The Roots of Frustration: A New Wave of Xenophobia in SA

"The screams of the burning Mozambican still haunt me... I have never seen such barbarism..."
Zimbabwean woman

 One of seven improvised refugee shelters.

The Zimbabwe embassy in South Africa is currently helping 700 of its citizens return home. To anybody familiar with the dismal social and economic situation in Zimbabwe this figure will be evidence enough that something is very wrong in South Africa. In the past years thousands of Zimbabweans have managed to enter South Africa illegally in search of a better chance. Now some are actually going back. So what happened?

This latest string of attacks on immigrants and refugees began in a Johannesburg township in the beginning of May and since then more xenophobic violence has taken place in and around major cities such as Durban and Cape Town. According to figures from the Red Cross and OCHA some 70,000 people have been displaced by the attacks: about 38,000 in South Africa itself and over 32,000 refugees have returned home, most to Mozambique (32,082), Malawi (500) and Zimbabwe (123). The result so far: more than 650 wounded and 50 dead, not to mention the collateral damage to houses and shops belonging to refugees. 

The cause for all this suffering appears to be a lethal mixture of poverty, unemployment and high crime rates, most of it focused in the townships. Groups of South African township residents have become frustrated by their going-nowhere-slowly existence and have found the perfect scapegoats in the (il)legal refugees living amongst them. An additional point of frustration among these South Africans is the fact that many refugees do relatively well for themselves by setting up small businesses and using their skills at various trades to get by. One example are the many teachers who have fled political persecution in Zimbabwe. The South African government has recognized the potential to improve on the dramatic shortage of teachers and has begun to speed up the application processes of such refugees and asylum seekers. But seeing foreigners fill up precious jobs has obviously fuelled some people's anger further. 

A final ingredient has been the apparently baseless figure of "three to four million" Zimbabwean, and an estimated five million in total, refugees. These statistics are often used to illustrate a growing threat to South Africa through an invasion of foreigners from all over Africa. However these same numbers were also given out in 2000 by the Centre for International Political Studies of the University of Pretoria, and in their turn were based on a peculiar study by the South African Human Resources Council in which people were asked "Do any people who are not South African citizens live in the houses around this property?". This study was conducted in 1995 by the way. According to the UNHCR, South Africa played host to around 175,000 refugees and asylum seekers in 2007... A recent study by the University of Wits in Johannesburg carefully estimates "around one million Zimbabweans in South Africa". Does anyone else smell some discrepancy? Anyone?

The South African government has stated (rather boldly in my opinion), that there exists "and urgent need to accelerate its programmes for alleviating poverty, unemployment and other forms of socio-economic deprivation". That should be alright then...

Conclusion

Despite my somewhat sarcastic tone I am hopeful that the government will take positive steps to tackle the roots of this problem, which now threatens not only African refugees but also tourism and the much-hailed (and maligned) build-up to the World Cup in 2010. However my hope is built on a uncertain foundation at best because this type of xenophobic outlash has occured in the recent past and clearly very little (if anything) has been done by the government to counter it. Records of this past violence can be found on the website of the South African Migration Project.

This eruption of violence and hatred clearly has two major causes. On one side the influx of refugees and their impact on South Africa, and on the other side the poor socio-economic environment in which most South Africans live. The government has to take visible, tangible and practical steps to manage the tide of immigrants while at the same time making similar, visible progress to improve the quality of life for the poorest in the country. It's pretty easy for me to say this of course, sitting behind a desk in a comfortable room 9000km away, but even the one person who can actually make a difference seems wholly indifferent:

"As to this... inflow of illegal people, I personally think that it's something we have to live with... it's difficult; you can't put a Great Wall of China between South Africa and Zimbabwe to stop people walking across." President Thabo Mbeki, speech to Parliament, 17 May 2007.