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Sam Muyumba, thought he was done with killing when he left the Democratic Republic of Congo. After civil war erupted there in 1998, he watched friends, family and millions of his countrymen die as neighbour turned on neighbour.

Seven years ago, he arrived in South Africa, the continent’s richest country, to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor in Africa’s best schools. Now, seeking refuge from murderous crowds in a central Johannesburg police station, he feels as vulnerable as he did back in Congo. “They’re our own neighbours, we lived together, and I gave them food,” he says. “Then, I saw them coming to our house. I saw them killing people.”

The anti-immigrant riots that have raged through Johannesburg’s townships since May 11, killing at least 42 and making refugees of 16,000 by May 21, have unearthed a dark truth: xenophobia can be as much about poverty as skin colour. The grim tide of killing, raping, burning and hacking that has torn through the north-eastern province of Gauteng, is centered on shanty towns such as Alexandra and Kya Sand that form a ring of destitution around Africa’s commercial capital.

While South Africa’s overall economy grows at a steady 4% to 5% and Johannesburg’s business district accounts for 9% of Africa’s GDP, according to the province’s economic development agency, on the city’s outskirts, lives have changed little since apartheid. Many families live in the same tin shacks they occupied under white supremacy. Most have no running water, sanitation or meaningful health care.

In this sea of unmet expectation, Muyumba says, South Africans vent their frustration on the only group more vulnerable than them; foreigners. As Africa’s most developed nation, South Africa, has long been a magnet for refugees and economic migrants. Since 2000, some 800,000 Zimbabweans have joined the tens of thousands of immigrants from Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Congo and Somalia, already in South Africa. Many of them have shared Muyumba’s plight in recent weeks. He was chased from his hut in Alexandra in the latest violence, only to be forced out of a second in Kya Sand; he finally found tenuous shelter with thousands of others at the Jeppestown police station compound in central Johannesburg. “If the government doesn’t do better by its people,” he says, “we’re going to be in trouble all the time.”

The angry disillusionment of South Africa’s poor has another very visible symptom: some of the world’s worst violent crime. South Africa’s police have been quick to blame the riots on the same criminals who, every 24 hours, murder an average of 52 people in South Africa. President Thabo Mbeki, whose official residence in Pretoria was burgled in May, has acknowledged the threat inequality presents, but insists his government is bridging the divisions of the past.

More than a million new homes have been built since apartheid ended in 1994, and Mbeki has now named a high-level government committee to examine the causes of the violence. Yet, critics insist Mbeki and his government are part of the problem. Last November, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated that 4.2 million people were living on 1 dollar a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. On May 21, the institute castigated Mbeki’s performance, listing crime, unemployment, education and corruption as key failures. “In failing to maintain the rule of law, the state had conditioned many poor communities to violent behaviour,” it said.

To be sure, that conditioning began under apartheid. For many years, violence in the townships was understandable; it escapes no one that the hot spots of anti-immigrant brutality today were the furnaces of anti-apartheid rebellion two decades ago. More than one African government has pointed out that since South African rebels were then given safe harbour in neighbouring countries, the millions of foreign Africans now in South Africa might reasonably expect the favour would be returned today.

Remy Kasanda long held such hopes. He had just finished high school in the Congo when he was conscripted into a rebel army. While he fought, his family was killed. Six years ago, he fled to South Africa and found work as a security guard. Now comes the reckoning. “I was at work when my friends called me to tell me that my house was on fire,” he says. “On my way into town, a mob attacked me with sticks.” Arriving at hospital, “the South African doctor told me: all you foreigners must go home.” Kasanda’s damning verdict on South Africa: “There is no help, and it’s not safe here.”

Courtesy: TIME, June 2, 2008

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