‘We don’t want you press people to put it in the paper that it is xenophobia. There’s a World Cup coming in a few months’ time. There would be an outcry if we say it is xenophobia and it involves only 20 people. You see, I love my country and I love the Western Cape.”
This was the response of the Democratic Alliance’s Theewaterskloof mayor, Chris Punt, to Mail & Guardian questions about the hounding of 20 Somali traders from the farming village of Riviersonderend, on the Garden Route between Cape Town and Mossel Bay, and the looting of their shops last week.
It lends weight to the complaint by displaced foreigners that Western Cape provincial police and municipal officials are covering up the spate of violent attacks on them because of the approaching Fifa World Cup.
Riviersonderend residents accused the Somalis of murdering mentally handicapped 26-year-old Denwin Willemse. But a post-mortem revealed that he had died of natural causes.
The displaced Somalis are now housed in a municipal shed and the locals have refused to allow them to be reintegrated.
Punt first told the M&G that local authorities could not put their finger on the reasons for the violence. But when pushed further he said he was going “to be honest”. He then expressed his fear of an “outcry” if media reports blamed the attacks on xenophobia.
In Cape Town Zimbabwean political refugee and teacher Anthony Muteti has moved his wife and three children from Hout Bay’s Imizamo Yethu to a rented flat in suburban Mowbray, which he can’t afford. Muteti fled during the violence in the informal settlement in 2008 and again last month when many foreigners were chased from their homes after the alleged rape of a three-year- old child.
Hout Bay station commissioner Dorothy Xesha told the M&G that last month’s attack on foreigners was not motivated by xenophobia. “Locals are just sick of crime in the area,” she said.
Muteti said Imizamo Yethu residents warned that xenophobia would flare up after the World Cup, particularly if South Africa loses. He believes anti-foreigner sentiment is growing. “The police and locals are saying this violence against foreigners is not xenophobia, yet only foreigners are being targeted.”
In scenic De Doorns, in the Hex River Valley, about 1500 mostly Zimbabwean refugees are still displaced.
The fugitives fled their homes two months ago after they were threatened by locals in two informal settlements in the area. Now they are living in tents on the De Doorns sports field.
Braam Hanekom, chairperson of the refugee rights organisation, People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty (Passop), said South Africans accused Zim-babweans of taking away their work during the grape harvest by offering cheaper labour.
Passop met Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana this week after it was denied access to the De Doorns site. Hanekom was arrested “when he caused trouble and created instability in the camp”, said the executive mayor of the Breede Valley municipality, the ANC’s Charles Ntsomi.
Ntsomi said the violence was not motivated by xenophobia, as only Zimbabweans were targeted: “No, it is not xenophobia. The people said the Zimbabweans use labour brokers and they take away their work because they accept low salaries. But this was merely a cover-up to raise issues of service delivery.”
Hanekom accused some officials of stoking anti-foreigner sentiment. On Tuesday he handed Mdladlana a petition by Zimbabweans in the DeDoorns camp, calling for him to be allowed back in to assist them.
“Entire populations of foreign nationals are being victimised because of rumours of misconduct or criminal acts of a few,” said Hanekom. “The risk of foreigners becoming victims of a national outbreak of xenophobic violence like that seen in 2008 is extremely high.”
Mike Moyo, chairperson of the Committee for the Displaced in the De Doorns camp, said that when the Zimbabweans go to work, locals threaten them and say they should return to Zimbabwe. “They say that after 2010, they will clean up South Africa as they regard us as dirty.”
About 200 foreigners, mostly Zimbabweans, also fled their homes in the Westernburg township in Polokwane last month after residents accused them of carrying out a spate of criminal attacks.