A new apartheid has risen up in Africa - the apartheid of religion.

Easter Friday evokes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This year, 147 Christian students were murdered the previous day in Kenya by the Islamist jihadis of al-Shabab for the single reason they were Christians. Their selection for execution because of their religious faith or cultural background was not different in principle or practice from the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany.

The next day, Good Friday, a report by Reuters in The Sowetan stated that in their pre-dawn attack on Garissa University College, the Nazis of Islamism carried out their mission of death by "sparing Muslim students and taking many Christians hostage", then slaughtering them. (3 April 2015)

In an article the previous day - the day of the killings - a person described as Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage was reported to have told news agency Agence France Presse that the gunmen sent by his organisation had specifically "taken non-Muslims hostage."

"When our men arrived, they released the Muslims. We are holding others hostage," Rage said, describing those seized as Christians.

"Our people are still there, they are fighting and their mission is to kill those who are against the Shabab," he said. (The Sowetan, 2 April 2015)

This is now the latest in a series of crimes against humanity in Africa, showing a pattern of deliberate policy across the continent.

The Sowetan recalled in the same report that only last November in Kenya, "Shabab claimed responsibility for holding up a bus outside Mandera town, separating passengers according to religion and murdering 28 non-Muslims. Ten days later 36 non-Muslim quarry workers were also massacred in the area."

In those massacres of the innocent, as The Sowetan pointed out on Good Friday, the killers also first "separated Muslims from Christians."

Prior to that, as the paper recalled on the day of the massacre, "Shabab gunmen killed close to 100 people in a series of attacks on the town of Mpeketoni and nearby villages" in June and July last year.

The previous year, in September 2013, al-Shabab had carried out the same practice of mass killings at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, sparing Muslims and killing non-Muslims.

These are now the ritual of an Africa-wide modern fascism against the people of Africa.

When the Islamist terror group Boko Haram captured over 200 schoolgirls in the mainly Christian town of Chibok in northern Nigeria in April last year, forcing many of them to convert to Islam as child-brides for its militia, its leader Abubakar Shekau stated: "The girls that have not accepted Islam, they are now gathered in numbers...and we treat them well the way the Prophet Muhammad treated the infidels he seized."

Only last February, the most powerful of all the Sunni jihadi organisations, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL), released a video showing their killers beheading 21 Egyptian Christian migrant workers in Libya on a beach on the southern coast of the Mediterranean sea. The Coptic church of Egypt, as well as the Egyptian government and the Libyan parliament, confirmed the deaths.

A caption in the video described the victims as the "people of the cross."

One of the killers declared in English on the video: "Oh people, you've seen us on the hills of Al-Sham (Greater Syria)... chopping off the heads that had been carrying the cross delusion for a long time, filled with spite against Islam and Muslims, and today we are sending another message. Oh crusaders, safety for you will be only wishes...".

After the beheadings in Libya, the Coptic church in Egypt released the names of the victims, but there were only 20 names. The 21st Martyr was originally a non-Christian from Chad. When the terrorists asked him if he rejected Jesus, he reportedly said "Their God is my God", knowing that he would be killed.

This Islamist system of mass murder of non-Muslims now poses a challenge to the entire ethos of the liberation struggle in South Africa.

The issue for South Africans today is whether they continue to affirm the vision of all the main political movements in the struggle against apartheid, and for which Nelson Mandela (educated as a Christian at Healdtown Methodist school in the Eastern Cape), Ahmed Kathrada (who received a normal Muslim education in the former western Transvaal as a young boy) and Denis Goldberg (from an Ashkenazi Jewish family deriving from the former Russian empire) faced the death penalty together in the Rivonia trial in 1963/64 and for which they were sentenced to life in prison.

In the same way, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe expressed a vision of unity in his inaugural speech at the founding of the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959, when he said: "We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African."

Discrimination against any individual on the basis of that person's religion, or lack of religion, was never even considered.

To its credit, the ANC sent a message to the people of Kenya in the name of its national spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa, stating:

"We send our deepest condolences to the families that are suffering at the hands of those who planned and committed these atrocious acts." 

The current head of the African Union, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, on Friday also said the killings were "cowardly", and praised Kenya for "its outstanding contribution to the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the huge sacrifices made towards stabilising that country."

Greater clarity of principle is needed, however. A clear statement is needed that any organisation which carries out systemic murder of people of other faiths is an enemy of the entire history of the struggle against apartheid.

Africa is now engulfed in a new war of opposites, in which the most fundamental beliefs of the liberation movement are being challenged again and again in the most terrible way in north, west and east Africa. South Africans will not remain untouched in the south. If ever there was a pan-African issue requiring continental solidarity, this is it.

By contrast with the fixation of the #RhodesMustFall campaign on the statue of a dead white man who went to his grave 113 years ago, here is an issue of life ands death for Africa right now and for the coming decades.

The new fascism in Africa requires new thinking in South Africa about the principles of freedom, democracy and solidarity.

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