Zimbabwean political refugee and teacher Anthony Muteti says that South African residents of Hout Bay’s Imizamo Yethu informal settlement are openly warning that foreigners will be driven out for good after next year’s Fifa World Cup.
Muteti was one of scores of foreigners hounded out of Imizamo last weekend after three Malawians were arrested following the alleged rape of a three-year-old child. He and his family were also forced to flee during last year’s xenophobic upheavals.
He claimed that police stood by and watched as residents broke down and looted the house the Malawians rented, running off with televisions, stereo sets and other electrical goods.
Muteti says 57 foreign nationals were driven from their homes in the settlement.
His family has taken refuge at the home of people he worked for when he arrived in Hout Bay in 2004.
Muteti says locals now talk in the taxis and buses about how “xenophobia will happen” after 2010 and that foreign nationals are scared to speak their own languages.
“I was totally enraged when I heard a child had been raped,” said Muteti. “After the house of the alleged rapists was broken down, I never thought the community would turn on us.
“I left my family at home and when I returned I saw people toyi-toyiing on the street. I am baffled as to how they can say it’s not xenophobia.”
His 16-year-old daughter, Kudzaishe, who has many friends in Imizamo and attends school in Hout Bay, said 10 men burst into the family home on Saturday and told them to leave by 5pm the next day.
“I just turned to my mother and asked her where we were going to go,” she said. “I don’t want to go back to Imizamo Yethu. When my father returned home, I just grabbed my school uniform and we fled.”
The Hout Bay purge is the latest sign that resentment of foreign nationals is bubbling up in the Cape townships. Two weeks ago foreigners were hounded out of the rural settlement of De Doorns.
Hout Bay’s South African National Civic Organisation chairperson, Clifford Nogwavu, however, denied that the purge was xenophobic. “The locals are just fed up with crime, especially when it involves an innocent child. This was not a case of xenophobia. It is not the same as what happened recently in De Doorns, where all foreign nationals were forced from their homes. Only those who lived close to the home [of the child] were forced out,” Nogwavu said.
When the Mail & Guardian visited Imizamo this week, tourists ambled up steep slopes to browse through the pavement craft stalls set up in the sprawling seaside settlement.
But it seemed that a tsunami had thundered through the next street. Wood was scattered around the plot formerly occupied by the arrested Malawians and hacked couches and chairs were dispersed among the ruins.
The child who was allegedly raped lived next door with her aunt, who looked after her when her 22-year- old unemployed mother went out to look for work.
“I’m very angry,” said the quietly spoken young mother, who cannot be identified to protect the identity of the child. “I was out looking for work in Sea Point when they say it happened. I still don’t know how this is going to affect my child.”
She said doctors at the hospital gave her daughter antiretroviral drugs to ward off possible infection.
“I just feel so sad. I never thought it would happen in this place, where all the children play in the streets,” she said. “I am going to send my child back home to my family in the Eastern Cape where they can keep her safe.”
Nogwavu said the foreign nationals were starting to return to Imizamo Yethu and a meeting to resolve the tensions was to be held with their leaders at the police station.
Hout Bay station commissioner Dorothy Xesha denied that police in three vans watched as residents tore down and looted the house rented by the Malawian families.
“There were no vans up there,” said Xesha. “It was all over by the time they came to complain to us.”
Xesha confirmed that one of the Malawians will be charged with rape, while charges will be brought against two others alleged to have been present.