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In the eyes of Western journalists, the fortunes of Africa always seem to vacillate between gloom and doom and rebirth and takeoff, with the pessimistic view weighing much heavier in the balance.

As a reporter, I have always resisted giving into the temptation to frame Africa in either of these ways. After all, it is the world’s second-largest continent, one of great complexity, and that includes plenty of scope for divergent fates.

In the eyes of Western journalists, the fortunes of Africa always seem to vacillate between gloom and doom and rebirth and takeoff, with the pessimistic view weighing much heavier in the balance.

As a reporter, I have always resisted giving into the temptation to frame Africa in either of these ways. After all, it is the world’s second-largest continent, one of great complexity, and that includes plenty of scope for divergent fates.

A recent development involving South Africa’s relationship to the rest of the continent, though, has had me thinking about the enormous opportunities that Africans are squandering by failing to think in more holistic terms about their common fortunes.

With the rest of the world paying scant notice, the past few weeks have served up dispiriting scenes of African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, sending airplanes to the country of Nelson Mandela to repatriate their nationals. They have felt that this is necessary due to the unremitting hostility and occasional violence that migrants from the rest of the continent have faced from South Africans. In early June, Mozambique said that five of its nationals had been killed in recent “xenophobic attacks.” (The South African police have confirmed two deaths.)

The reasons why I find this dispiriting run deep, and they are inseparable from why the behavior of South Africans and their government has been myopic and self-defeating.

South Africans seem to have........

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