“I don’t have a big problem with kwerekweres. I broke [into] their homes and stole their stuff because they have so much more than me. But they’re okay, some of them are friendly. They can come back — we wouldn’t do it again and the police took back the fridge and TV I took,” said an 18-year-old resident of Du Noon township this week, shortly after he was released from custody.
Patrick* is one of the 173 people arrested and charged with attacking and looting in the past 10 days.
Xenophobic attacks in Cape Town, which included the looting and destruction of thousands of foreign-owned businesses, started last Thursday evening in Du Noon.
The ANC councillor for this poverty-ridden township just outside Milnerton is an angry man. Peace Stimela said he was railroaded by ANC-NEC member Lumka Yengeni into calling a mass meeting in Du Noon to address the xenophobic attacks. It was the cancellation of this meeting that ignited the violence.
“It was Lumka and the SAPS in Milnerton who called this meeting at six in the evening. I refused to call the meeting because I said that you cannot put the cabbage and the goat in the same kraal and not expect trouble … The goat will eat the cabbage, right?,” Stimela said.
“Lumka forced me as the councillor to call this meeting, saying if I refuse then I’m defying her. She said I must obey and complain later. And now I’m very angry because the foreigners had confidence in me and that is now broken. It was irresponsible to call that meeting.”
Stimela said thousands of people arrived for the meeting, which then had to be cancelled for safety reasons because the school hall where it was scheduled to be held was not big enough.
Stimela was given a loudspeaker and told people the meeting was cancelled. “It was when people were told that the meeting was not happening that a group of people started shouting at me that they were there to listen to Yengeni. She was not there. They then told me: ‘You’re too late Peace. You’re too late. We have looting to do and we will chase those foreigners away once and for all.’
“I shouted at people to calm down and not to kill or hurt anybody. They simply shouted ‘Peace, you’re too late.’”
Yengeni hit back, insisting she was indeed at the meeting. “I left Parliament just after 6pm and went straight to Du Noon. When I arrived there I called the police and asked for back-up because I saw that there were too many people to hold a meeting. I couldn’t speak,” she said.
“It’s irresponsible to blame me. We all saw the terrible violence against foreigners in Gauteng. Du Noon has more foreigners living among locals than any other township in the Cape and it’s my constituency. I felt it necessary to be pre-emptive and sensitise people because some years ago people were killed there because of tensions between foreigners and locals,” Yengeni said.
She is adamant that her initiative has saved lives. “I was there and I’m the one who called for the police and then we told people to leave because we couldn’t control the crowd. There were a lot of foreigners there … and if the meeting didn’t happen the situation would have been worse. It has limited the situation,” Yengeni said. But she concedes that it was “a mistake to have a meeting at night-time”.
* not his real name