Heroic march to a land marred by hatred
In the swamp of Twitter, a sophisticated and expensive operation is stirring up anger
In 1996, a Rwandan former child soldier named Kennedy Gihana wrapped his matric certificate in plastic, taped it to his chest and started walking to SA.Many months and 5,000km later he trudged into Joburg. He had nowhere to live, no job, no food. No prospects.He lived on the streets and slept in parks. He found work as a security guard. After some time, he had saved enough money to start studying for a law degree at the University of Pretoria. Still homeless, he sometimes slept in the university library until someone heard about his plight and organised him a room.He graduated in 2011 with a master’s degree in international law.For every Gihana who gets a book written about him (Rat Roads by Jacques Pauw), there are dozens whose stories of hardship and bloody-mindedness will never be heard.Certainly not in the swamp of dog-whistle xenophobia on Twitter, where the account of a faked person named uLerato Pillay is, along with dozens of other accounts, stirring up hatred of all foreign...
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