africa is not organic. It is sustained by a cultural genocide inflicted by white supremacy on Black South Africans themselves. When a people are taught for generations to despise their own reflection, they will eventually outsource that hatred.
These attitudes were not formed overnight, and they will not dissolve quickly. They took centuries to construct, reinforced by law, education, church, economy and violence. Expecting them to disappear with a new flag and a good anthem is naive.
Yet there are green shoots.
The YouTube couple are married. The South African woman speaks now with introspection rather than suspicion. Her Nigerian husband is no longer an abstract stereotype but a human being—flawed, complex, familiar. Love, it seems, succeeded where policy failed.
Breaking the shackles of embedded racism and inherited self-hate takes time. It requires discomfort, re-examination, and the courage to admit that some of what we “just grew up knowing” was, in fact, a lie.
South Africa’s struggle did not end with the fall of apartheid. In many ways, the hardest battle—the one against the architecture of the mind—has only just begun.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 