Best you find out, and best you find out quickly. Apparently this is what people are being asked to see if they are foreigners. I don't know the figures of people displaced and people killed, but the spreading Xenophobia is frightening. A friend of mine working as a Doctor in KZN, happens to have been born in Tanzania, and is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. When a security guard asks him, with a wink, `Aren't you scared?'... then things are really getting a little crazy.
I am busy reading a book called Guns, Germs and Steel which tries to answer the question that David Bullard was posing in not such a well phrased way, and which a friend of mine (half jokingly I hope) also had the other day...
Why is it that Europeans took over the world, and African or Native Americans didn't take over Europe?
I will talk about it more once I have finished it. But one of the fascinating things in the book as seeing the callous regard basically every group of people has had for people who are different to them.
The last mass killing of Aborigines happened in 1931! Australia had a White Only immigrants policy until 1973! The story of Spaniards conquering South America, and the better known ones (for us in SA) of Europeans and Bantu people killing the indiginous people of South Africa are horrifying and very recent.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
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