South Africa Braces For Anti-Immigrant Violence

Immigrant Violence

The most recent unrest’s in South Africa has included protests that deteriorated into rioting in eastern South Africa, with foreigners’ businesses looted and police firing rubber bullets. In another protest, in the Indian Ocean port of Durban, protesters complaining of high food prices invaded supermarkets and ate food from the shelves.The incidents have put South Africa’s ANC-led government under pressure.

In an editorial this week, the Johannesburg newspaper The Times called new protests “disturbing warnings that a full-scale outbreak of xenophobic violence is not far away.” The ANC is desperate to avoid the kind of violence that hit last year, when images broadcast around the world – including some from Jeffsville of residents burning shacks where Zimbabweans, Malawians, Somalis and other foreigners had lived and worked – exposed deep anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa.

Zuma’s party released a statement Thursday promising “to listen and find solutions to people’s concerns” and condemning looting and attacks on foreigners “under the guise of `service delivery protests’” against the government.

If Jeffsville is any model, such pronouncements and promises won’t be enough.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, Mandela’s headquarters since he retired from politics in 1999, had been looking for ways to address the anti-foreigner violence. Impressed with Jeffsville’s efforts, the foundation helped organize another community meeting in June, at which Tshavhuyo, who has been unemployed for six years, rose to offer an apology to foreigners on behalf of the settlement’s South Africans.

“We are responsible as citizens to make sure we behave in a way that promotes peace,” said Mothomang Diaho of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. “There needs to be a lot of self-reflection.” South Africans know wariness of foreigners is common around the world, but worry their xenophobia is particularly virulent, perhaps a result of the isolation created by apartheid, or because the institutionalized racism of the past has left even black South Africans suspicious of black foreigners.

“The healing, it needs to take place among ourselves,” said Tshavhuyo, who apologized in public again on Mandela’s birthday July 18, when a reconciliation ceremony was held under a tent on a sports ground on the edge of Jeffsville.

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