Proposed reforms to Angola's Penal Code have divided opinion in the country about whether HIV-positive people who intentionally infect others with the virus should be punished. The law under discussion calls for a sentence of between three and 10 years in prison for those who knowingly pass on infectious diseases, including HIV.

Several hundred Malians fleeing fighting between the army and Touareg rebels in northern Mali have crossed the border into Burkina Faso since April, according to the Burkina Faso national commission for refugees (CONAREF). Over 300 refugees, most of them women and children, have been registered in Ouagadougou where they are sheltering in locker rooms in the football stadium, while a further 600 are setting up makeshift shelters in Djibo, 53 km from the Mali border and 205 km north of the capital.

At least three people have been killed after bombs exploded in two hotels in a town in southern Ethiopia. The blasts also injured five other people in Negele Borena, a small town 595km south of the capital, in the Oromo region, police and government officials said on Wednesday.

The foremost Nigerian rebel group has threatened to carry out a series of attacks on oil installations and military checkpoints. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) said in a statement on Wednesday that it would carry out car bombings to mark the one-year anniversary since Umaru Yar'Adua was inaugurated as president.

The UN refugee agency has helped almost 900 Liberians return home from other West African countries since resuming a voluntary repatriation programme in mid-April. UNHCR, with aircraft space provided by the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), has flown home 646 returnees from Ghana, 196 from Guinea and 41 from Nigeria since April 13.

The exiled leader of Burundi's last rebel group returned to the capital on Friday to begin implementing a stalled deal seen as the final obstacle to peace in the tiny central African country. Agathon Rwasa, leader of the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), arrived at Bujumbura airport with the South African mediator for talks between his ethnic Hutu group and Burundi's ethnically mixed but Hutu-led government.

Government spokesperson Themba Maseko on Thursday ruled out the possibility of large-scale refugee camps for the victims of the recent attacks, saying that government was in favour of smaller, temporary shelters. Mr Maseko, briefing reporters on the outcome of the latest Cabinet meeting, said government preferred to create smaller, temporary shelters that would be more manageable.

Burundian police and judicial officials should immediately release the scores of persons still detained solely as suspected members of a movement long opposed to the government, Human Rights Watch has said. They should also instruct security forces to cease such arrests. More than 300 alleged members of the Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People-National Liberation Forces (Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu-Forces Nationales pour la Libération, Palipehutu-FNL), many of them civilians, have been arrested throughout Burundi since mid-April.

The decision by Sierra Leone’s war crimes court to reject sentence reductions for two convicted militia members because they fought for a “legitimate cause” is crucial in ensuring justice for all victims of human rights violations, Human Rights Watch has said.

The Free State students who made the racist video are perhaps breathing a sigh of relief that they’re no longer the centre of the world’s attention. It was too much for them too soon. The world was shocked then too. At least they too know, no matter how revolting their little show, malicious prejudice conflicts with the idea of democracy and they are not alone in harbouring ghastly prejudices. They have something in common with all of us. Even a quiet prejudice seeds it’s acting out in others – its unwitting.

As of Tuesday 27 May 2008, there are 20 000 displaced foreign nationals being sheltered in 65 sites across the Western Cape province. The number of those seeking shelter differ greatly from site to site as does the nature of the housing. Communities have opened their halls, mosques and churches to provide shelter and amenities to survivors of xenophobic attacks and those fleeing in fear of being attacked.

All groups representing the displaced refugees will be marching to parliament on Monday 2 June from 10am (keizergracht str - next to CPUT (old Cape Technikon). Memorandum will be handed over at 1115am and march will end by 1230pm. They have asked the Action Forum against high prices to assist with the march. We appeal to all to spread the message and to mobilise as many as possible to come and show solidarity with them.

In response to the violence against foreigners, the Western Cape Civil Society Emergency Task Team has activated an SMS emergency system for citizens to respond to the violence. The Task Team, a coalition of TAC and over 20 NGOs, has activated a “NO TO XENOPHOBIA” SMS lines across South Africa. Says Peter Benjamin of Cell-Life: “Almost everyone has a cell phone. South Africa, make your voice heard to counter the violence. Tell everyone that South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”

At approximately 18.00 hrs on the 28th May 2008, the South African Police Services came into the camp with white tents and commanded the refugees to move to the Disaster management camp set up by the South African Government. The Refugees have made it clear on a number of occasions that they do not want to move to the South African Government camp but have requested that they be attended to by the UNHCR and moved to a safer country.

Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel laureate, called for an end to the "abominable" Israeli blockade of Gaza yesterday and condemned a "culture of impunity" on both sides of the conflict. Tutu was in Gaza on a three-day mission, sent by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the deaths of 18 Palestinians from a single family, who were killed by a wave of Israeli artillery shells in Beit Hanoun in November 2006.

The international community must move beyond providing immediate basic services and develop a strategy to deal comprehensively with the dynamics of the current displacement crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Despite a precarious security situation, internally displaced people in North Kivu and the communities that host three-quarters of the total displaced population are trying to move forward with their lives, and they are doing so with or without the support of the international community.

Amongst other things, Paul T Zeleza argues that in spite of the xenophobic violence being black on black, there is a "bequest of deeply racialized and internalized superiority and inferiority complexes at work."

The Pan-African world has been watching with mounting horror the xenophobic violence that has gripped several South African townships over the past two weeks which has resulted in the wanton destruction of many lives and property. Fifty-six people have been murdered, thousands seek sanctuary in police stations, churches, community halls and 'safe havens' or camps, and many more are fleeing back to their countries of origin as several governments desperately try to repatriate their nationals.

Our horror reflects our immense investment in the success of the rainbow nation born out of our collective abhorrence of apartheid South Africa as the supreme embodiment of the barbaric crimes committed against peoples of African descent over the last half millennium: slavery, colonialism, and racism. It also reflects deep disappointment that migrants from the neighboring countries and the rest of the continent are being treated with such vicious contempt notwithstanding their countries' unwavering support and sacrifices for the liberation of South Africa from the historic nightmares of apartheid.

To date, 35,000 people are internally displaced and more than 26,000 have fled to Mozambique alone, and 25,000 Zimbabweans are fleeing through Zambia. The scale of the violence has shocked South African civil society and humanitarian organizations, pummelled the rand and business confidence, and dented South Africa's image across the continent, shaking the South African state and its embattled lame-duck president out of their stupor of political indifference, policy incoherence, and operational incompetence on migration and the poor.

The current cycle of xenophobic violence--there have been several others--is a depressing testimony to the failures of post-apartheid South Africa to resolve the interconnected challenges inherited from the political and racial economies of apartheid: domestically the deracialization and reduction of social inequalities and externally the reinsertion of South Africa into independent Africa from its apartheid laager of isolation. While South Africa has made remarkable progress since 1994, not least in terms of economic growth, national integration, democratization at home, and reincorporation into African and world affairs abroad, social inequalities persist and are in fact deepening, and the dangerous and occasionally deadly myth of South African exceptionalism endures.

The South African poor are still awaiting the fruits of uhuru as the black middle classes expand and the white rich maintain their monopolies of wealth and privilege even if they are now joined by politically well-connected 'native' beneficiaries of black economic empowerment. In the meantime, South Africa historically constructed as a sub-imperial metropole ever since the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth century continues to attract labor migrants from the subregion and further afield. The postapartheid migrants are no longer chanelled predominantly to the declining mining industry, but find themselves increasingly competing for economic survival with South Africa's poor in the townships.

The demise of apartheid ended internal 'influx' controls into the previously designated 'white' cities and opened South Africa to new waves of African immigrants. Circumscribed by its conformities to neo-liberal economic policies on the one hand and its commitments to a Pan-African agenda on the other, the ANC government has thus far failed to stem domestic racial and social inequalities and develop a sound and sustainable immigration policy. This is the combustible brew that has blown up: the struggle for resources among the disaffected South African poor and the disenfranchised immigrants, whose very social and spatial intimacies engender the violent narcissisms of minor difference.

Whatever their debilitations and marginalizations from the postapartheid dispensation, the township poor have citizenship on their side, which they periodically wield violently to dispossess the immigrants, for petty primitive accumulation (342 foreign-owned businesses have been looted or destroyed), for national attention, to make claims for redress from the neo-liberal state. As is typical in such struggles, the former blame the latter of taking their jobs, opportunities, and women (the gendered inflexion of xenophobic bigotry), and the escalation of crime--never mind that levels of crime in South Africa are much higher than in the countries where most of the immigrants come from, itself another tragic legacy of apartheid.

But there is more to this depressing carnage of xenophobic violence than material conditions. Nor is South Africa unique in its eruptions of xenophobia in the Pan-African world, let alone the world at large. Remember the state-sponsored expulsions of 155,000-213,000 West Africans including 50,000 Nigerians from Ghana in 1969, 1.3 million Ghanaians from Nigeria between 1983-1985, the killings and mass expulsions in Libya in the 1980s and 1990s, the tit-for-tat expulsions of nearly 150,000 people between Eritrea and Ethiopia in the late 1990s as the two countries slid into a senseless war, and of tens of thousands from Cote d'Ivoire during its boom years. The list of xenophobic violence across Africa is a long and depressing one indeed.

One could of course blame the incongruity of Africa's porous national boundaries and the legacies of colonialism, the universal propensity of governments and the media to blame foreigners for domestic economic and social crises, and the rise of chauvinistic and explosive nationalisms in response to the stresses of neo-liberal globalization. In the case of Africa's former settler societies from Algeria to South Africa, via Kenya and Zimbabwe, there is an added dimension: the cruel bequest of deeply racialized and internalized superiority and inferiority complexes. The current xenophobic violence in South Africa is being meted out to what some in the country call "those Africans," or more popularly, the makwerekwere. None of the fifty people who have been killed is white. The anger is intra-racial, directed at other black Africans.

Pius Adesanmi discussed the social pathologization and discursive ridicule of the in an earlier blog on The Zeleza Post. African commentators and visitors to South Africa are often confounded by the pervasive sense of South African difference, of exceptionalism, the lingering racist apartheid myth that South Africa is an outpost of civilization, of modernity, on the 'dark continent'. Ignorance about other African countries is of course not peculiar to South Africa, nor is the sense of misguided national superiority. I have encountered it in many other countries in which I have lived in the Pan-African world from Zimbabwe to Jamaica to Kenya, not to mention Britain, Canada, and the United States. It is the deadly mantra of xenophobic nationalism: 'We are better than you, You are less than us'.

In all these cases, across the Pan-African world, the measures of the 'better than, less than' national discourses mutate and are articulated in peculiar local idioms, but they revolve around two axes: the relative levels of material development and the magnitude of the white presence. Thus, westerness and whiteness remain imprimaturs in the scale of human worthiness in the Pan-African world, the reason why diasporan Africans feel superior to continental Africans, why within the diaspora the light-skinned have historically enjoyed better opportunities than their darker skinned compatriots, why shades of blackness have become a shameful basis for distinguishing African immigrants among black South Africans, why the latter's xenophobic rage is not directed at white immigrants but at 'those Africans', the despised makwerekwere.

This is the racialized devaluation of black lives that we are witnessing in South Africa today in the xenophobic violence against African immigrants perpetrated by fellow Africans whose own lives were devalued during the long horrific days of racial segregation and apartheid. Racialized superiority and inferiority complexes have stalked the Pan-African world for decades, stoking the mistrust that sometimes degenerates into interpersonal and intracial animosity and even violence. This violence is the flipside of the collective Pan-Africanist struggles and ideals for the unity of African peoples and their collective liberation and empowerment. South Africans and all of us could benefit from a more systematic and sustained education about our shared pasts, present, and futures in a world that has devalued and continues to devalue our lives and humanity.

*Paul T Zeleza is editor of The Zeleza Post. This article was first published at http://zeleza.com

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48635que.jpgTo convey the reasons and effects of xenophobia in South Africa and its effect on the working class, Thandokuhle Manzi and Patrick Bond take a microscopic look at Cato Manor Township, one of the sites where the attacks took place.

The low-income black township here in Durban which suffered more than any other during apartheid, Cato Manor, was the scene of a fanciful test performed on a Mozambican last Wednesday morning.

At 6:45am, in the warmth of a rising subtropical winter sun, two unemployed men strolling on Belair Road approached the middle-aged immigrant. They accosted him and demanded, in the local indigenous language isiZulu, that he say the word meaning “elbow” (this they referred to with their hand).

The man answered “idolo”, which unfortunately means “knee”. The correct answer is “indololwane”. His punishment: being beat up severely, and then told to “go home”.

What was going through those two young thugs' heads? Why did others like them kill more than 50 immigrants in various South African slums last week, leaving tens of thousands more to flee?

Cato Manor has several features that incubate conflict of the type Thando Manzi witnessed – and was powerless to prevent - on his way to high school last Wednesday. The same scene played out dozens if not hundreds of times here in Durban's sprawling townships, where more than 1.5 million people suffer daily indignities.

Indeed, thousands of immigrants were asked such questions by assailants in recent weeks. Many millions heard of the elbow test and saw press coverage of immigrants being burned to death last week in Johannesburg's eastern townships, which ironically house the reserve pools of labour closest to Africa's busiest airport, O.R.Tambo International, the gateway to and from the continent.

Thousands of Zimbabweans and Mozambicans living in Johannesburg and Durban fled to the borders, but most went nearby to police stations, community centres and churches. The notoriously corrupt Cato Manor police station now has several hundred people sheltering in the immediate vicinity, and a large tent was erected for shelter.

A 15-minute drive south of Cato Manor is Chatsworth, whose best known community activist is Orlean Naidoo. She joined Patrick Bond at central Durban's main place of safety, Emmanuel Cathedral, on Thursday night. The Catholic church had taken in 150 terrified Zimbabweans, and that night Naidoo helped rescue another 100 from Chatsworth's Bottlebrush shack settlement. By Sunday that number of refugees at Emmanuel had doubled again.

Our colleague Ashwin Desai documented Chatsworth's role in progressive struggle dating back more than a decade (in his 2002 book We are the Poors). Sadly, last week, a majority of residents voted in a municipal by-election for the welfarist-nationalist Minority Front, with its single-minded emphasis on Indian identity.

And in Bottlebrush, low-income Africans were apparently incited – and immigrants terrorised – by an anonymous pamphlet telling foreigners to leave.

Naidoo notes the rise of racial and class tensions here: “Bottlebrush settlement has never been properly organised,” she says. “It is not an easy thing to do, when people are subject to arrest at any time due to lack of formal documents.”

In every locale, surface stresses that invite bitter residents to cheer on beatings and ethnic cleansing have deep faultlines. Cato Manor violence appears endemic for several reasons that Thando Manzi hears every day in ordinary conversation, to the point of stereotyping.

To illustrate, a taxi war is now underway, as one owners' association whose market has stagnated attempts to invade Cato Manor turf. Taxi lords from nearby Chesterville – a township two kilometers west – apparently instructed their drivers to begin expanding services into the Cato Manor Taxi Association's routes a few weeks ago.

The Manzi household hears gunshots most evenings, and it is sometimes impossible to move around the township due to flying bullets. One taxilord has been killed and quite a few innocent passengers and bystanders – including a schoolchild – were wounded.

Indeed, long-suffering residents know – named after the city's first white settler mayor - as contested terrain following British settlement in 1843 . A century later, Indians and Africans regained occupation rights, but the apartheid regime soon practiced a sophisticated divide-and-conquer that heightened both ethnic and class cleavages.

By 1949, Cato Manor's unequal internal power relations, evident in petty retail trade and landlordism, generated a backlash by Africans against Indians that left 137 residents dead over two days, with thousands more injured. Recovering from this catastrophe, however, the African National Congress began serious organising, and set the stage for women's uprisings against both the state and African men who patronised the local beerhall (where profits financed local apartheid), instead of consuming the women's homebrew.

Combinations of local grievances plus anti-racist macropolitics meant Cato Manor gender relations were as advanced as anywhere in the country. But by 1964, the apartheid regime overwhelmed social resistance, embarking on mass forced removals, leaving the land just below the University of KwaZulu-Natal vacant for a quarter century.

But like so much of our 'planet of slums', as Mike Davis describes these sites, a new generation of shack settlements then emerged in the interstices of working-class Indian and African communities. The post-apartheid government's construction of tiny housing units, half the size of apartheid "matchboxes", did not help. Too many quickly went onto the market and became unaffordable to Cato Manor's lowest-income residents, though immigrants have bought them and are settling in.

The ethnicised political economy of Cato Manor capitalism creates many such tensions. Speaking at a labour-community-refugee forum on Sunday, Timothy Rukombo, a leader of exiled Zimbabweans in Durban, described how microeconomic friction is displaced into hate-filled nationalism: “If you want to go home [to Zimbabwe], you compare prices and you see the large bus is a little cheaper than the minibus kombitaxi. Then when you go to the bus, the taxi driver shouts loudly that you are makwerekwere”, a derogatory term for immigrant just as insulting as “kaffir”.

Rukombo continues, “And when we are beaten, and we call the police, they never come.” In fact, when police do come – as to Johannesburg's Central Methodist Church on January 30, where 1500 Zimbabweans had taken refuge – then their agenda is often pure brutality. Host bishop Paul Verryn was beaten that evening, and all the Zimbabweans were arrested. But no charges stuck.

These sorts of grievances Thando Manzi hears continually, but on the other side of the conflict from Rukombo. At a time of roaring food price inflation – as high as 80% for basics this year - he prioritises a few structural reasons for his neighbours' xenophobia:

* lack of jobs, as formal sector employment dropped by a million after 1994, and declining wage levels as a result of immigrant willingness to work for low pay on a casualised basis;
* immigrant tenacity in finding informal economic opportunities even when these are illegal, such as streetside trading of fruits, vegetables, cigarettes, toys and other small commodities;
* housing pressure which leads many immigrants to overcrowd inner-city flats especially in Durban and Johannesburg, hence driving up rentals of a dwelling unit beyond the ability of locals to afford; * surname identity theft, which can cost an immigrant R3000 by way of a bribe for an ID document and driver's license (including fake marriages to South Africans who only learn much later); and
* increases in local crime blamed on immigrants.

Behind some of this tension is the recent expansion of the hated migrant labour system. We thought in 1994 that the ANC government would slowly but surely rid the economy of migrancy, and turn single-sex migrant hostels into decent family homes. But hostels remain, and in Johannesburg, the ghastly buildings full of unemployed men were the source of many attacks.

And even if racially-defined geographical areas have disappeared from apartheid-era Swiss-cheese maps, the economic logic of drawing inexpensive labour from distant sites is even more extreme (China has also mastered the trick), now that it no longer is stigmatised by apartheid connotations.

Instead of hailing from KwaZulu or Venda or Bophuthatswana or Transkei, the most desperate migrant workers in SA's major cities are from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent.

In a brutally frank admission of self-interest regarding these workers, First National Bank chief economist Cees Bruggemann intoned to Business Report last week: "They keep the cost of labour down... Their income gets spent here because they do not send the money back to their countries.”

If many immigrants don't send back remittances (because their wages are wickedly low and the cost of living here has soared), that in turn reminds us of how apartheid drew cheap labour from Bantustans: for many years women were coerced into supplying unpaid services - child-rearing, healthcare and eldercare for retirees - so as to reproduce fit male workers for the mines, factories and plantations.

Apartheid-era superprofits for capital were the result. Now, with more porous borders and the desperate crisis Zimbabweans face (in part because Thabo Mbeki still nurtures the Mugabe dictatorship), SA corporate earnings are roaring. After falling due to overproduction and class struggle during the 1970s-80s, profit rates here rose from 1994-2001 to 9th highest in the world, according to a Bank of England study, while the wage share fell from 5% over the same period.

So notwithstanding SA's national unemployment rate of 40%, a xenophobia-generated bottleneck in the supply of migrant labour could become a crisis for capital, such as occured at Primrose Gold Mine near Johannesburg. The mine's workforce consists nearly entirely of Mozambicans, who much of last week stayed away due to fear, thus shutting the shafts.

On the big plantations, northeast of Johannesburg, men like Paul van der Walt of the Transvaal (sic) Agricultural Union remark upon the danger: "It is not far-fetched that even farmers employing workers lawfully from neighbouring states could experience at first hand that xenophobia is not restricted to metropolitan areas."

What next? If you work for the state to impose neoliberalism on capital's behalf, as does central banker Tito Mboweni, you stick with sadomonetarist policies “come hell or high water”, as he vowed last week, and you maintain fiscal austerity, as finance minister Trevor Manuel also promised.

If you are a ruling party politician, either ignore the problem – like Thabo Mbeki, who didn't even bother visiting the conflict sites – or send in the army (a dangerous new development), or distract attention as much as possible through “Third Force” allegations. To explain xenophobia, minister of national intelligence Ronnie Kasrils harks back to an earlier threat: “We see, on the surface, that there is a duplication of what happened in the early ’90s. We know that there were political elements behind that. Are those same trigger elements in place now? We’d be naive to just write that off.”

And if you are an internationalist activist, like Soweto resident Lindiwe Mazibuko, you address the root of the problem by fighting for access to decent public services for all residents regardless of national origin.

With four other residents, Mazibuko won an historic court case against the Johannesburg Water company on April 30, doubling her free water supply and banning prepayment meters (though the city will appeal). Tragically, she died of cancer last week, but many more activists are inspired by her example.

And if you are a brave immigrant, we must be grateful that you reinvigorate our fights for socio-economic justice and against the new racist xenophobia. In solidarity, several thousand marched in Johannesburg on Saturday.

In contrast, on 25 May 1963, the Organisation of African Unity (now African Union) was founded by nationalist elites to support liberation from colonialism.

It is hard to celebrate Africa Day given that in the meantime, neoliberalism and paranoid nationalism imposed from above have made mockery of Africa's ubuntu philosophy (we are whom we are through others). From below, the thugs who beat up that Mozambican have merely joined a rapidly-growing movement: to barbarism.

*Thandokuhle Manzi lives in Cato Manor. Patrick Bond is an academic at the http://www.zmag.org

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Tuareg rebels attacked an army camp in north-eastern Mali where 17 rebels and 15 soldiers were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes to date in a revolt by the desert insurgents, the government said on Thursday. A Defence Ministry statement said an "armed band" assaulted the camp at Abebara, 150km from Kidal during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in Mali's remote north-east, where Tuareg fighters have carried out a series of raids and ambushes.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has begun the voluntary repatriation of Ugandan refugees in Zambia, some of whom have lived in the southern African country for over two decades. The first group of 39 Ugandans, out of a total of 200 settled in the country, were repatriated by commercial flight on 21 May under the terms of a tripartite agreement between the governments of Zambia, Uganda and UNHCR. The programme is expected to run until the end of the year and cost US$210,000.