On 18 May 2008, a Mozambican national was beaten, stabbed, then covered with his own blankets and set alight. His crime? Being an African migrant.
“The violence began in Alexandra in Johannesburg after a local community meeting at which migrants were blamed for crime and for ‘stealing’ jobs,” The Guardian wrote. “Within days the attacks had spread around the country, with Ramaphosa settlement on the East Rand becoming one of the areas that witnessed inhumanity on an unthinkable level.”
The violence left 62 people dead, 1,700 injured and 100,000 displaced.
On 24 May 2008, following the attacks, the Mail & Guardian ran an article headlined “The 21st century pencil test.” In the article it reported an incident in which a Zimbabwean woman was asked what an elbow is in isiZulu before she was attacked by the marauding mobs that targeted foreign nationals:
“They took my money and my passport and asked me what is the name of this [elbow] in Zulu and I did not know and they started attacking me,” the woman said.
7 years later, on 11 April 2015, xenophobic violence erupted again, extending from KZN to Gauteng and resulting in 7 deaths – both foreign and South African alike.
In October of the same year, similar attacks were reported in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, where more than 500 people were displaced.
With the re-emergence of xenophobic sentiment in South Africa in recent years, a Daily Maverick article noted: “Attacks or incidents of xenophobia are becoming more frequent and immigrant children are hyperaware that, at any given moment, their family could be next.”
This article was published on 5 September 2022.
