Bartamaha (Nairobi):- I was walking through the streets of the De Noon township just outside of Cape Town last week — before the Ghana loss. Malusi Dyasi, a local footballer, was waving the Ghanaian flag. Adults shouted out words of encouragement from their corner shops, and children stole away from their older siblings to bumble after us in the afternoon sun.
A tournament where millions of people brandish their flags and drink copious amounts of alcohol could easily divide nations. Acts of hooliganism have been commonplace on the sidelines of past World Cup events.

But over a few short weeks here, Africans in South Africa were united.

“That day South Africa lost to Uruguay, I could see people starting to say those [immigrants] from the rest of Africa must [leave South Africa],” said Andile Tsbongolo, a boxing coach from De Noon. “Then after Ghana won, everybody was happy. South Africans and Africans were happy because Ghana is an African team and they qualified for the last 16.”

See, this street in De Noon was the epicentre of attacks on foreign nationals in the Western Cape in 2008. Shacks and shops were looted and destroyed after mobs attacked immigrants living in the area (mostly Somalis) with stones and bottles. Across the country people from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Mozambique – to name a few countries — were targeted. More than 40 people were killed and several women raped in the attacks.

South Africans blame foreigners for increased crime in their neighbourhoods and stealing local business opportunities.

“We know most of the guys hijacking cars are the Mozambicans, most of the guys who steal are Zimbabweans, and most of the guys selling drugs are Nigerians,” a South African from Johannesburg told me this week. “And Somalis go into townships and open shops and push down prices.”

“The prices are the same so that everyone can survive,” he added. “If you push down the prices, then the other guys lose out on business.”

From road to road in De Noon, I saw Somalis peeking out from behind the bars of their shops — their possessions and lives locked away from the brewing public hatred.  Most of them wouldn’t speak to me about the violence. But a beautiful Ethiopian woman welcomed me in to her stall with a fist full of oranges. Behind me she locked the grating.  Check out my photos of the area.

Etafariwu Turago had followed her husband here to South Africa after fleeing the political situation in Ethiopia. “The land was rich, you did not even need fertilizer,” Etafariwu’s husband Firehiywo lamented about his homeland. “But we didn’t have peace.”

The couple travelled through seven African borders to reach South Africa with nothing on their backs. They originally set up shop in Stellenbosch, an area around 50 km east of Cape Town, known for its university and sprawling vineyards.  But after being robbed at gunpoint three times in 2008, they moved here.

The threats followed them all the way to De Noon.  “When they stop here, they say: ‘Somalia move out, Somalia move out. Somalia you are out this day, you are out that day,’” Firehiywo said. “Those things we are listening all the time.”

But the couple say they can’t move now. They have nothing to go back to. They came to South Africa in hopes of rebuilding their lives, of starting over and they mean no ill-will to the local communities.

“No-one is taking the citizens’ jobs. The outsiders, themselves, they make a job,” Firehiywo told me. “When I came here, I didn’t have one dollar. But I didn’t sit and waiting something from God or something from the hand of the government. I just shake myself up and down.”

Hushing before the World Cup

In 2008, with South Africa’s World Cup bid depending on it, the government stepped in to assure the international community that everything was safe for foreigners. There were isolated bouts of violence, for example in De Dorns, another vineyard area, in late 2009, but most incidents were squashed and thrown under the carpet.

The thing is, under the carpet, the feelings and resentment haven’t gone away.

That’s why some people who fled the violence, refuse to go home. In De Dorns, more than 200 Zimbabweans are still staying in a refugee camp in the centre of town, on the area’s only sporting ground.

White tents line the field, flanked by women doing their daily washing. On a Sunday afternoon, a few men sit around a box of cheap wine, passing around a small cup. The government has tried to close the camp several times over the last few months, but the refugees are scared to return to their community.

“The only thing the South Africans want is to have this World Cup. After the World Cup, they are promising that they are going to kill us and if they don’t kill us, they will do something else very bad,” said Evah Chibukira, while getting her hair braided outside her tent.

Chakauya Musakwa, who has newborn twins with his wife Moleen, would gladly move back to their old home, but only if it’s safe. “The government wants to move us out of this place. If they can come and facilitate an agreement between us and the community people, we can go to back the location freely. But if they can’t facilitate that, then we will stay here until they kill us,” he said.  “We can’t go to the community and be killed there; it’s better the government kills us than to be killed in the community.”

The Scalabrini Centre, a Cape-Town-based NGO that helps foreigners living in South Africa, says that around 70% of the roughly 150 people they surveyed in May had been threatened with violence, the majority of threats for right after the World Cup. It’s definitely not an exhaustive survey, but in a field where little concrete statistics exist, it proves a point – that xenophobia hasn’t gone away.

The government has tightened security and deployed the military in De Noon  to quell violence in the short term. But according to Miranda Madikane, the Scalabrini Centre’s director, to really address the problem of xenophobia, the government needs a long-term solution.

“The root causes for a lot of the xenophobic threats are a lot to do with service delivery, it’s a lot about poverty,” she says. “And I think if those root causes were addressed, we wouldn’t be dealing with the xenophobic threats, the rumours that are going around in the communities.”

As the World Cup draws to a close, the fear amoung foreigners is growing. Yesterday a Zimbabwean man wasthreatened by a mob before being thrown from a train.  Hundreds more foreign nationals are packing up shop and seeking transport out of the region before the World Cup’s final whistle blows.

It’s hard to know exactly what will happen in the coming days and weeks and whether the government will stand up to its promise of stopping the violence.

I’d like to think that Ghana’s flag is still flying high in De Noon.

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Source:- cbc.ca

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