Pass Freely and Without Hindrance

What a borrowed Ethiopian passport asked of the world in 1962 and what South Africa now refuses the continent that once sheltered its liberator.

In 1962 a wanted man with no country of his own boarded an aircraft in Addis Ababa carrying a passport that did not bear his name. The document was issued by the Empire of Ethiopia, stamped with the Lion of Judah, and made out to one David Motsamayi. The bearer was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, commander of a newly founded guerrilla army, fugitive from a state that called him a terrorist, and by the grace of an emperor he had never met a free traveller for the first time in his life.

The passport carried a request, set in the formal cadence of imperial English: that the civil and military authorities of all friendly countries allow the bearer to pass freely and without hindrance, and to afford him every assistance of which he stood in need. Sixty-four years later, those words read like an indictment. For the question that should trouble every South African political elite who has lodged a brief at The Hague while a mob gathers at home is brutally simple: what has become of that request?

The debt that built a nation

Mandela did not arrive in Ethiopia as a curiosity. He came as a delegate to the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa, the body that would become, the following year and on Ethiopian soil, the Organisation of African Unity. He addressed that conference directly after Emperor Haile Selassie, and he named Ethiopia for what it was a country that had paid the full price of its own freedom and now extended that freedom to others.

What followed was not symbolism. It was logistics, money and weapons training. At the Kolfe police camp outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopian officers drilled him seven days a week in tactics, sabotage, explosives and the discipline of guerrilla command. He left with five thousand pounds, granted by order of the Emperor, to arm Umkhonto we Sizwe. On the flight in, he had been startled to find a black man in the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft the first he had ever seen and understood, before he had even landed, what an Africa governed by Africans might look like.

Ethiopia was the keystone, but the arch was continental. Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika gave him passage and, later, sanctuary to thousands of exiles. Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia handed him another five thousand pounds for weaponry. Nasser’s Egypt received him; Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal opened their doors. Zambia would host the principal camps of the ANC’s army. And when the imperial era gave way to the Derg, the patronage did not stop: Mengistu Haile Mariam trained Zimbabwe’s ZANLA guerrillas and the fighters of half a dozen liberation movements a debt Robert Mugabe would repay, controversially, by sheltering Mengistu in Harare for the rest of his days.

This is the unglamorous machinery of African solidarity: passports issued, camps built, instructors seconded, money pressed into the hands of men the West had branded criminals. Much of it remains unwritten. The Ethiopian instructors who trained liberation cadres at camps across the region men such as Asnakew Sisay, whose account The Ethiopian Tribune has documented from his own testimony have largely vanished from the official record their students went on to govern. That forgetting is itself part of the story.

The brother at the border, turned away

Now hold that history against the present.

South Africa today presents the world two faces. Abroad, it wears the robes of moral conscience most visibly at the International Court of Justice, where Pretoria lodged a genocide case over Gaza and won the applause of the Global South. At home, in the same season, African nationals are hunted in the streets. Movements such as Operation Dudula have made a political programme of it: the harassment of asylum seekers, the blockading of clinics, the demand that the foreigner overwhelmingly the African foreigner be expelled. Vigilante ultimatums set deadlines. Authorities issue statements and look away.

The word for this is not xenophobia in the abstract. Its victims are specific: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Congolese the nationals of precisely those states that armed, hid, funded and trained the men who broke apartheid. The grandchildren of the liberation are raising the panga against the grandchildren of the liberators. There is no crueller inversion of Mandela’s passport than a South African mob demanding that an Ethiopian ‘go home’.

The failure is not of the young it is of those who failed to teach them

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of an under-educated, ethnocentric youth who never learned the principles the African Union and the United Nations were built to protect the dignity of the refugee, the rights of the migrant, the idea of an African citizenship larger than the tribe. The temptation should be resisted, because it lets the guilty off lightly.

A generation does not forget its own history by accident. It forgets because those entrusted with transmitting it the governing party that calls itself the heir of Mandela, the ministers, the curriculum-setters, the elders who sat in those exile camps found it expedient to let the memory lapse. It is easier to govern a frightened population that blames the foreigner for joblessness than to answer for three decades of unemployment, inequality and collapsed service delivery. The xenophobe is manufactured, and the factory is political. To call South Africa’s angry youth ignorant is true but insufficient; the deeper charge is against the elites who profited from keeping them so.

None of this is to flatten a difficult reality. South Africa’s pressures are real an economy that cannot absorb its own, a state that struggles to manage migration, communities competing over genuinely scarce resources. Those conditions explain the violence. They do not excuse it, and they certainly do not license a government to perform humanitarianism at The Hague while withholding it in Diepsloot. (A note of editorial honesty: the documented core of this crisis is afrophobia — violence against fellow Africans. Claims of a coordinated campaign against the white minority belong to a separate and contested debate, and the Tribune does not conflate the two.)

Coda

The passport that carried Mandela out of bondage asked a single thing of the world: that its bearer be allowed to pass freely and without hindrance, and be given the assistance of which he stood in need. Ethiopia granted it. Tanzania, Zambia, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and a dozen other African states granted it. They did so for a man their own governments could have handed back for a reward.

South Africa is free today because the continent refused to turn its liberator away at the border. The least it owes to Mandela, to the OAU founded in Addis, to the brothers who sheltered him is to extend that same grace to those who now stand, frightened and unwelcome, at its own gate.

Pass freely and without hindrance. It was never only a sentence on a forged passport. It was the founding promise of a free Africa. South Africa, of all nations, should be the last to break it.

The Ethiopian Tribune