Chief Justice Pius Langa, Chief Justice of South Africa will deliver this lecture, which will address the relationship between the entrenchment and enforceability of socio-economic rights in South Africa and the fact that the Constitution is best understood as a manifesto for positive transformation towards a truly equal society.

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.

The second edition of the African programme on Rethinking Development Economics (APORDE) is about to start in Stellenbosch. This fully-funded training programme (26 participants have been selected via a competitive application process) is a joint project of the dti and the French Institute and Development Agency.

More than 18,000 people have fled xenophobic violence around Cape Town since mobs began attacking foreigners and burning and looting their homes and businesses one week ago. Thousands more were chased out of their homes in the central Gauteng Province in the previous week. At least 42 have been killed in and around Gauteng's capital, Johannesburg. Terna Gyuse reports from a shelter in Cape Town.

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.

In addition to a conflicted identity, Mildred Barya argues that the xenophobic attacks in South Africa and Africa in general can be traced to the Berlin Conference and partitioning of Africa.

Until the colonial borders are removed we will not have lasting peace anywhere in Africa. Nobody is going to deconstruct the existing borders except a group of committed African thinkers and doers. The recent South Africa shame of brother against brother, sister against sister has clearly shown that we need to make the journey to Berlin quickly, to break the curse of borders that was inflicted upon Africa by the white colonialists in 1885.

The time is ripe to reverse the trend before other clean ‘fingers’ catch the infection and oozing pus from the festering, sore fingers. The disease is the same across Africa, it only manifests differently. It happened in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa, it has happened in Kenya in East Africa, it happened in Rwanda and continues to spill in the Great Lakes Region. It is the same happening in the Horn of Africa, now it is happening in South Africa, soon the entire Africa might begin to smell from these rotting fingers if the African Union leadership and other concerned bodies, concerned people, do not step in to curb the disease and rename the land. It is time for us Africans to change this bloody, brother-sister-hunting course and write our history as Patrice Lumumba dreamt when he said:

“Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity…it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets.”

South Africa reached pitch fever in its bursting hatred, clearly demonstrating a greater need for us to say; ‘Let there be no more South Africa but a country that accepts all Blacks, no matter where they may be coming from.’ Words alone do not bring a prophecy to pass; we are not in the days of miracles so actions must do. Short of action, South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, must eat the papers on which he wrote Black Consciousness. What is Black Consciousness without the African personality and identity? What is Black Consciousness if it is not all Africa-Black-Inclusive?

It is a big shame that when we were beginning to recognize and celebrate the African presence globally, South Africa announced its own drum beat and danced to a different tune. When we were beginning to warm up to the World Cup come 2010, South Africa proved that it is not worthy to host the cup, that it is not ready, not yet ready. For if many South Africans cannot tolerate their brothers and sisters from the closest, neighbouring countries, how will they consider the people from far off lands? The saying that charity begins at home does not lie. Who will be safe to watch the World Cup in the folds of xenophobia? One would rather go to a less ‘privileged’ but safer country than being caught up in the throngs of xenophobia.

The way South Africa has given vent to reckless violence shows there’s something rotten at the core. We are not witnessing the surfacing of new fear, but a deep decay in the hearts and minds of the killing groups. It is not about hating the other foreigner. If anything, South Africans started with hating themselves. For a long time they have been killing what is considered their ‘own.’ They did not spare Lucky Dube; they do not spare thousands of women and young girls who are raped and murdered everyday, making South Africa one of the most dangerous countries to live in. The killings have been going on, it is only now that they have reached marginal proportions and gained a new definitive target: Black foreigners. Immigrants.

The murderers have forgotten a crucial piece of history: They have forgotten that many Africans wept with the South Africans during apartheid rule. Many African countries mobilized logistical, moral and physical support for the South African struggle. And many Africans left their safe homes to go to dangerous South Africa to fight for the freedom of South Africans. The people from Nigeria, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Tanzania and several other places actively joined the South Africa struggle with good will and intentions of brother fighting for brother, sister standing by sister. They must rent their clothes now realizing not only the loss of unity that they embraced, but the shame and disgust that come with regression. The pain in a journey back to the broken road.

I did a small exercise with a large, African social group. I asked each one of the members to suggest which country in Africa they would not want to live in. 99 per cent circled South Africa. The most amazing thing is that places like Congo, Sudan’s Darfur, Chad, Somalia, Kenya and Zimbabwe where conflict is ripe and the residents are not just seated on volcanoes but are being boiled and cooked in the lava, many Africans still indicated a willingness to want to live there, to go there and help. To go and suffer with those who are suffering. This gave me hope that there is a revolution and there are Africans keeping true to the revolution, defying fear and other obstacles to fight for justice, progress and African-ness.

South Africa therefore has plunged in a senseless blood-spilling orgy. We cannot understand why this has happened if we do not recognize that a deep Identity crisis is at the bottom of the problem. Many South Africans have never quite accepted themselves as Africans. The logic therefore is simple. They cannot accept others who are Africans. Many South Africans haven’t felt safe in their own skin, in their country, in their own-ness, how then can they accept others? South Africa is warped in denial at many levels, confusion, reckless power and now, a terrible forgetfulness. This is the analysis: It will take a longer time cleaning up the South African psyche and reality than stopping all the violence in Congo and Darfur. The reason is because South Africa seems to be the only country so far that has an in-built denial system. In other countries when things are not going well, the masses and leadership to a large degree generally accept the dysfunctional phases and the need to change. There is a wide acceptability of things having gone wrong. In South Africa what you easily recognize is denial: It is not HIV/AIDS, it is not crime, it is not this and that... This is going to cost South Africa such a huge fortune in terms of time and name clearance.

How do we help South Africa to at least resolve the huge identity crisis and denial syndrome? The answer is in deconstructing and then reconstructing Africa as a whole and within that framework redefining who is a South African. Many of us know that our cultural ties and heritage go beyond colonial borders, yet we continue to wear the colonial blinds. Culture and politics have failed to make the interconnectedness shared among all Africans a check against violence. Perhaps it is time to go scientific. Here is how. If many of us are to do a DNA ethnic make-up test, we would discover various percentages of several ethnic groups that contribute to our genetic profile. This would give us good snapshots of who we are, our ancestry and our identity. We would realize we are yesterday’s people, we are much of today’s people and we will be tomorrow’s people too. In short, to borrow Alice Walker’s new book title, “We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.” There isn’t going to be a so-called pure South African, the other Mozambican, Malawian, because in truth such identities do not exist, have never existed. They were coined up to suit the colonizers. Centuries down the road we still let them make us, shape us, define us. What more could be wrong with us?

For a start, I think all the so-called South Africans should do a DNA test, government sponsored. It will make us humble and teach us a thing or two about union and diversity which culture and governments have failed to teach us. Because we inherit a unique assortment of DNA from our mothers and fathers, it is possible for one’s DNA results to be different from a family members—even a sibling’s. Does this mean members of a family who discover unique differences and some noticeable similarities as well should pick up guns and fire at one another, in the name of a different DNA composition, one being more Shangaani than Zulu for instance?

Before any peace movement can stop us all from shouting ‘kill the other, kill them all…’ perhaps a DNA is what will save us and show that we have enough of ‘the other’ in us; in our cells, in our genetic make up and ‘bloody’ composition, thus stopping us from wrecking havoc on our selves, the other.

* Mildred K Barya is Writer-in-Residence at TrustAfrica (www.trustafrica.org)

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

In the essay, , the authors write "...Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent." Can any further information be given on this crucial matter?

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/

In the same week that the Johannesburg High Court declared prepaid water meters to be "unconstitutional and unlawful", the City of Cape Town indicated it intends to roll out more than 20 000 water meters within the next year. Previously, Judge Moroa Tsoka found the City of Johannesburg's imposition of meters that cut off residents' water supplies once they reach the free basic monthly limit to be "unlawful and unreasonable".

The community of Motala Heights, set on the edge of Pinetown between the factories and the hill that runs up to Kloof, dates back to the early years of the last century and has a rich history. For the last three years it has been under sustained and violent attack from a local gangster businessman who seems to be able to direct the local state, including the police and the Municipality's Housing Department, at will.

As homophobic hate crimes escalate in the country, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community is concerned about certain information purported in relation to the gay community. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that information disseminated is balanced so that people understand its stance.

The UN refugee agency on Wednesday provided 2,000 blankets and 2,000 mats to victims of a wave of xenophobia in South Africa's Gauteng province. The distribution, aimed at meeting immediate humanitarian needs, was conducted in several police stations in the province in north-east South Africa. Attacks on foreigners since last weekend have left dozens dead and caused an estimated 13,000 people to flee their homes. Most are migrants from other nearby African countries, but there are also refugees and asylum seekers among the displaced.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has noted with concern the rising tide of violence leading to loss of human life, destruction of property and livelihoods, against foreign nationals in the Republic of South Africa.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/372/48212burn.jpgThe mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding, write Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji looking at the background to the explosion of xenophobia in South Africa. The situation is the culmination of policies that have made the rich richer, and the poor poorer. But "the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia."

The mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding. There is no point in running away from this. The edifices we have of Truth and Reconciliation, post-apartheid healing, rainbow nations and multi-party post-dictatorship democracies are coming down all around us.

What is more, the edifices are crushing down into a sea of ruin. Kenya, Zimbabwe, Somalia, and now South Africa are burning alongside bigger fires in Darfur and the Congo. And where a fragile peace now reigns in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, the poverty is so extreme that unless tackled decisively, the slide back into civil war will continue to loom threateningly in the background.

But South Africa especially represents a collective tragedy because, and perhaps naively, it has represented our collective hope for Africa. This land where, as of today, at least 42 Africans from other countries have been killed and thousands are fleeing, businesses destroyed and homes burnt, where the army is being deployed in the poor townships just like the days of apartheid, this is the land that produced Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Ruth First and others.

This is the land that produced a militant and revolutionary Mandela, a Mandela so sure of the righteousness of his struggle that at his treason trial, he described the ideal of a South Africa where “all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”, and as one that he was prepared to die for. That was in 1964. In 1990, when he was released from prison, and with apartheid broken, the promise of his struggle became a possibility. And the new South Africa became our collective hope. We clung to that hope all the more because in the same year as South Africa held its first democratic election – 1994 - was also the year in which we witnessed the genocidal slaughter of nearly a million people in the space of a few months in Rwanda. Hope and tragedy – these are elements that hover concurrently in our collective consciousness across the continent. In the rest of Africa, we have lived with those contending emotions, but somehow South Africans believed themselves immune.

But history is not without irony for in that same statement that he submitted at the beginning of his prison trial, Mandela said:

“The whites enjoy what may well be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery. Forty per cent of the Africans live in hopelessly overcrowded and, in some cases, drought-stricken Reserves, where soil erosion and the overworking of the soil makes it impossible for them to live properly off the land.

"Thirty per cent," he continued, "are laborers, labor tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages. The other 30 per cent live in towns where they have developed economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards. Yet most Africans, even in this group, are impoverished by low incomes and high cost of living.”

That was the Mandela of 1964, but he might as well have been speaking about the South Africa he helped create. For the Mandela of the 1990’s was followed by Mbeki who answered the challenge of this vast economic and social inequality by throwing at it the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy followed by the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) plan. These social and economic policies have enriched a minority, and impoverished the many. The poor have remained poor, but part of the class that Mandela in 1964 identified as developing “economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards” have been the only ones who benefited, and grown rich, from BEE.

That the ANC struggle would not have succeeded without sacrifices from fellow Africans is well known. As is the fact that the South African economy from the days of apartheid has been kept afloat by migrant labor. So how did we reach this point where xenophobia has turned violent? As in any situation – keep an eye on who benefits.

A government with policies that reward the haves - those who during apartheid already had something - and punishes those who had nothing to start with, has a good reason to find xenophobia useful. What racism did for apartheid, xenophobia serves for the new ruling class – its unjust policies, its failures, its betrayal of poor South Africans, are all blamed on the amakwekwere.

What should we expect? We now know that the even in exile, some ANC members were more equal than others. The elite of the ANC today was the elite in exile. Blind to the poor of Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola when in exile, how can we expect them to see them today from the high offices of government? And if blind to the cries and struggles of poor South Africans, surely the poor immigrant is invisible.

The Mbeki government has for the short term deployed the army to assist the police. The government will do what all other governments do – criminalize: it will criminalize the youth in the slums in the same way that the Kenyan, Zimbabwean and Nigerian governments have, in the same way the American government has criminalized African American youth in the ghettoes. The structural inequalities will remain, individual youths will be thrown in jail as criminals.

But let us remember this: the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia, opposed to the policies that attack the poor and reward the rich. There are many who understand, as did Steve Biko, that because of the vicious inequalities in South Africa, justice cannot come without redistribution of land and wealth.

Anticipating the violence,, PASSOP (People Against Suffering Suppression Oppression and Poverty) together with COSATU and other organizations marched against xenophobia on the 17th of May. Announcing the , PASSOP said that it is “appalled by the reports of recent xenophobic attacks in Alexandria and Diepsloot. We are appealing to all political parties and social movements within South Africa to address and clarify their stances towards the important issue of xenophobia. Foreigners in townships across South Africa live in fear, much like the Jews during the Nazi Regime. Their homes are vandalized, their stores looted and even their lives are taken. This inhumanity cannot be allowed to continue.”

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – “a coordinating national body of social movements, civil society and activist organizations – is organizing with its affiliated organizations and immigrant communities to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia” on 24th May. Recognizing the “origins lie within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of south Africans live” and that the struggle is “for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has created this reality” SMI maintains that a “rearguard struggles for safety and security of immigrants in the country must continue.”

Abahlali baseMjondolo, (Shack Dwellers) Movement says it is time for us to ask seriously the question “why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation.” Abahlali baseMjondolo which began in Durban, South Africa is the largest organisation of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa that includes tens of thousands of people from more than 30 settlements. It is this organization that says “A human being cannot be illegal!”

In this issue of Pambazuka News, we carry some of the courageous reports that have arisen for those who ally themselves with the oppressed. Below is a partial list of articles on xenophobia carried Pambazuka News in the recent past. They illustrate that xenophobia is not new to South Africa. But it had to blow eventually.

* Owen Sichone (2008-02-07)

* Koni Benson (2007-08-30)

* 2006-09-14

* Further articles on racism and xenophobia

*Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji are co-editors of Pambazuka News.

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

A lot has been said in the media about the ongoing violent attacks on foreigners, described as ‘Xenophobia.’ However, in accordance with the elitist method of news making, adopted by almost all mainstream media outlets, which puts too much emphasis on ‘expert’ opinion, mainly petty bourgeois analysts and commentators have been invited on major talk shows to analyse the situation and suggest solutions. Of course, their views, while very narrow and shallow, vary vastly.

Some Pan Africanist ‘Azanians’ feel that ‘black consciousnesses’ could be the solution. Blacks are killing each other because of a colonial mentality, the argument goes. Many others have linked the attacks to the country’s socio-economic conditions. Typically, the analysis on the root cause of the country’s scandalous poverty fails to bring in the necessary structural element. Others, including the DA, have blamed it on, amongst others, our immigration policies and failure to ‘protect our borders.’

While all this discussion is going on, we are losing out on a wonderful opportunity to get to the bottom of the issue. Mainly, because, the people at the centre of all the violence, both the foreigners and the ‘xenophobic’ South Africans, are not part of the debate.

And, in true denialist South African style, the government has absolved itself from any responsibility and has vehemently condemned claims that this is as a result of frustration linked to poor service delivery.

Instead, going as far as attributing the chaos to a ‘third force’ and the IFP, they have vowed to bring to book the ‘hooligans’ and the ‘thugs’ that are behind the atrocious attacks. In the midst of this, as part of the ongoing struggle for power between Luthuli House and the Union Buildings, the new populist ANC leadership has contradicted the government and has linked the attacks to government’s ‘failures.’

The politicians, pundits and everyone else has spoken. But, strangely, the people at the centre of the dispute have not. None of the radio or television talk show hosts which have been discussing the matter for more than a week now have bothered getting the opinion of the people at the centre of the dispute. In newspaper columns, the usual columnists have written page long philosophical, sometimes abstract, analysis of the problem.

In Alexander for example, to get to the bottom of the problem, should the media not be attempting to secure the views and opinions of people who attended, or organised the meeting that decided foreigners should be driven out of the impoverished township? And, surely, in all the other areas where the violence has spread, there are ‘ringleaders.’ Should these people not be the ones at the centre of media discussion around the issue? Why are they attacking foreigners? Should we not be striving to hear it directly from the ‘horse’s mouth’? Has anyone in the press even attempted to locate the perpetrators?

Clearly, if we are to resolve many of the widespread socio-economic problems of the ‘new’ South Africa, there must be a departure from the current method of news gathering. For far too long, we have been listening to ‘intellectuals’ and to fat cat turkey necked cabinet ministers, very out of touch with reality, in their chauffer driven vehicles and designer outfits. And, given that many of the problems have remained and even worsened, most of their talk has proved nothing but ‘cheap’ and populist.

Is it not about time we listened to the people at the centre of the news whose desperate pleas to the government, in the last fourteen years, have fallen on deaf ears? Or are we too afraid what they might say may be too ‘politically incorrect’ and ‘counter revolutionary?”

President Thabo Mbeki has given the go-ahead to the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to step in and assist police quell the attacks on foreign nationals. The attacks have left at least 40 dead, and thousands others displaced. "President Thabo Mbeki has approved a request from the South African Police Service for the involvement of the South African National Defence Force in stopping on-going attacks on foreign nationals," a statement issued on Wednesday from the Presidency read.

Jacques Depelchin reflects on the ties that bind Haiti to South Africa and asks: "In a country where the lethal combination of racism and competition has left a legacy of gross injustice, is it too late to suggest that those who were trampled upon should be listened to with the greatest care possible?"

This is a brief report from a visit to Durban, specifically to see for oneself places like Kennedy Road, Motala Heights, to meet with people like S'bu Zikode and Shamita Naidoo whose words continue to impact us in a way which is still generating new thinking. We were on our way to meet people who can be described as the staunchest defenders of the poor, and, by extension, of humanity.

Driving with Pauline from Maputo to Durban reminded her of her native lands in the Caribbean: sugar plantations after sugar plantations. However, for her, that was the 50s. Now, this was 2008, in the Province of Kwazulu-Natal, where Jacob Zuma, the newly elected President of the ANC, comes from. For those who do not know, it is worth remembering, in the name of always connecting the dots, that President Jean Bertrand Aristide presented a thesis in linguistics at the University of South Africa (Unisa) comparing Isizulu and Creol. I am still reading the thesis which can be found on line and downloaded. It was presented in November 2006. I hope and pray that President JBA does get invited/encouraged to visit the place from where so many Haitians originally have came: DRC. We could then look forward to another comparative thesis on Kikongo and Creol and another step in the process of reconnecting those who should never ever been separated from each other

Thanks to Richard Pithouse we were able to meet a few among those who constitute the heart of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), including Shamita Naidoo at Motala Heights and S'bu Zikode at Kennedy Road. Besides wanting to see the faces behind the names we had heard about, we wanted to understand how people like S'bu Zikode and his companions had attracted such wrath from Durban City officialdom in general, and from the Superintendent of Police Nayager, in particular. We wanted to understand how in the country where Apartheid was defeated, some of its practices are still alive and well.

Here were people who, living among the poorest of the poor, standing up and insisting on being treated with respect and dignity, as called for by the South African Constitution, but who, strangely, were being charged, beaten up and arrested by the police as though they were criminals. How could a police force, under the political leadership of the ANC, behave in a way that is reminiscent of the apartheid police?

This question could be formulated differently, and maybe, more generically, in a region and in a world where such drastic turns are no longer the exception: How do good people or, more precisely, people who could have become heroes/heroines of Goodness/Love took a wrong turn somewhere. Some may not like the jump, but visiting places like AbM could help understand how a Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, became what he is today, i.e. turning against his own people. Is it that easy to loose one's moral compass?

In a world where governments are stating their objectives of wiping all forms and degrees of poverty from extreme to mild, from endemic to periodic, one might be forgiven to think that the poor themselves would be the most important allies in such a project. Unfortunately, not so when one listens to AbM. Instead what one hears and what one sees leads one to a frightening conclusion. That is: how something akin to ethnic cleansing emerges, against defenceless people. The average person might balk at such an assertion. After all, cleansing has been more easily associated with genocidal behaviour against another ethnic group. Some might find it offensive and out of line to suggest that an ANC government could be accused of ethnic cleansing against the poorest of its citizens. Is it not better to think of a most outrageous hypothesis so that those who are currently responsible for its probable outcome might pause, pull back and change course?

What would it take to stop the violence against the poorest of the poor (pop)?

One of the possible explanations for the extreme hatred shown by Superintendent of Police Nayager, can easily be understood once one understands the context of the soon to be held in South Africa Soccer World Cup: in 2010. FIFA may not have stipulated that all efforts must be exerted to keep all and any signs of extreme poverty out of sight but the message comes through and RSA is doing everything to hide the offending communities away. It is not difficult to understand the reasoning behind this: people who come to be entertained by the Soccer extravaganza must not be allowed to be disturbed by the sight of shacks. Such a sight could lead some of the visiting entertainees, not to speak of the performers themselves, to ask themselves about the appropriateness of spending such huge amounts of money when significant segments of the local citizenry does not have access to adequate housing and amenities, such as water and electricity.

2010 being just around the corner, South African officialdom, at least some of them, are implementing the most radical option in keeping poverty/poor out of sight: removing the poor from the landscapes which could be in the visitors' line of vision. In the process, these poverty/ethnic cleansers have affirmed, in various and modulated ways, that the poor are not worth listening to, that their voices do not count.

In a country where the lethal combination of racism and competition has left a legacy of gross injustice, is it too late to suggest that those who were trampled upon should be listened to with the greatest care possible? Is it too late to suggest that while the TRC was a step in the right direction, it was bound to fall too short of the task at hand? Is it too late to suggest that those who understand their profession as that of repressing, oppressing and beating up, should be retrained to listen, attentively, and, wherever possible, with compassion to the poor? Surely it is not too late to suggest that as long as the poor are not free from the consequences of apartheid, no one is free. In parenthesis, that is why on Freedom Day, they, at Kennedy Road, marched to remind the South African Nation that, for them, this was Unfreedom Day.

It will be a while before I digest all of the words from S'bu Zikode and his companions, but there is a phrase I shall never forget: "We do not want money". This is the crux of the matter. In a world driven by the profit motive, competition, greed, selfishness, S'bu reminded those who would listen that they are not interested in what the self appointed discoverers of poverty would like to eliminate via charitable gestures. They want to be treated with respect, justice and dignity. In those cases where the law is broken, e.g. trying to get food, water and/or electricity, they are saying to the government "look at our situation. It is an unacceptable one to any self-respecting human being". Is such a demand so outrageous that it has to be met with the unleashing of extreme violence? Is such a demand so unreasonable that it cannot even be listened to?

When so much still remained to be said we asked S'bu Zikode "what is the way out?" "Healing", he said. Needless to say, given Ota Benga's motto –for peace healing and dignity—a very long exchange followed. In a post Apartheid South Africa, in a South Africa where the TRC had raised such expectations and led to such disappointments, is it too late to listen to those who articulate the spirit of reconciliation with the conviction of a Mandela or a Tutu? People like Nayager, Sutcliffe, Govender and many others who share their understanding – misunderstanding, really—of the poor, surely are in deep need of healing because in their minds the poor are not worth anything.

Is it too late, in the name of humanity, to slow down the race to join in globalization, the race to be part of the first world, with the collateral damage of maiming, torturing, killing those who are not strong enough to keep pace? It is our hope that the voices of S'bu, Shamita, and their growing supporters, such as Bishop Rubin Philipp, will re-energize, re-awaken the flagging spirits of those who had a different vision of Post Apartheid South Africa, one which was more in line with the prescriptions being enunciated with such clarity from the favelas of South Africa and many other parts of the world. Those voices are refusing to accept the transition which has taken South Africans, poor and rich, from the end of apartheid in South Africa to Global apartheid.

Seeing the citizens of Kennedy Road, of Motala Heights reminded us of their brothers and sisters in Haiti, in Brasil, India, and cities all over the world whose only prescription is to be listened to with respect, and justice as human beings. As they keep repeating over and over: they do not want charity, they want solidarity. They do not want to be treated as a humanitarian issue, they want to be treated as human beings. To them we say thank you for being strong, thank you for reminding us of our common humanity, thank you for your courage and serenity.

* Jacques Depelchin works with the Ota Benga Alliance for Peace Healing and Dignity. He is currently visiting Professor at the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

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

More than a year ago, the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) requested that the Human Rights Commission (HRC) host public hearings to hold leaders accountable for not addressing xenophobia, hate speech, violence, and threats to human dignity. But CoRMSA was told that the HRC’s agenda was set for the year and that they would see what they could do. Clearly they have not done enough.