‘The signs were there in 2004’

As President Thabo Mbeki insisted this week that he had no prior warning of xenophobic violence, he was flatly contradicted by a group of Congolese and Rwandan refugees in Cape Town.

The refugees told the Mail & Guardian that they repeatedly wrote letters to Mbeki, the ANC and Cosatu since 2004 alerting the government to the growing ill-treatment of foreigners in South Africa.

The M&G has seen one of the letters, written by Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) citizen Deo Kabemba Ngulu to ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe. It reads, in part: ‘We’re asking you to recognise that there is a crisis between us and the people electing the government … The authorities must protect us because we are under threat.”

Ngulu is one of about 200 foreign nationals who set up camp between the central police station and the magistrate’s court in Cape Town, refusing to move to the refugee camps in and outside the city or to be reintegrated into the townships from which they were driven.

Last weekend he and other foreigners were given money by a private donor to move to the Train Lodge, a small hotel near Cape Town station, where they are housed and fed each day.

Ngulu said the group included people from the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola and Mozambique.

‘We’ve survived camps all over Africa and know that once a government has you in a camp you can rot and die there. We will stay here in town where people have to see us everyday so that we are not forgotten. We want people to see us so that they can think about the society we’re living in.”

Ngulu said his first experience of xenophobia was in KwaZulu-Natal in 1998. He said local people ‘told us at a taxi-rank they don’t want us to travel in their taxi and if we get on they will throw us off. They said this pointing to my children”.

He said the problems in Cape Town were evident as early as October 2004 when local residents drove foreign African and Indian traders from market stalls in Khayelitsha.

‘I’m being treated like shit in this country. My countrymen are born tradesmen and we’re not allowed to make a living here because we are hated and the authorities have allowed this wound to fester.

‘It’s like living in America — ‘either you’re one of us or you’re against us’ seems to be how South Africans think.”

Ngulu said his landlord in Lower Crossroads gave him a few minutes to leave his rented home and his possessions two weeks ago. Among other things he lost four computers he used to operate a small printing press.

‘I fled the DRC because of civil war. I have 10 children and coming here we were put into camps in Mozambique where we were starving because the then president, Joachim Chissano, didn’t want us in his country either.

‘Then we came to South Africa and the situation was better — except that the people have always hated us.”

The group of refugees has consulted top Cape Town advocate Michael Osborne to prevail on the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to mediate between them and the South African authorities regarding their demands.

‘Our problem is political. We were told before Polokwane last year that the time has come for kwerikweris to go back home. Before that foreigners were killed during the security-industry strike two years ago. Somalis were attacked and killed.

‘Even if you eventually get a South African ID book, they print in it that you’re a foreigner,” said Ramazani Gihimbare from Burundi, who is also living in the Train Lodge.

Gihimbare owned the biggest garage in the Cape town township of Nyanga. He said that he lost about 50 cars and his house two weeks ago when he and his family were driven from Nyanga.