[Marxism] A spasm of xenophobia

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, May 21, 2008
South Africans Vent Rage at Migrants
By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W.DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG — The man certainly looked dead, lying motionless in the 
dust of the squatter camp. His body seemed almost like a bottle that had 
been turned on its side, spilling blood. His pants were red with the 
moisture.

Nearby was evidence of what he had endured. A large rock had been used 
to gouge his torso. Embers remained from a fire that had been part of 
some torture. Shards of a burned jacket still clung to the victim’s left 
forearm.

Then, as people stepped closer, there was the faintest of breath pushing 
against his chest. “This guy may be alive,” someone surmised. As if to 
confirm it, the man moved the fingers of his right hand.

The jaded crowd neither rejoiced nor lamented. After all, the horrific 
attacks against immigrants around Johannesburg had already been going on 
for a week, and in their eyes the victim was just some Malawian or 
Zimbabwean, another casualty in the continuing purge.

This nation is undergoing a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South 
Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their 
midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting 
mayhem, the police said.

But the death toll only hints at the consequences. Thousands of 
immigrants have been scattered from their tumbledown homes. They now 
crowd the police stations and community centers of Johannesburg, some 
with the few possessions they could carry before mobs ransacked their 
hovels, most with nothing but the clothes they wore as they escaped.

“They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this 
one is a foreigner and this one is not,’ ” said Charles Mannyike, 28, an 
immigrant from Mozambique. “It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.”

Xenophobic violence, once an occasional malady around Johannesburg, is 
now a contagion, skipping from one area to another. The city has no 
shortage of neighborhoods where the poor cobble together shacks from 
corrugated metal and wood planks.

Since the end of apartheid, a small percentage of the nation’s black 
population — the highly skilled and the politically connected — has 
thrived. But the gap between the rich and poor has widened. The official 
rate of unemployment is 23 percent. Housing remains a deplorable problem.

“That’s fueling the rage at the bottom,” said Marius Root, a researcher 
at the South African Institute of Race Relations. “There’s the 
perception that they’re not enjoying the fruits of the liberation.”

Here at the Ramaphosa Settlement Camp, the squatter’s colony southeast 
of the city, six immigrants have been killed in the past two days — or 
perhaps seven if the man found in the dust Monday morning does not survive.

“We want all these foreigners to go back to their own lands,” said 
Thapelo Mgoqi, who considers himself a leader in Ramaphosa. “We waited 
for our government to do something about these people. But they did 
nothing and so now we are doing it ourselves, and we will not be stopped.”

The authorities have inveighed, perhaps belatedly, against the violence. 
‘’Citizens from other countries on the African continent and beyond are 
as human as we are and deserve to be treated with respect and diginity,” 
President Thabo Mbeki said in a statement issued late Monday, expressing 
confidence in the ability of the police to ‘’make significant 
breakthroughs in getting to the root of this anarchy.”

But, among people here, a familiar litany of complaints against 
foreigners is passionately, if not always rationally, argued: They 
commit crimes. They undercut wages. They hold jobs that others deserve.

George Booysen said that as a born-again Christian he did not believe in 
killing. Still, something had to be done about these unwanted immigrants.

They are bad people, he said: “A South African may take your cellphone, 
but he won’t kill you. A foreigner will take your phone and kill you.”

Beyond that, he said, immigrants were too easy to exploit.

“White people hire the foreigners because they work hard and they do it 
for less money,” Mr. Booysen said. “A South African demands his rights 
and will go on strike. Foreigners are afraid.”

These days, the nights and early mornings belong to Ramaphosa’s 
marauders. On Monday, soon after dawn, they were boldly celebrating 
their victories. Stores belonging to immigrants already had been looted, 
but there were still fires to set and walls to overturn. There was 
dancing and some singing.

Then the police arrived, quick to fire rubber-tipped bullets. Rocks were 
tossed by the mob in counterattack, but in order to triumph they really 
only had to be patient. The police did not stay long. They could not 
keep up with the widespread frenzy.

Those left behind by the nation’s post-apartheid economy commonly blame 
those left even further behind, the powerless making scapegoats of the 
defenseless.

South Africa has 48 million people. It is hard to find a reliable 
estimate of the number of foreigners in the mix. Most certainly, not all 
immigrants push ahead of South Africans economically. But Somalis and 
Ethiopians have proved themselves successful shopkeepers in the townships.

Zimbabweans, who make up this country’s largest immigrant group, 
benefited from a strong educational system before their homeland plunged 
into collapse, sending an estimated three million across the border to 
seek refuge here. Schoolteachers and other professionals — their 
salaries rendered worthless by Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation — come to work 
as housekeepers and menial laborers.

Many South Africans consider themselves at a disadvantage with 
employers. “If you have a surname like mine, you can’t get a job,” said 
Samantha DuPlessis, 23, a woman of mixed race. “I’ve been looking for a 
job for four years. All the employers want to hire foreigners.”

So there is a nationalistic sense of jubilation in the areas where the 
immigrants have been dislodged. “The Maputos, we don’t want them around 
anymore and we’ll never have to worry about them again,” said Benjamin 
Matlala, 27, using a common term for people from Mozambique.

Mr. Matlala, who is unemployed, lives in Primrose, a community now 
emptied of its foreigners. The sections they lived in are being 
dismantled. First, the belongings of the fleeing immigrants were looted.

On Monday, the dwellings themselves were torn apart by dozens of eager 
men. It wasn’t difficult. Walls of thin metal were knocked over with a 
few blows. Wooden posts were pulled from the ground. Picture frames were 
tossed into a heap of rubbish.

Mr. Matlala had managed to get a shopping cart, which he filled with 
scrap metal. Each load, he said, would fetch 40 rand in trade, or about 
$5. He was hoping for three loads, more money than he had made in a long 
time.