Xenophobia in South Africa

This landed in my Inbox today, shortly after I had responded to Rina's comment on yesterday's post. I can do no better than to add it verbatim here, and share how my heart aches. I'm a ridiculously optimistic person, but even I have entirely lost hope.

By R.W. JOHNSON
FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
May 27, 2008

CAPE TOWN, South Africa

South Africa is taking stock after two weeks of xenophobic riots. By the latest count, 50 people have been killed and thousands injured. Over 600 rioters have been arrested as the violence spread through all nine of the country's provinces. The images are shocking. Large, well-armed mobs of black people rampage through the townships, even the center of the commercial capital, Johannesburg . The necklace (burning tire) style of killing, so familiar from the civil strife that swept the country in the early 1990s, has made a horrific return. The plight of the foreign Africans has been desperate, with some 30,000 displaced and many of their shops and shacks ransacked or destroyed; unknown thousands have gone back home.

The damage to South Africa 's image both within Africa and beyond is very large. Perhaps worst of all, the riots have raised the question of whether the country really made a miraculously peaceful transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy, as so widely trumpeted, 14 years ago. In a ghostly reversal of history, mobs are once more in the streets, and as in apartheid days, the military has been called out to control them. The ruling African National Congress is used to thinking of large, politically mobilized township mobs as masses demanding democracy, and the soldiers out to bring them into submission the instrument of apartheid oppression. Now the roles are reversed, posing some disturbing thoughts about whether one has viewed the past correctly. Certainly the sight of workers attacking workers is a nightmare for the left. The greater fear is that this could all easily spill over into intra-South African tribal conflict.

Nobody knows how many illegal immigrants there are in South Africa . Most estimates suggest that up to four million Zimbabweans have fled here from Robert Mugabe's rule of brutality and enforced poverty. Mozambicans make up the second-largest group. But South Africa 's borders are porous and there are also large numbers of people from Malawi, Nigeria, the Democratic of Congo , Somalia and elsewhere in Africa. At a bare minimum there must be five million such illegals, though some think there are twice that number. Xenophobia is not new -- over 30 Somali shopkeepers were murdered in Cape Town in the last two years -- but the country has not witnessed civil strife on anything like this scale before.

The causes are obvious. A Markinor survey earlier this month found that only 42% of South Africans had jobs. Millions are housed in shacks lacking many basic amenities. It is now winter here and at night on the Gold Reef, on which Johannesburg was built, temperatures can fall below freezing, so the homeless can no longer live on the streets. In addition, soaring food prices and shortages of maize, the African staple, have left many hungry. Tempers have frayed and many point to foreigners as a major source of crime.

But the greatest complaint, inevitably, is that "They are taking our jobs." There is some truth to this: Employers generally find Zimbabweans and Malawians make desirable employees -- they are often better-educated, speak better English and work harder. In my little valley in Cape Town every single domestic servant or gardener is now from one of those two countries.
Some are political refugees from Mugabe's Zimbabwe but mainly they're economic migrants, drawn by South Africa's more developed economy. South Africa's per capita income is, for example, 36 times Mozambique 's.

Thabo Mbeki's government has floundered in response, clearly unaware that it has been sitting on a powder keg for some time -- despite warnings from African ambassadors here. Astonishingly, President Mbeki has failed to visit any of the trouble spots or even vary his program of frequent foreign visits. This has merely added to the general impression that the disaster is due to the government's having allowed everything to drift -- it simply couldn't be bothered to do its job. It failed to exercise immigration control; halved the number of riot police; abolished the rural commando system that used to patrol rural areas; propped up Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, causing millions of Zimbabwean refugees to flee to South Africa; and did too little about jobs and housing for locals. Above all, in its pan-Africanist naïveté the Mbeki government assumed that all Africans are brothers. It failed to realize that to allow uncontrolled and massive immigration into a society already overflowing with unemployment is inevitably explosive.

The government has been frantically trying to suggest that right-wing whites or Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha movement are behind the attacks. This is ludicrous. Chief Buthelezi has in fact distinguished himself in this crisis. He is the only major black leader to tour the trouble spots, to commiserate with the refugees and apologize to them, and to sternly threaten that any of his supporters who join the rioters will be expelled from Inkatha.

ANC leaders have preferred to give homilies, from a safe distance, about how when the ANC was in exile they received hospitality from many African countries and everyone must accordingly treat other Africans as brothers now. This fails to understand the difference between a country hosting a few thousand ANC exiles and the competitive impact in the labor, housing and other markets of millions of illegal immigrants.

The government has treated the problem as one of xenophobia only, as if it is all about people having the wrong ideas in their heads. The underlying causes have not been tackled and there is no sign that they will be. In its pan-Africanist enthusiasm the government has now signed a protocol allowing free movement of people within the 15-nation Southern African Development Community. When this comes into effect shortly, many million more Mozambicans and Congolese could well attempt to move to South Africa. Apostles of African unity like Mr. Mbeki cannot see why Africa should not follow the example of the European Union. In effect the street mobs are demanding the opposite. Further collisions can hardly be ruled out.

Mr. Johnson is southern Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times of London.