With the onset of riots in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa has entered the escalation of the conflict. A report from downtown from the Mail and Guardian, past Sunday:

Mob violence turns Jo'burg CBD into war zone : Mail & Guardian Online

Marshall Street is criss-crossed with makeshift barricades of rusty barbed wire, tyres and chunks of concrete. In Main Street, shops have been literally disembowelled, their heavy-duty Jozi iron shutters wrenched off and their interiors cleaned out, stripped of every Pringle jumper and pair of Converse sneakers.

Police officers in bulletproof vests, with shotguns slung over their shoulders, stand guard at intersections, firing warning shots over the heads of would-be looters.

Helicopters clatter above us constantly and sirens and alarms wail all day.

We catch a ride in a police vehicle and, duly outfitted in bulletproof vests, tag along with Constable Meshack Sebiloane and Inspector Klaas Moloi as they escort a Zimbabwean man to his shop to remove his stock.

The pavements of Jules Street are thronged with knots of men, many of whom are drunk and carry sticks which they drop hurriedly when they see the cops approaching. The officers stand guard, rifles at the ready, as the family pack up their stock and household goods. Their landlady is disgusted: "If they are forced to move out, no one else must try to come in here. I refuse to rent it to anyone else -- let it stand empty."

Sylvia Khumalo (63) sits on a bench on the other side of the road, watching in disbelief. "This is just terrible, we don't understand what is going on," she says, and the other old women on the bench murmur their agreement. "I don't like it -- I am a human being, they are also like me."

Not everyone shares her compassion. A group of young women passes by and they laugh scornfully: "Abahambe. Manje sizohlala emarumini abo mahala. [Let them go. We will live in their rooms for free.]"

This actually underlines a first facet in this: I'm very much convinced this is also a generational divide between those who've lived through the apartheid days and the younger generation who have little emotional ties left with the past - except that a large majority of them still live in deplorable conditions and that economic apartheid remains a fact of life.

Monday has been worse than Sunday. Riots have now spread to townships all over Gauteng province: Germiston, Kya Sands, Reiger Park, Tembisa, it goes on and on. There has been fighting all day long and the incoming pictures are repulsing, shocking, horrific - and so is the one picture that has become an emblem - and I will show it:

Mob violence sweeps Gauteng : Mail & Guardian Online

On Sunday an immigrant died after being covered with his own blankets and set alight. The gruesome image of the human fireball was captured on the front-page of several South African papers on Monday.

Gauteng reels under xenophobic attacks : Mail & Guardian Online

Deadly day
Earlier, police recovered the hacked body parts of a Malawian national on a sandy road in Ramaphosa township and, near Primrose, one person with Mozambican identification papers in his pocket was found dead. Two other Mozambicans were seriously beaten.

In Zamimpilo, outside Riverlea on the West Rand, at least 50 shacks were burned. Foreign nationals in the area were taken to safety at a community centre.

In Kya Sands, an industrial area close to informal settlements, groups of people began throwing stones at each other after a community meeting, but the situation was brought under control, said police spokesperson Superintendent Lungelo Dlamini.

In the Jerusalem informal settlement, near Boksburg, police came under fire as they tried to stop a group of about 500 people from looting shops there.

Police in Cape Town were identifying possible flashpoints for xenophobic violence and would have units on standby, the city administration said on Monday.

The pattern I described for Alexandra township past week is now seen everywhere: police stations, community buildings, churches have become the safe-haven for thousands and thousands of people. Why do we see violence continue to spread? Because it's a strategy that is paying off for those who want the foreigners gone: people are leaving in droves, by the thousands. Park Station, a coach hub in Joburg is packed, one coach after another sets off, according to a witness I talked to today.

The Cape provinces and other areas remain apparently unaffected by all of this: it is no surprise that in Gauteng these tensions come to a head. Gauteng, and Johannesburg especially, have been the very nexus of economic migrants from other African countries since apartheid ended. It forms the economic heart of the country; it's the richest city on the continent and it draws people by the hundreds of thousands. It's also one reason why it harbours some of the world's worst squalor - the city can simply not keep up with immigrants, either from outside the country or coming from the rural areas.

There are a few points I'd like to underline which I have rarely seen mentioned in European press.

Firstly. A scary element in all of this is that also South Africans have been assaulted, raped, murdered. Why is that? Because the organisation and execution of all riots and plunder are dominantly run by Zulu. Anyone found who's not capable to speak proper IsiZulu becomes a target. Thus: there is a tribal element in all of this. People who speak SePedi or Venda (which are South African, officially recognised languages!!) have also been molested. And NB, the targeted Ndebele from Zimbabwe (who are already terrorised by Robert Mugabe) are the "cousins" of the Zulu - their languages are near identical!
Mob violence turns Jo'burg CBD into war zone : Mail & Guardian Online

"Since Zuma won the ANC presidency, they think they own South Africa. If they meet someone in the street and that person can't answer questions in isiZulu, they insult them and beat them," she says.

It's a story we are to hear over and over again -- and not just from foreigners. South Africans who speak Shangaan, Venda and Pedi report being attacked and told to go back to Limpopo.

And:

Gauteng reels under xenophobic attacks : Mail & Guardian Online

Though many foreigners were targeted in mob attacks, causing thousands to flee their homes for the safety of community centres and police stations, South African citizens were also reportedly victimised, with, for example, Pedi and Shangaan people being told by Zulu antagonists to "go back to Limpopo".

"We will burn the Shangaans if they don't go back," were the chilling words of a 25-year-old man arrested for public violence in Ramaphosa on the East Rand on Monday as police deployed specialists to stop the xenophobic attacks.

"We will fight for this country. We will keep on going, they can't stop us," said the unemployed man, speaking to reporters through the bars of a holding cell at the Reiger Park police station.

South Africa has seen most of this before: Zimbabwean refugees have been targeted frequently and there have been on and off flares of xenophobic attacks for the past year for as long as I've been reading papers here, most of them contained in only one township. The difference today is the scale at which these attacks are happening.

It is significant however that Jacob Zuma, the recently chosen ANC leader who had no qualms to let his admirers glorify Zulu-ness, has spoken out against the violence in strong terms:

Mob violence sweeps Gauteng : Mail & Guardian Online

n Pretoria, Zuma addressed a fully packed hall at the University of Pretoria's Vista campus in Mamelodi.

"We cannot allow South Africa to be famous for xenophobia. We cannot be a xenophobic country," he said, adding that he could not understand how people could attack foreigners when ANC members had sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

The address followed Zuma's meeting with local stakeholders -- including the Somali Association of South Africa -- to address issues facing the community, including xenophobia.

He said community leaders had informed him that residents had identified those behind xenophobic attacks but that when the information was taken to the police, they did not act on it. "We cannot have the police who are not active to deal with the issue because in no time this matter is going to take a different direction."

But Zuma is a respected ANC freedom fighter who is 66 years old; he also represents the older generation.

What does President Mbeki do?

Mob violence sweeps Gauteng : Mail & Guardian Online

President Thabo Mbeki announced on Sunday that a panel had been set up to look into the attacks.

snip

Speaking at San Lameer after a meeting of the International Investment Council, Mbeki said it is important for police to act firmly. "We hope that the panel and the police will work together and help us answer who is behind this."

A panel. A freaking panel. This is total madness at the scale at which this has been developing.

Here is another point that should be stressed continuously: the criminal elements active in the mobs should not be underestimated. The rioting mobs work hand in glove with criminal gangs who have seized each and every opportunity to plunder ruthlessly. Xenophobia has joined with unfettered hooliganism, full stop. Criminal gangs are profiting from fanning the flames.

In the meantime, Mbeki refuses to even open up the discussion to bring in the army. Perhaps Mbeki feels that bringing in the army to restore order would give South Africa a bad look, yet exactly because he does little to none, the riots continue, damaging the prestige of South Africa. Catch 22.


I will speculate very briefly on what has set this off. The Mail and Guardian brought a timeline in their edition of last Saturday which is partially on-line and it targets a group operating in Alexandra township, the ARA, which the M&G left undefined and I've no further information on them:

'They must leave or die ...' : Mail & Guardian Online

Tuesday May 6

During a meeting residents threatened to take matters into their own hands and remove foreigners from the area, according to Alexandra Community Police Forum (ACPF) chairperson Thomas Sithole. Sithole said police assured residents they would deal with the issue.

Saturday May 10

Then the renegade Alexandra Residents Association (ARA) held a meeting with taxi drivers to discuss concerns that foreigners were taking over the taxi industry.

Taxi drivers were unhappy about the growing number of foreigners working in the industry. They said foreigners were taking away their jobs and were willing to work for lower wages.

Chairperson of the Zimbabwe Diaspora Forum, Sox Chikowero, who attended the meeting, says people accused Zimbaweans of driving crime in the area and "taking away our jobs and our women". Chikowero said it was agreed that non-nationals would be driven from the township.

Sunday May 11

By nightfall mobs were rampaging through Alex.

There is another rumour doing the rounds, which is bone chilling in its scope, but cannot be relied on at all.  None of the succeeding has been confirmed in any way, but I no longer find it silly to keep it in the back of the mind: the Zimbabwe factor. A likely date for the presidential run-off in Zimbabwe has been set, perhaps lost in the turmoil of the earthquake in China and the catastrophe in Myanmar/Burma: June 27. Is it beneficial for Mugabe to undermine the relative security of its southern neighbour, to distract a pliable Mbeki even further? The role of the CIO, the dreaded secret police of Zimbabwe, in stirring up part of the troubles in Alexandra has been circulating for a few days now, but I once again want to stress it could likely be unfounded chatter.

Update [2008-5-20 6:1:0 by Nomad]:A brief Addendum: I want to come clean in all honesty that with yesterday's post in the Salon, speculating on the interference of Zimbabwe, I jumped the gun. I've scaled down the rhetoric in this diary when I had to conclude there was not one reliable verification of these rumours. Although possible, the riots have everything in them to have developed spontaneously. However, it goes without saying that the exodus of Zimbabweans under Mugabe's regime has massively contributed to the development of xenophobic tensions and are, ultimately, an expression of Zimbabwe as a failing state. (end of addendum)

That's it for now. A personal note: My university and the neighbourhood where I live are entirely unaffected by any this - as said, I wasn't even aware of what was happening in downtown Joburg yesterday. For now, I've suspended my activities in the townships and I'm taking care that I do not travel alone. I'm blessed to live with five people in one house; we're all looking after each other. Personally I do not have worries, but I have the more for this country and its northern brother, Zimbabwe. It's bitter and frustrating to watch from so close and yet so far what's unfolding.

I sincerely hope tomorrow will bring better news. I'm done being angry; weariness remains.