Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  In April 2015, the South African government launched Operation Fiela (meaning “to sweep clean”) with the ostensible goal of reducing crime.14 In practice, it turned into a crackdown on immigrants, leading to mass arrests, detention camps, and deportations. The government boasted that nearly four thousand foreign nationals were arrested in May and sent to the Lindela Repatriation Centre, an immigration prison outside Johannesburg. Human rights lawyers denounced the roundup as “a show of institutional xenophobia.”15

  As much as government officials have sought to deny the existence of widespread xenophobia or dismiss it as the unfortunate work of criminals, surveys of the South African population show deep-rooted suspicion and dislike of foreigners even though the sort of terror-related fears that stoke hostility to foreigners in Europe and the United States are completely absent in South Africa. Both crime and persistent poverty are huge problems, but they do not explain some brow-raising statistics: two-thirds of the population believe that refugees don’t deserve police or legal protection, over half of South Africans surveyed want to deport all migrants not contributing to the economy, and one in four would prefer to expel all foreigners. When asked to explain the causes of the pogroms that raged across the country in May 2008, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed migrants for taking jobs from South Africans or causing crime. More than half either supported the violence against foreigners or were indifferent.16

  Baron Mukeba, a Congolese man with the build of a rugby prop forward, was left for dead in early 2015 when he was attacked with an ax to the head near the mining town of Rustenberg, two hours north of Johannesburg. “They can attack you easily,” he says with a shrug. “The things that happen at night … it’s the law of the jungle,” Mukeba told me, speaking French over a drink in a small Ethiopian-run bar near his home in Johannesburg.

  It took him fifteen days to recover, and his attackers were never caught. “The police didn’t even try. They don’t give a damn. They didn’t even do an investigation.… There wasn’t even a trial,” he recalls. After being released from the hospital, he fled. Faced with this kind of terror, immigrants have turned inward for security. The Johannesburg neighborhood of Yeoville, perched on a hill overlooking the city, used to be almost exclusively Jewish. These days, it is full of Congolese and Ethiopian restaurants—a safe zone. South African taxi drivers and xenophobic gangs are afraid to go there, something that makes local residents happy. “It’s not easy to come here and attack a foreigner. It has become a stronghold,” Mukeba tells me.

  The sort of impunity Mukeba describes is rampant. Mukeba’s friend Prince Abenge Médard, a fiery speaker who works with the Congolese opposition in exile and various immigrant groups in Johannesburg, says that francophone immigrants have it worse than others. “They are hostile to all the foreigners,” he says of South Africans, but “Francophones are worse because they are really foreign.… To have a linguistic connection is already something. From the start, we are foreign.”

  He is convinced that xenophobia has been deeply inculcated into most South Africans and is being directed from above. He doesn’t hesitate to make analogies to Europe, but he insists that there is one crucial difference. “In Europe, it’s from the bottom up,” Médard argues. “The leaders feel the pressure of the people against foreigners, and they’re reacting to it. Here, it’s top down.” He blames the ruling party—or segments within it—for spearheading violence or condoning it. Only after the dust settles do they hypocritically speak out like arsonists masquerading as firemen. “They organize marches after having killed 350 people,” he scoffs.17

  Marc Gbaffou, the head of the African Diaspora Forum, an immigrant lobby group headquartered in the stronghold of Yeoville, also claims that the green light for anti-immigrant violence comes from above. “Many close to the pinnacle of power have expressed openly xenophobic views,” he points out. President Jacob Zuma’s son declared publicly that foreigners are a ticking time bomb and could take over the country.18 “When you tell someone who is not educated that, they take it seriously,” Médard argues. “People need to be conscious that we are in a hostile country.”19

  Immigrants in South Africa, and especially shopkeepers, have come to be known as walking ATMs. It is not because they are particularly rich but because South African laws make it difficult for immigrants to legally acquire weapons and for those without a longtime fixed address to obtain a bank account. As a result, they are known to often carry large amounts of cash and to lack the ability to defend themselves.20

  For many of the diaspora forum’s members, the South African reality they experienced upon arrival was very different from the rosy image they had of “the most open and welcoming country on the African continent.” Soon after moving there, Gbaffou laments, “people start losing the image of South Africa that we all believe in.”21

  Despite Mary Louw’s upbringing in Communist Party circles, foreigners were never part of the democratic South Africa she dreamed of. As we sit in the school parking lot, she vents. Louw complains that she routinely sees foreigners waiting in line at the social security office for food grants, foster care, or child support. “They benefit more,” she says. The government must “recognize us before they even think of recognizing foreigners.”

  In late 2016, Louw started a lobbying group, organized on WhatsApp, called “Proudly SA Citizens.” The message espoused by its members is not subtle, and the accompanying texts leave little to be imagined. The chats feature calls to evict foreign families from their homes alongside emojis, including a running black man, Nigerian and Zimbabwean flags, knives, guns, and swords.22

  Louw believes that all violence in inner-city Johannesburg is the fault of immigrants, and she insists that locals are the only victims, even if crime statistics show that plenty of robberies and murders are committed by South African citizens.23

  But as in many European countries where immigrants have come to be seen as competitors, the real lightning rod is jobs. The anger of poor South Africans is not directed at Japanese or Italian businessmen; it is fellow black Africans competing for the same jobs who are the targets of their xenophobic rage. Louw lost her job as a third-grade teacher, as she tells it, because Zimbabwean colleagues lied to her boss and alleged that she’d corporally punished a student—an offence in South African schools. She was unemployed when we met and had trouble returning my calls until a friend offered her a five-rand (approximately thirty-five cents) top-up for her cell phone. “If you go to many South Africans who are presently unemployed, they all sing the same song. ‘I lost my job. A Zimbabwean lied about me to my boss,’ or ‘A Mozambican lied about me to my boss, and I ended up losing my job.’” These foreigners are also “criminals,” Louw insists. “They are pushing us out of jobs.”24

  For a country that prides itself on having the world’s most liberal constitution—guaranteeing housing, health care, and education—the spectacle of angry locals attacking foreigners and burning down immigrant-owned shops does not look good. But political leaders, sensing that defending the rights of foreigners won’t win them any votes, have largely remained silent.

  As in Europe and the United States, nostalgia is a centrepiece of anti-immigration rhetoric in poor South African communities. “It’s always an image of how things were. How things used to be. How things could be,” says Ingrid Palmary, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. What is different and deeply ironic is that some of it is yearning for a time during the apartheid era.25 She interviewed members of the Greater Gauteng Business Forum, a grandly titled group that brought together angry locals who wanted to push foreigners out of Johannesburg’s townships.26

  Their complaints echo Louw’s grievances, coated with the language of reconciliation that pervades South African politics. “We had to battle for so many years against apartheid.… Now we are in the process of rebuilding the country to trust each other, to get to know each other, get to tolerate each other, to live with each other … to heal, and wi
thout any disturbance from them,” said one member.

  The business forum went to great lengths to push “them” out. Threatening letters were sent to foreign-owned shops but always with a quasi-legalistic tone.27 There was no shame in the threat; those who wrote listed their names and phone numbers. Looters often made a point of getting their faces on television when camera crews rolled up. The business forum unapologetically recounted how they would raid immigrant-owned shops to carry out searches for weapons with no sense that vigilantism was illegal.

  Ultimately, they were demanding rights for themselves that they believed foreigners should not be entitled to. “South Africa has got freedom, that freedom is not yours, it is a South African freedom,” another member of the forum told Palmary.28

  Just like Europe’s purveyors of white identity politics, who warn of Muslim usurpers, many black South Africans regard foreigners from elsewhere in Africa as new colonizers, the vanguard of a great replacement that prevents South Africans from enjoying the fruits of their hard-won liberty.

  The South African government was initially shocked by the various pogroms. Worried that it might be accused of failing to fulfill its international human rights obligations, officials soon settled on crime as a convenient explanation. If the violence was simply the work of common criminals, there were no fundamental societal ills to address. This approach has deep roots. During the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the key factor determining whether someone could request amnesty was if his violence had been politically motivated violence or simply a “crime.” It was a moral line in the sand.29

  Many murderers walked free after confessing apartheid-era transgressions and requesting amnesty; those who were deemed common criminals without a political motive ended up in prison. In leaders’ responses—and dismissals—of xenophobic pogroms today, there is an echo of this moral distinction. In 2010, the minister of police called attacks on foreigners “just crime.” Five years later, President Zuma insisted that most South Africans weren’t xenophobes and the violence was driven by “criminal elements.”30 The implication was that crime is an unfortunate nuisance but ultimately something that can simply be written off.

  Denial is rampant, even among people who see themselves as progressives and liberals. At a conference in late 2015 that assembled various left-leaning NGOs and academics devoted to helping immigrants, a trade union leader took the floor and gave a rousing speech about how black South Africans couldn’t possibly be blamed for hateful violence, because they had always lived happily alongside Mozambican neighbours. Prince Abenge Médard, the Congolese activist, was sitting at the table next to him. Infuriated, he rose to show the union leader pictures of the dead and mutilated bodies of slain immigrants on his cell phone.

  For black South Africans who have joined the middle classes, the places where these clashes are occurring—on the edges of townships and in shantytowns—are far away from the world they now inhabit. Like the well-meaning European progressives who never lived in immigrant areas and were blissfully unaware that rapid immigration sometimes leads to resentment and violence, many South Africans who have moved up the economic ladder refuse to believe that there is a problem.

  In much the same way that the European right complains about political correctness and the erosion of free speech, Louw believes the South African constitution is too liberal when it comes to foreigners and is not living up to its promise to its own citizens. Louw, like the Dutch AZC-Alert activists protesting asylum-seeker housing in their towns, insists that her speech is being silenced. “We have a democracy and … we have all this beautiful rosy constitution that says you have the right to freedom of expression and freedom of speech and freedom of association.” But, she is adamant, “we are deprived of that. If you don’t want to associate with foreign nationals, you are being labeled as xenophobic.”31 She also rejects the idea of hate crimes legislation, which would undoubtedly criminalize some of her own statements.

  Legal scholars across the world point to the South African constitution as a model document. On the streets of Johannesburg, and at the grassroots level of the ruling party, there is a very different view. “As rosy as it might look in theory,” Louw told me, “in practice, it’s not working for us.”32 It’s a remarkably similar refrain to Samuel and Pascal, the French activists opposing refugees in Calais, who complained of foreigners being treated better than the native French.33

  Louw sees absolutely no problem with Germans and other Europeans wanting to send Syrian refugees home and insists that the same must happen in South Africa, echoing the refrain of the European right, which routinely portrays young male refugees as cowards and deserters for failing to stay behind and fight against Assad, Hezbollah, the Russians, and ISIS. “Why go and seek refuge in another country?” Louw asks. A true fighter, she insists, “it’s one who lays down his life, her life for their people, right in the midst of where those things are happening.” If gays were under attack in South Africa, Louw says, she would stay and fight rather than become a refugee. “I feel I have to fight for my fellow homosexual people; I will never run to another country.”

  For many observers with a knowledge of South African history, the violence against immigrants from African nations is all the more alarming because many of the victims come from neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique that sheltered South Africa’s liberation movement leaders during their decades in exile. Louw has no time for this argument.

  She says she owes no debt to the nations that sheltered exiled leaders. Her own brother was killed by the notorious apartheid-era police. “There are South Africans, who fought with stones.… If my family died here and they refused to go into exile, why should I owe my loyalty to the central African countries? Mandela and his family owes it … but not my family. They fought against the same system, but they did it right here at home.”34

  Louw is preparing for a new battle, and she is not ashamed to advocate forced removal. “Presently, the government is refusing to listen to us,” she says. “The only way for the government to listen, it’s through violence.”

  A group of schoolchildren stroll past on their way to the train station, and two men living in wooden huts emerge from the small structures with laundry hanging in the windows as ash blows from a barbecue on the nearby platform. Children duck the fence and return to school with Styrofoam containers filled with grilled meat. A two-wheel trailer inscribed with the words Thuleni Burial Society lies in a corner under shade, next to an empty parking spot.

  “This is what we are going to do,” Louw tells me. She will apply for a protest permit and make sure her group is accompanied by police. “Wherever you are going to target those people, it mustn’t be regarded as an unlawful picket or an unlawful march,” she explains methodically.

  “I believe we should actually drive them out. It’s the only way,” she tells me calmly. “When I say drive them out, we should actually use force. Not force in terms of burning their shops but telling them we are kindly asking them to leave.” That polite request, she explains, should be backed by the threat of violence. Louw has no qualms brandishing weapons outside of immigrants’ homes until they leave the country if that’s what it takes.35

  I ask if that could lead to injuries or deaths. “I think it’s worth the risk. How else are we going to do it?” she deadpans. So what if people die? I ask. “It shouldn’t be the price to pay, but maybe it’s the only way that it will shake the government,” she tells me. Sounding every bit the populist, she tells me they need to “come down and listen to the people.”

  Even when Louw acknowledges that plenty of foreigners work hard and don’t commit crimes, she still demands their expulsion. In her view, the innocent are “silent criminals,” because they will have children who might commit crimes one day or take South African citizens’ jobs. “They are even more dangerous than the one who openly shows he’s a criminal,” she tells me.36

  Five thousand miles from France, and without a hint o
f hatred toward Muslims, Louw’s logic echoes the European backlash after the Brussels bombings of March 2016 and the frightening vision of Charlie Hebdo’s very large iceberg, where even the innocent are guilty when any one of their kind commits an offense.

  South Africa is far from Europe and the Middle East, and fear of Islam is not the animating force behind the populist backlash there, but the pattern of resentful native-born citizens mobilizing against foreigners and politicians’ responding to their rage is very similar to what is happening in Europe. South Africa’s experience should serve as a warning that the virus of xenophobic violence lurks beneath the surface in all liberal democracies. Jealousy, resentment of competition, and a refusal to share the fruits of a liberal state with outsiders is a scourge that can strike in any society, even when religious difference or fear of terrorism are not the catalysts.

  There has not yet been an explicit politically endorsed backlash against immigrants in South Africa. For all the violence at the local level, no national political party has openly campaigned on a platform of kicking foreigners out.37 But as the ruling ANC loses ground to the opposition parties, or as others see that the issue is a sure way to win votes, a movement like France’s FN or Denmark’s DPP could one day emerge.

  If other parties in South Africa start blaming the ruling ANC for failing to curb illegal immigration or failing to tackle unemployment, the ruling party could crack down on foreigners to regain lost power.38 The process may have already begun.

  In December 2016, Johannesburg’s mayor, Herman Mashaba, from the opposition Democratic Alliance, declared that all illegal immigrants should leave the city. “I want them to understand that they are criminals,” Mashaba announced a few months after ousting the ANC from city hall. “They are holding our country to ransom and I am going to be the last South African to allow it.” He promised to contact foreign embassies to give notice that their citizens were in South Africa illegally.39