Death by starvation or butchery

“Give me a one-way ticket back to Zimbabwe” is the chorus of the hundreds of displaced people huddled at the Alexandra police station, in fear of their lives.

The police station teems with scores of aid workers, journalists and displaced foreigners from Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique.

The victims of the xenophobic attacks are dishevelled and dirty, having slept in the open at the police station since Sunday. Some have managed to rescue a bag or a bicycle, but most escaped with only the clothes on their bodies. Now they long to be among familiar people who speak familiar tongues.

For Knowledge Mutisi, a 21-year-old Zimbabwean, their ordeal started with a knock on the door late on Sunday. He said a group of men barged into his shack and demanded money and cellphones from him and his friends before beating them up. As they fled “a gun was fired and one of us was shot in the leg”. They dare not go back, he says, sitting on a grey blanket handed out by the Red Cross. Mutisi left Zimbabwe last year after the death of his parents, jumping the border to follow his uncle to Alexandra. Recurring droughts and the farm invasions had put an end to employment on the tea farms around Birchenough Bridge. He is not sure what he will do now - a life of poverty in rural Zimbabwe is unbearable, but staying in South Africa seems like certain death. There is a sense that if the choice is starvation or being butchered, they would rather die at home, where their ancestors are buried. “Tell them we want transport. We want to go back home.”

Kholani Dube, who wears a Zion Christian Church cap, speaks in a weary voice. He has lost everything, but shows a surprising understanding of his attackers. “We don’t blame them, but they should realise that we are not fighting them. We are just trying to get by.”

Brothers Daniel and Gift Sithole, from Chipinge in eastern Zimbabwe, sit ashen-faced, scooping out baked beans from a can onto a piece of bread. Gift removes his heavy woollen hat to reveal a head full of stitches. “They beat me with a metal rod,” he says. His brother Daniel says they don’t feel safe even at the police station, as mobs have come into the station and ordered them to leave. “What’s there to stop them from throwing a petrol bomb or something into this enclosure?” he asks. Daniel insists home—however hard—is where he wants to be.

But Sox Chikowero, chairperson of the Zimbabwe Diaspora Forum, warns against rushing back to Zimbabwe. “That’s not a solution. You can’t go back to Zimbabwe now,” he told the terrified group. “You will be targets of the militias that the government is using to cow the opposition. A person who has come from South Africa will obviously be targeted.”