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SOUTH AFRICA: BRUTALITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE WORST DAYS OF APARTHEID
Xenophobic rage explodes in South Africa
Mobs kill at least 22 foreigners and injure hundreds as violence sweeps townships around the capital
STEPHANIE NOLEN
May 20, 2008
RAMAPHOSA INFORMAL SETTLEMENT, SOUTH AFRICA — In his haste to leave, Paolo Cosa left behind the things that once had pride of place: the framed family photographs nailed on the walls of his tin-scrap shack, including the one that showed his beaming, dimpled daughter in blue cap and gown, graduating from primary school.
He hauled out the furniture that was still intact and heaped it in a truck, then left the shell of his small house behind yesterday afternoon. He was determined to get as far away as he could from this squatter settlement that has been his home for 13 years, since he moved to Johannesburg from Mozambique.
“If they have a gun, they’ll shoot you, and if they don’t, they will take some fire and put it on top of you,” said Mr. Cosa, a 32-year-old bricklayer.
Just down the road, a mob set another Mozambican on fire here yesterday morning, and laughed while he burned to death. They burned another immigrant alive the day before.
While Mr. Cosa loaded his hired truck, a swaggering mob of about 20 men was just 15 metres away, brandishing sticks, knobkerries and homemade wooden truncheons. They leapt onto a roof and began dismantling a shack, chanting “Hambani makwerekwere” – “Foreigners, get out.”
A wave of horrifying violence has swept the townships around Johannesburg in the past five days. At least 22 people are dead, hundreds injured and an estimated 4,000 have been left homeless, most of them refugees and immigrants from other African countries.
The sudden eruption of xenophobic savagery has forced South Africans into a moment of uncomfortable self-reckoning, as the newspapers and TV screens fill with images of ethnic-based brutality of a kind not seen since the darkest days of apartheid, and considered part of the past in this country, which fancies itself to be Africa’s beacon of democracy and tolerance.
The attacks began in Alexandra Township and have spread to at least nine other poor, black communities. Foreigners are the ostensible target, although hundreds of native South Africans have also fled their homes in fear, seeking shelter in the yards of police stations and churches.
The attacks have overstretched South Africa’s police force, which was already struggling to respond to one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime. And the government of President Thabo Mbeki has done little to quell the crisis. He has yet to visit any of the besieged communities, and has made only one brief statement about the violence, saying he will set up a committee to investigate its cause.
There is a bitter irony in the attacks on foreigners, including Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and citizens of other nations that offered support to the African National Congress during the fight against apartheid and whose own people suffered immeasurably because of their solidarity with black South Africans – who, 14 short years after the end of apartheid, seem determined to drive them out.
“We should be the last people to have this problem of having a negative attitude towards our brothers and sisters who come from outside,” ANC president Jacob Zuma said Sunday, urging people to stop the killings.
The initial attacks in Alexandra last week, in which the first two people killed were South Africans who refused to join a mob, began after a community meeting about crime, for which foreigners, especially Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, are often blamed. The people at that meeting apparently added to the list that foreigners take jobs (the unemployment rate is an estimated 40 per cent here) and houses (hundreds of thousand of people have been on waiting lists for government housing for more than a decade) from citizens and even take “our women.”
As a mob rampage began, no distinction was made between recent, illegal immigrants and long-time residents who have obtained South African residency or citizenship. “These same people are the ones who have been our neighbours for more than 10 years,” said a Malawian woman who was too frightened to give her name; she was bundling her belongings into a quilt in preparation for flight yesterday.
“When you live in abject poverty, you feel you are forgotten, then you cry out and you say, ‘What does democracy mean to me?’ when you still don’t have a home,” said Very Rev. Christopher Barends, dean of the Lutheran Church in nearby Reiger Park, where parishioners were struggling to feed and shelter the steady stream of refugees from the squatter settlement yesterday.
“The same people who fought for their liberation from apartheid can’t enjoy that.”
But, he said, immigrants and refugees, such as those from neighbouring Zimbabwe’s political and economic implosion, are drawn here for the same reasons. “This is why people are in South Africa,” because it is free and peaceful and prospering, he said.
The intensity and scale of the violence of the past week are startling, but attacks on foreigners have occurred here for years. Somali and Pakistani shopkeepers are periodically driven out of small towns; Zimbabweans are attacked in the streets.
“The indications were there,” Dean Barends said, blaming the government for failing to tackle the issue earlier.
The culture of xenophobia originates at the top: The notorious Department of Home Affairs treats refugees and asylum seekers abysmally. Multiple reports from human-rights organizations have documented how corrupt officials demand bribes to extend asylum papers and police officers tear up valid papers, then deport “illegals.” South Africa was the world’s largest recipient of asylum seekers last year.
No one here, however, seems to have an answer to the question of why the long-standing xenophobia suddenly produced this sustained wave of attacks now.
As night fell in Johannesburg yesterday, police in heavily armed vehicles were parked at the major intersections of this and most other informal settlements, but it was still mob rule in the narrow alleys, where the ruins of torched houses continued to smoulder.
Lerotholi Kafile, 32, was locking his door and heading into town, hoping friends would take him in. Mr. Kafile, a Xhosa South African, described how he was awoken on Sunday night by a mob of stick-wielding men demanding that he join them to hunt for “the Shangaanis,” the dominant ethnic group from Mozambique. “They said, ‘We just want Shangaanis; if you get a Shangaani, just beat him.’ ”
They went from house to house and checked identity documents, or even a style of shoe they thought gave away a foreigner, said Mr. Kafile, a 32-year-old miner; he followed them for nearly an hour before he managed to sneak away and carry his three young children out of the settlement.
Tabitha Mokhomakhane, 30, was pacing her tiny dirt yard, debating whether to stay and try to protect her house from looters or go and avoid the fighting and fires she was sure the night would bring. Her Mozambican neighbour’s house had been demolished – only the lovingly tended calla lilies in the garden had somehow survived – and she wasn’t sorry to see her go, because foreigners can’t be trusted, she said. But the violence upset her nevertheless.
Ms. Mokhomakhane is South African, born and bred, but she is BaPedi, a smaller ethic group from the north.
“Maybe next,” she said with a grim smile, “they will decide they want the Pedis.”