In May 2008, African immigrants were attacked across South Africa. The violence was captured in a horrifying image of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a 35-year old father of three from Mozambique, who was burnt to death. He had arrived in Johannesburg just three months before the 18 May attacks, hoping to find work in the building industry. The image of this human fireball drew haunting reminders of necklacing during the apartheid years (The Times 2008). The May 2008 xenophobic attacks resulted in the death of just over 60 people, a third of whom were South Africans. According to official reports, some 342 shops were looted, 213 gutted, and 1384 people arrested (Crush et al. 2008, p. 11).
Much has been written on the factors that led to the violence of May 2008 and the response of the state and civil society to the violence (Human Sciences Research Council [HSRC] 2008, Misago 2009). However, once thousands of immigrants had been bundled off to their countries of origin and the camps dismantled, the researchers and media began to write about the violence in the past tense. Alongside this, both the state and much of civil society stopped any support work once those displaced left the camps. This Briefing traces developments after the May 2008 attacks with a particular focus on the impact on the lives of African immigrants. In a limited number of areas the state sought to reintegrate those displaced. In many of the instances the South Africans rejected attempts at reintegration.
Journalist Victor Khupiso wrote of how ‘on Friday nights in Ramaphosa squatter camp, it's time for what locals call their “Kwerekwere-Free (Foreigner-Free) Society” campaign’. In haunting detail Khupiso chronicles how groups of young people spread out over the camp to hunt down foreigners. One of the young people told Khupiso that he could ‘proudly say foreigners had decided to leave our area because they know what would happen to them if they are found. They would burn. Hell is waiting for them. We have stored some tyres’ (Khupiso 2008). These were not empty threats. The example of Francisco Nobunga who fled the Ramaphosa shack settlement in Ekurhuleni during the May xenophobic attacks was a clear signal. He returned to his dwelling with his South African-born wife, Sylvia Nosento, and survived three weeks before he was killed. He produced a South African identity document, as demanded by his attackers, but it had a Mozambican address (The Star 2008).
Nyamnjoh vividly unpacks the significance of the use of the word Kwerekwere in his 2006 book, Insiders and Outsiders:
To demonstrate that these ‘illegals’ clearly have little to offer, South African blacks, perhaps reminiscent of the Boers who named the local black communities ‘Hottentots’ to denote ‘stutterers’, deny black African migrants an intelligible language. All they claim to hear is ‘gibberish’ – a ‘barbaric’ form of ‘stuttering’, hence the tendency to classify them as Makwerekwere … as used in South Africa it means not only a black person who cannot demonstrate mastery of local South African languages, but one who also hails from a country assumed to be economically and culturally backward in relation to South Africa … In terms of skin pigmentation, the racial hierarchy … Makwerekwere are usually believed to be the darkest of the dark-skinned, and even to be less enlightened. (2006, p. 39)
While Zimbabwean national Eugene Madondo told the Durban Regional Court how he was forced out of a fifth-floor window to land on top of a lifeless body on the pavement below, city councillor Vusi Khoza laughed and smiled. (Daily News 2009a)
In the small space of the inner city, tensions accumulate, concentrate, and erupt. The Community Policing Forum (CPF) has equated crime with the presence of African immigrants, and using this institutional base they have raided flats where immigrants live and have thrown them out. Once on the streets, the police move in to harass and force the immigrants to keep on the move until finally they leave the area altogether. The police too, according to Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), have taken to raiding flats and simply confiscating the goods of immigrants, regardless of whether they have purchase receipts or not. The situation in the Albert Park area is particularly acute because the CPF and the ward councillor have a close relationship and their power reaches into City Hall. Classically, in the Albert Park area one group of ‘local’ poor were positioned as policing agents against poor African immigrants.
The organisations supporting the immigrants at Diakonia Centre have their hands full. Both the LHR and the Refugee Social Services (RSS) are contracted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR). On any one day the queues are long and resources short. Their work is about papers, legalities, and treating each case in an individual way: they are not about collectives and mass mobilisations. These organisations, for example, were opposed to the concentration of immigrants at Albert Park. They could not fathom the strategy of the immigrants: how the immigrants' stubborn presence exposed the lack of support from the city authorities; how their tents staked out a place in the heart of the inner city; how their continuing resistance in the face of their tents being pulled down and harassment by the police drew attention to the ongoing xenophobia in the city; and how their use of bin bags (intended for rubbish) as shelter exposed the lack of state support. For the city manager it was a ‘problem’ that had to be got rid of, and he warned that while the support of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the public was to be commended, ‘we also have to take care that we do not perpetuate the situation longer than necessary. A growing refugee problem is something we must try and avoid at all costs’ (eThekwini Municipality Durban 2008).
For the UNHCR-supported NGOs, this was just a ‘game’ that the immigrants played because they wanted to demand a camp so that this would facilitate their rendition to a ‘first world country’ (Interview with LHR, Durban office, June 2009). For them the rudimentary shelter was not an act of desperation and fortitude but a place of opportunism and conspiracy.
If on the one hand refugee support has become technicised and individualised, the recognition of refugees in the city on the other has resulted in a professionalisation. Amisi and Matate, for example, point to the fact that in its early years the commemoration of World Refugee Day in Durban was organised by the refugee community itself. However on the last two World Refugee Days, the community was replaced in this work by service providers supported by the government. This changed the complexion of the commemoration into ‘one for the poor and the refugees often without food or drink, and usually in a tent; and another one for the agencies in comfortable venues such as City Hall, with expensive food and drinks.’ As Amisi and Matate laconically reflect, the service providers developed ‘a commemoration to celebrate themselves’ (Amisi and Matate 2009).
The killings in January 2009 were at the peak of the high-intensity xenophobia in Albert Park, and to some extent the court case has reduced tensions, but there is a low-intensity threat every day on the streets. The city is supporting plans to revamp blocks of flats into sectional title units that will sell for between R250,000 and R400,000. African immigrants without access to papers and credit will not be able to take advantage of these developments, and the relocation of Metropolitan Police Headquarters will make Albert Park increasingly inaccessible to immigrants. It is one of the last of the commons where African immigrants can meet, lay in the sun, have a view of the harbour and receive a meal from individual ‘do-gooders’ or faith organisations.
In Johannesburg thousands of those displaced by the violence live in bushes and makeshift shelters. It is estimated that some 30,000 refugees live in terrible conditions in the inner city alone. Some 2000 live in the Central Methodist Church alone (The Sowetan 2009).
Takawira Moyo was one of those displaced by the violence of May 2008 (Interview with T. Moyo, Johannesburg, October 2009). He arrived in South Africa from Chegutu, Mashonaland West Province, on New Year's Day 2007 on the run from ZANU-PF youth and intelligence officials of the Mugabe government. He was chairperson of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the area while working as a clerk at a local bakery. ZANU-PF youth had previously frog-marched him out of his house and beaten him, and this time when he heard that he was to be taken to Harare for questioning, he decided to make for South Africa. After a long trip via Bulawayo, he finally got to the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg. Already a known figure in Zimbabwean exile circles, Moyo decided to lay low for six months.
After six months Moyo made his way to Springs on the East Rand of Johannesburg and sought to build a business doing painting and welding jobs. He also secured a shack in Paineville and set about building a home. The business began to expand and Moyo started employing three other Zimbabweans. He used some money to start a tuck shop alongside the shack. In 2008 he decided to go back home and bring his wife and two young children to live with him. On the way back to South Africa he was robbed of all his possessions. He left his wife in a village in Venda and walked from the Limpopo River to Polokwane, a distance of just over 200 kilometres. There he worked for R10 a day until he secured R130 to make his way back to Springs. His younger brother Wisdom had looked after things while he was away. It was May 2008. He later recalled that:
At midnight I heard a noise at the door. I had on a tee-shirt, shorts and socks. I could only wear socks because the long walk from Limpopo River to Polokwane had left me with sores on my feet. The banging on my door continued. I opened the door. The first thing I got was a hard slap. People rushed in. They ransacked my shack. My fridge and television were the first to go, and then all my clothes and the goods in the tuck shop. My brother was stabbed twice in the back. We just ran for our lives.
From the hall the refugees were transported to the Selcourt Camp. The food was often ‘rotten’ and many people got sick, while health conditions were ‘terrible’: the toilets were overflowing and had never been cleaned. People avoided the toilets and used the bush, thus adding to the problems. Moyo charges that a lot of things were donated to the camp, but were stored by the site manager and sold off to local people.
Moyo participated in a series of meetings with residents of Paineville to reintegrate displaced foreigners, but the residents refused to allow them to return. The Ekurhuleni Municipality decided to build shacks for many of the displaced in Extension 10 Kwa-Thema, some distance from Paineville.
Currently, Moyo is desperate to find a job to feed his family. There are however other concerns, the most pressing of which is documentation. The Moyos have three children who cannot get birth certificates, as neither parent has an identity card or passport. For them to get a passport, Mrs Moyo has to go back to Zimbabwe; for an emergency passport they will need to pay R2000 and for a long-term one they will have to pay the equivalent of R1500. The eldest child is due to start school, but to register him they need to have a birth certificate. The one document that the Moyos hold on to is Takawira's MDC membership card. He says it is what gives them some hope that one day they will return to a free Zimbabwe.
Thembi1 arrived in Johannesburg on 2 May 2007 from Zimbabwe (Interview with ‘Thembi’, Johannesburg, October 2009). She made her way to Nigel, as her mother had once lived and worked in the area and knew a few people with whom she could find temporary accommodation. She shared a garage in Duduza Township with two other Zimbabweans and got a job doing hair braiding. She has a young daughter back in Zimbabwe as well as an elderly mother. Whatever spare cash she had, Thembi sent back home to them.
In May 2008 Thembi heard of attacks in nearby Tsakani. All three occupants of the garage decided to flee that night. They went directly to the police station and from there were taken to Nigel town hall. That night there were no blankets and nothing to eat, and by the morning there were some 300 people in the hall, a mix of Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and a small contingent of Ethiopians. Thembi was anxious to secure her belongings, however by the time she got back to the garage the place had been ransacked.
After a month they were transferred to the Springs camp. However Thembi's problems really began once she left the camp. She had lost all her belongings and could not restart her braiding business. She eventually found a job guarding repossessed houses, working seven days a week for R850 a month. When she was in the camp, the residents were asked to apply for asylum, but everyone was refused. Her passport that gave her permission to stay in the country for three months has expired. The card issued by Home Affairs has also expired. For Thembi to get her passport stamped for a further period means going back to the border and paying R800, money that she does not have. She lives ‘in pain and fear’, as she has not seen her daughter, now aged five years old, for two years. The word on the streets is that after the 2010 World Cup there will be a ‘gnashing of teeth’, and all foreigners will be chased out of South Africa.
This fear of attacks, especially expressed by Zimbabweans, was brought to the fore by a series of attacks on Zimbabweans in the Western Cape town of De Doorns beginning in mid-November 2009. Most of the South Africans involved in the attacks accused the Zimbabweans of ‘stealing their jobs’. The Zimbabweans were prepared to work for between R30 and R40 a day, while the South Africans were usually paid about R60 a day. One of the attackers told a journalist that the farmers were ‘scoring’, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because the Zimbabweans were prepared to ‘work on Saturdays and Sundays and on holidays’ (Daily News 2009b). One of the Zimbabweans attacked seemed to confirm this resentment: ‘They hate us because we work harder than them and we work every day’ (ibid.). The complaint of the De Doorns residents was apparently simply that ‘they are taking our jobs’. It is clear that the Zimbabweans were prepared to work for less than the sectoral rate of R70 and also labour over weekends. The locals responded in a fashion usually extended to those who cross the picket line during a strike. In a country with an unemployment rate of over 30%, where even the most basic elements of bare life have been commodified, if one does not have access to welfare grants, a job becomes the only legitimate source of cash.
Harold Wolpe's 1972 essay on capitalism and cheap labour power in South Africa describes the apartheid system as not only one of racial exclusion, but also a system of domination and control intrinsically bent on reproducing and elaborating capitalist relations by maximising cheap labour with little financial burden on the state. The increase of economic migrants and refugees in South Africa has a strong parallel to the world described by Wolpe. In this case, however, it is a cheap labour pool without rights within a cheap labour pool of black South Africans, once again creating a situation in which some members of society are denied rights, without recourse to the state, subjected to a bare life, and in this case policed through violence both by the state and by other poor South Africans who see themselves as bearers (and possible beneficiaries) of certain rights and concessions through the ANC-led state. In De Doorns, for example, the community was involved in violent protests against the government around the lack of service delivery and consultation over development initiatives. Yet, given the way the demands were framed as ‘houses for residents of De Doorns’, their concerns translated into a demand for the ‘real’ residents, i.e. South Africans, and in places like Alexandra and De Doorns fed into xenophobic sentiments.
Meanwhile, while only a minority of the vast African diaspora living in South Africa was directly affected, wherever these people now move – through township street or inner city alley, standing behind a counter in a shop or presenting themselves for work in the Western Cape farmland – the memory of the May 2008 events and the constant threat of further violence lie close to the surface for hundreds of thousands of African immigrants residing among fellow African citizens of South Africa.
Tens of thousands of African immigrants' lives were destroyed by the May 2008 violence. Thembi has not seen her child for two years and, on a meagre wage, will not be able to get to Zimbabwe in the near future. Those evicted at De Doorns live in camps, their shacks destroyed. The Moyos live without documents, in fear of another attack.2
While there was a significant outpouring of support in the immediate aftermath from South Africans for those affected by the May 2008 violence, xenophobic attitudes are widespread. The South African Migration Project (SAMP) surveys conducted in 1997 and 1998 on the attitudes of South Africans toward immigrants and immigration point to strong and growing xenophobic attitudes, as the views expressed were held across class and race lines. In the 1997 survey, ‘people living in neighbouring countries’ were seen by 48% as a criminal threat, 29% of those surveyed thought they brought diseases and 37% believed they were a threat to jobs. In 1998, some 53% of those surveyed wanted a ‘strict limit on the number of foreigners allowed in the country’ (Mattes et al. 1999). By 2006 the SAMP survey showed a deepening of attitudes, with nearly 50% of those surveyed supporting the deportation of foreign nationals, including those living legally in South Africa: only 18% strongly opposed such a policy. Some 74% supported deporting anyone who is not contributing economically to South Africa; close to 75% were against increasing the number of refugees; and some 50% said they would support refugees staying in border camps (Crush et al. 2008).
John Berger writes of photos taken at a shelter for refugees in France, giving us a sense of:
In post-apartheid South Africa most African immigrants will identify with these words, while many South Africans, as the surveys indicate, will have little empathy.