World Refugee Day

As well as Father‟s Day, today, 20 June, is World Refugee Day. It is an opportunity for us to consider the plight of the many refugees and to examine our attitude towards them.

It is always instructive to do a little history to put things into perspective. Earlier this week we celebrated Youth Day, when we remembered the massacre of the youth of our own country beginning on June 16th 1976.

In their legitimate protest against inferior Bantu Education, many black students were gunned down, detained, or made to „disappear.‟ After the 1961 Sharpeville massacre, our country once again became a refugee-producing nation. Nobody really knows how many thousands of our compatriots fled the repressive apartheid regime to find safety and refuge in our neighbouring African countries and further afield. In many cases they were housed, fed, educated, received medical care, etc. often at considerable expense to their host countries. Citizens of these countries sometimes lost their lives as South Africa‟s racist war spilled over our borders.

When our refugees were eventually able to return, they came home with wisdom, experience and insight that helped us to write a model human-rights based constitution. Two of our post-apartheid state presidents and many political leaders had been refugees in other countries. Based on this experience, it is not surprising that South Africa ratified the OAU convention on refugees in 1995 and in 1998 enacted legislation to protect refugees and asylum seekers within our borders.

Going much further back in history, we see how the Holy Family were refugees in Africa, escaping the persecution of Herod who, out of jealousy, was killing all possible pretenders to his throne – all boys under the age of three, as Mt 2:14-16 tells us. We don‟t know precisely for how long Our Lord and his family were refugees.

So, refugees have been with us for years. They are not a new phenomenon. They are certainly not all economic migrants trying to reap the benefits of our relatively strong economy, to “take our jobs and our women.” Some of them are enterprising and offer employment to several other refugees or South Africans. Nobody wants to be a refugee. Nobody wants to have to flee their homes, to be at the bottom of the food chain in an alien land.

Why is it then, that we extend warm African hospitality to all the foreigners coming to watch the World Cup soccer tournament, which is costing our country billions of Rands in stadia and other white-elephant infrastructure? These are essentially people with leisure, spending some Dollars, Naira, Yen, Euros or Pounds for their own entertainment. Yet we have a thinly-disguised hostility towards people in real need, whose circumstances force them to flee their homes and turn to the stranger for hospitality and support.

We can make a difference to their lives by making them more welcome in our midst, trying to understand their circumstances and why they have fled, opening our parish and even our homes to them. We can challenge xenophobic conversation when we hear it. And we can agitate for real change in the countries from which they have fled, so that like the Holy Family and our own returnees, they may once again be united to the family, friends and livelihood they had to leave behind.