Jul 30 2008 at 15:24 – Mail & Guardian
Government inaction in the face of deteriorating living conditions in camps for displaced foreign nationals has forced refugees to take legal steps against the state, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) said on Wednesday.
A pregnant Congolese woman was beaten by private security guards hired by the eThekwini municipality on Thursday evening as foreign nationals displaced by xenophobia staged a sit-in on the steps of Durban’s City Hall.
Salema Moshondi, who is five-and-a-half months pregnant, was left vomiting on the floor after repeated blows to her body – including her stomach – by two security guards.
Mavuso Dingani
The intensity of the xenophobic attacks in Gauteng has taken the government, media, political analysts, and all the included in the new South Africa by surprise.
As pictures of bloodied men and women, burnt shacks and the atoms of destruction scattered on empty streets were first beamed into suburban living rooms I could just imagine the moral indignation in all those homes. Read the rest of this entry »
by Nsingo Fanuel
Zimbabwe, ……………..wait before you……………….!
Excitement gripped me when I was able to go back across the border to visit my family in Zimbabwe. Pleased as I was, I tried to ignore all the media reports on the country’s disregard of acceptable and proper treatment of human beings. Before going home, I braced myself for whatever the hell was to befall me! Imagine going back home to unpredictable situations, disastrous conditions, or even impending death – and when home is Zimbabwe this is no exaggeration. If you have been in South Africa you are immediately suspected of being MDC. Anyway, going home was the only way to please my mum! Read the rest of this entry »
THAT the growing upsurge of xenophobia across all communities and social classes in South Africa has finally erupted into savage and violent attacks on Africans from across our border should be of concern to everyone. This explosion of bigotry threatens to destroy much that is positive in our emerging democracy and undermine the limited gains made to date, especially by working people.
In the wake of this, it is absolutely essential that everyone concerned with the struggles for jobs, social progress and against poverty, puts the fight against xenophobia at the top of their agenda.
Also see: The South African Migration Project
The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.
But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue.
In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People’s Movement. These are all poor people’s movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid. Read the rest of this entry »
What the U.S. press got wrong about South Africa’s xenophobic riots.
Posted Friday, June 20, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET
coverage of xenophobic riots in South Africa told of victims gruesomely killed—beaten, slashed, doused in petrol and set alight—and untold thousands displaced. The stories described mobs of poor South Africans armed with sticks and machetes, shouting, “Kill the foreigner!” and President Thabo Mbeki leaving the violence unchecked for more than a week before eventually calling in the army, causing shootouts in the townships reminiscent of the bad old days of apartheid.Unfortunately, the U.S. coverage provides an incomplete and distorted picture by relying on old clichés about African politics. The coverage shows only suffering victims, violent perpetrators, and a failed African head of state. By slotting foreigners, the South African poor, and the president into these roles and pitting them against each other, U.S. readers and viewers never really find out what xenophobia means in South Africa, except for the most obvious and familiar definition: the hatred of foreigners.
In case the photographs of burning shacks hadn’t already tipped you off, the rioters and their targets in these pogroms were overwhelmingly poor. The U.S. coverage tells us that much. Given South Africa’s history of white racism and colonial privilege, the vast majority of residents of the poorest communities are also black. Comedian Chris Rock, who was touring the country at the time of the attacks, quipped, “It’s not really black-on-black violence; it’s broke-on-broke violence.”
Still, by equating foreigners and victims, much of the U.S. coverage glosses over this race/class dynamic. Newsweek asked, “Can South Africa’s Foreigner Killings Be Stopped?” Migrants from other regions and asylum-seeking refugees were certainly targets of the violence, but the South African Press Agency reported that one-third of the people killed—21 of 62—were South African citizens.
Rioters subjected many South Africans to so-called “elbow tests,” in which a potential victim is asked to supply the Zulu word for elbow. People married to foreigners, those who speak a different language from their neighbors, or anyone with complexions deemed “too dark” were targeted, whether or not they were foreign. Rather than rooting out non-Zulus—it is unlikely that all who administered the tests are even themselves Zulu—the tests are about targeting those who carry a perceived taint of the outsider.
What’s more, it is important to note that the wealthy of any race or nationality were not among the attacked or displaced. In South African cities—in all cities—the rich work, live, and play in separate areas from the poor. Even when the attackers left their home turf, they didn’t head to the nearest wealthy Johannesburg suburb nor to the international airport adjacent to the epicenter of the attacks. Busloads of foreign tourists, ubiquitous in many townships, were unharmed.
But South Africa’s poor aren’t counted among the victims—they are cast as the perpetrators, the embodiment of xenophobia. Read the rest of this entry »
The print and electronic media have had – and continue to have – an overwhelming amount of news and analysis around the crisis of xenophobia that has gripped our country.
Surely, this is justifiable when you have figures of between 50 000 and 100 000 people who have been displaced and when such a complex occurrence has such far-reaching implications for a country like South Africa. Read the rest of this entry »
by Andile Mngxitama
The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks. I dreaded opening a newspaper for days – afraid of being confronted by yet another grisly product of the negrophobic xenophobic violence, which by the end of week three had claimed the lives of about one hundred people and displaced about 100 000, according to some estimates. The mind spins out of the axis of the normal.
As the Alexander township burnt, I was reading text messages from my cappuccino-loving Tito Mboweni-fearing middle class friends. The messages were generally along these lines; “I’m so embarrassed to be South African right now”, or more engaging: “I’m so tired of feeling angry about this and not being able to do something about it…” . Email lists held similar messages of shame; at least Winnie Madikizela-Mandela went to Alexander and told the terrified victims cramped at the police station; “We are sorry, please forgive us. South Africans are not like this”, before hopping back into her nice car and driving back to her life. Desmond Tutu, our beloved archbishop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) followed with another “sorry, we are not like that”. The leader of the narrow Zulu nationalist movement, Dr Gatsha Buthelezi, went to the police station as well and cried for the cameras, at the same time as his followers from the hostel he had just addressed continued their war cry that they would kill all the “foreigners”, Hambani! Of course our president in waiting, Mr Jacob Zuma, was also told by an angry crowd, “go back to Mozambique with your Mozambiquens”. Apparently his favourite solo “Mshini wam” is sung by the marauding gangs as they go about their murderous deeds. The killings, burning and looting continued. Something has definitely broken, the despised are telling their leaders in their faces that they must all go to hell. Read the rest of this entry »
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