The wave of pogroms that saw foreigners fleeing Alexandra this week, clutching at the tattered remnants of their lives, should surprise no one. Xenophobic attacks have been growing in ferocity and frequency. In just the past three months Gauteng has witnessed a wave of attacks from Itereleng to Atteridgeville and from Alex to Diepsloot.
A pattern is emerging: a mob is organised, foreigners are beaten, raped and even killed. Their business are plundered and razed. They are driven out of their homes and their attackers move in, commandeering houses and possessions. As an ethnic cleansing strategy, it works remarkably well — once the dust has settled and the media and the politicians have gone away, victims are too terrified and traumatised to move back into the area.
“The modus operandi is the same,” says Jody Kollapen, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission (HRC). There will be a wave of public condemnation and outrage, but there will also be a high level of fear and intimidation, preventing victims from returning. “They [attackers] have made personal gains. And they have succeeded in what they set out to do so they just ride out the public storm.”
Kollapen also fears that there is a copy-cat element in the attacks.
On Wednesday afternoon Kollapen told the Mail & Guardian, “My concern is that there may be other Alexandras and Atteridgevilles waiting to erupt. In a depressed social climate it is easy to whip up feelings of exclusion and marginalisation and redirect these to non-nationals.” Within hours of him saying this Diepsloot went up in flames, allegedly at the hands of the same people who organised the Alex attacks.
Scapegoats
Xenophobia may have been the spark that set Alex alight this week, but joblessness, crime, a lack of service delivery and soaring prices provided the kindling.
Loren Landau of the Forced Migration Studies programme at the University of the Witwatersrand points out that “in some instances, local leaders have blamed foreigners to deflect criticism around the lack of jobs and service delivery”.
Lashing out at foreigners is rather like domestic violence, he says: “A man who loses his job may go home and beat his wife. He’ll feel better for five minutes, but in the morning his wife is bruised and he still doesn’t have a job.”
No one denies that there is competition for scarce resources, but the pressure is being felt most by those with the least resilience to economic shocks — the poorest of the poor.
Poor vs poor
The truth is that impoverished migrants, fleeing political or economic disaster, do not move into the suburbs. They move into already overcrowded squatter camps and townships, where survival is a daily struggle. “Poor black people are directing their anger against other poor black people,” says Kollapen.
“An influx of people who have skills and are willing to work do represent competition for people in the township who — because of Bantu education and apartheid — are not equipped to compete,” says Landau.
But the scapegoating is often based on misconceptions and deliberate distortions, such as the claim that foreigners are stealing jobs, houses and even women. Most migrants can’t enter formal employment without a South African identity book, so they often set up small businesses. This leads to jealousy when locals see these foreign businesses thriving. Similarly, the perception is that migrants are jumping the queue for houses.
“Many South Africans get RDP [reconstruction and development programme] houses and then rent them out to foreigners, which creates the impression that the foreigner has just been handed a house,” says Zonke Majodina of the HRC. In fact, migrants, who cannot open bank accounts or buy property, generally have no choice but to rent. She adds that there is no doubt that corrupt housing officials take bribes to ensure people are pushed to the top of housing allocation lists and that the attacks highlight frustrations of residents don’t feel they are seeing any results from the seven-year-old, billion-rand Alexandra Renewal Project.
The tendency to blame all crime on foreigners is also groundless as there is no hard evidence to suggest that migrants are disproportionately represented in the criminal class. “Alex has always been crime-ridden — we cannot blame foreigners as if everyone else who lives there is an innocent,” says Majodina.
And those South Africans who think this isn’t their problem are deluding themselves says Dosso Ndessomin of the Coordinating Body for Refugee Communities. He says South Africans should be afraid — very afraid — particularly if political forces are manipulating ethnic differences for their own advantage. Ndessomin is a refugee from Côte d’Ivoire and has lived through this before: “It starts off as xenophobia and when they’re finished dealing with the foreigners, they turn to tribalism. Trust me, that will be much, much worse than anything we are seeing now.”
Migration
“South Africa needs a more pragmatic migration policy that recognises both our dependence on foreign labour and the inability to stop migration without massive human rights abuses,” says Landau.
Kollapen concurs and says we need to address gaps in policy as well as do some straight talking about the causes of the problem. “It’s not an easy issue, but it does need to be addressed at some level. Arresting, detaining and deporting people is just not working,” he adds.
“How do we deal with large numbers of people who may not qualify for formal refugee status but who, on genuine humanitarian grounds, represent a larger question for government and for our society?”