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| A South African man with a knife ready to attack immigrants |
Running small
convenience stores in the townships has become a dangerous business for
foreigners. Often serving their customers through locked gates, they are
accused of spreading disease, stealing jobs and sponging off basic government
services like electricity, running water and healthcare. But as violence
against them continues, the
South African government insists that criminality is behind it, not xenophobia.
In a haze of
violence in late January, an angry mob approached a convenience store belonging
to Abdikadir Ibrahim Danicha. They pried open its iron gates and looted everything inside.
Even the large display refrigerators were carried away. Danicha’s life was
upended.
“South African
people don’t like us,”Danicha, a 29-year-old Somali national, told Al Jazeera,
while sitting on his bed in a small room he shared with three others in
Mayfair, a suburb popular with foreign nationals in Johannesburg.
The violent
outburst that led to the looting ofDanicha’s store began in Snake Park, in the
western reaches of Soweto, when 14-year-oldSiphiwe Mahori was allegedly killed
by another Somali shop owner, Alodixashi Sheik Yusuf. Mahori, a South African,
was allegedly a part of a group of people who attempted to rob Yusuf’s store on
January 19. His death sparked a week of mob justice, which appeared to be
inflamed by xenophobia. Scores of people were injured and hundreds of stores
were looted. As the violence spread to nearby Kagiso, a South African baby was
trampled to death. For the foreign nationals affected by the violence, the
actions of the mob were inexplicable. “I don’t even have clothes … I lost all
my things,” said Masrat Eliso an Ethiopian national, four days after his shop in
Protea Glen, a suburb of Soweto, was looted.
I don’t havemoney. I don’t have anything on ground. I’m scared
for my life.”
Calm was
eventually restored and most foreign-owned stores reopened. Shelves were
restocked and customers returned, poking their arms through the closed metal
gates of the stores to buy a loaf of bread. Groups of children clamoured to buy
lollipops, while tired looking men eyed the fridges for energy drinks. It
appeared to be business as usual, but to the foreign nationals who returned to
their stores in Soweto, there was a shared fear that they may soon be the
subject of another attack.
Danicha returned
to his shop in Mofolo, another suburb of Soweto, three weeks after the violence
subsided. “I don’t feel safe, “he said in early March, outside his partially
restocked shop. He is one of a few hundred thousand Somali refugees in South
Africa who have found some measure of success in operating small stores in
townships around the country. He is also one among thousands of foreign
nationals here who report multiple incidents of persecution. But Danicha’s life
in South Africa has been filled with hardship. And the scars, which run across
the entire left side of his body, act as a stark reminder.
In June 2014, he
and a friend were running a small store in the Johannesburg suburb of Denver,
selling groceries and basic
cosmetics when their store was set upon by an angry mob. “The first day, a
group of people came to the shop. They wanted to loot us. We closed the doors
but then they started stoning us,” he said. “Then, on the second day, they just
came and threw a petrol bomb at the shop. I was inside the shop.”Danicha was
one of four people who sustained severe burns in Denver on that day. “I came to
South Africa in 2012 and I thought life would be easy’’.
“Everywhere,
everywhere I am burned, “he said. “I was in hospital for three months. “After
being treated at the Charlotte Maxeke public hospital, Danicha was then forced
to rely on the Somali community in Johannesburg for assistance. “A brother of
mine helped me out by giving me a share in a shop in Soweto. “Two months later,
another mob attacked his store. “Unless I have the capital to start another shop, I don’t know what I can do.
“Estimates suggest that more than 50,000 Somalis have fled to South Africa
since their home country erupted into civil war in 1991.Many of them have
settled in townships across the country, operating small businesses among the
poorest South Africans. While the store in Mofolo has reopened, and Danicha
helps his co-owners periodically, he has not been able to contribute to the
capital needed to get the store sufficiently restocked. It is very difficult to
start again and again “
As researchers
begin to unpack the stories of yet another bout of violence against foreign
nationals in urban South Africa, many of the victims are beginning to feel that
the pain caused was not just the loss of goods, earnings and trading
days; “We came to South Africa because
we needed to save our lives, “Mohamed Rashid, an Ethiopian national from the
Oromo community says. He runs a store in Snake Park and is angered by the lack
of justice in cases involving foreign nationals. “The law is forgetting us so
soon we will also forget the law, “he warned.
Back at the store
in Mofolo, Danicha watches as his co-owners serve customers through a gate. He
is not sure what the future holds for him. “At first I had a plan but the plan
has been destroyed two times now, ”he said. With Somalia still reeling from
conflict, he has nowhere else to go. Despite the on-going violence, South
Africa
I came from
Somalia in 2009. And the South African government is good; they let us work for
ourselves. I say the government thank you very much and I was working myself
and I was looking my food and to trade. Some people come to South Africa by plane. Others come with taxis and
busses. But I took a very long route to South Africa. I came to South Africa in
2010 and it took me three months to get here.
This is how I
started, I worked and got together some money, and I put this money together
with other people. Then I acted like a supervisor. I would go to a place and
see the owner of the property where I think we can make a shop and I say can
you give us the lease I’m going to work in the building here. Then when we make
money I don’t take it all, we are
sharing. So if it is, 18, 19, 20 thousand rands ($2,000)profits, it is shared
between five people. That is how we work. When we make this money here we
working hard. In Somalia there is no peace there. When I ran away from there, I
was not the only guy. And I run because from Somalia there was no government
and I came here where I can stay and make a life in peace. I got the family
there but I don’t have the choice to go back hat time if I stayed in my country there was no law and order, I was
scared.
They must do
something about these people who are attacking our business and take
everything. I think other people are jealous. My shop was closed for 10 days
after the attack. After my shop was looted, we came back, and we fixed it. We
bought a new fridge, we made a new gate and we put new shelves. So now people
think we have a lot of money here, we don’t have the money because they took
everything. Because we also have to buy food, we have families to feed. But even
when I came back, I was told I could not open my shop. I went to the police
station and complained and told them that some people have given me this paper
that says I must close my shop or they will kill me. They give this letter to
all the shops.
They told us not
to open, to go back to where we come from. They asked me why I am coming here.
I said I live here. They said close your business, go back to where you come
from.
They are fighting
us. We called in the police. The police did not care. They did not listen, they
did nothing. They said, “Voetsek!”We are not feeling safe right now. It’s the
police who are supposed to look after our safety but they say they don’t care.
They listen to other people only. If someone attacks us they don’t care.
Despite promises
of help, the situation on the ground is disastrous and rebuilding almost
non-existent.With help hardly getting through, and so many in need, building
materials are scarce and flats for rent even scarcer – and expensive too.
The South African
government is not bad. But the people… they really don’t like us. Even when
they come to the shop, we are giving them big discounts because we sell
everything very cheap. But they are abusing us. Even the police when they come
to help you they first take money from you. There is nobody that helped us to
get so far in South Africa. We did by ourselves. I am here for almost two years
but I can’t leave South Africa.
We have problems
in South Africa but it is still better than Somalia. I am from Kismayo. If my
country has peace, I want to go back to my country. It is my country. I love my country. Family? (His face
creases with deep emotion) I don’t think I have any family any more. They have
all passed away. You see, the problem in Somalia is if you want to be safe you
have to join Al Shabaab, or else they will kill you. And I can’t join Al
Shabaab. They kill innocent people. I’ve seen this. There is no law. What we
need is more security from government. We just want to be safe.
“Of cource violence against foreign nationals is criminal.
But it can be criminal and xenophobic, it doesn’t have to be either or,” Misago
said.
And even before
the onset of the latest wave of violence in 2015, there was more to come.
In early 2013, a
young Mozambican man named Mido Macia was tied to a police van and dragged
through a street close to Johannesburg by officers. He had parked his taxi on
the wrong side of the road which was captured on video.
A national survey of the attitudes of the
South African population towards foreign nationals in the country by the South
African Migration Project in 2006 found xenophobia to be widespread: South
Africans do not want it to be easier for foreign nationals to trade informally with South Africa (59 per cent
opposed), to start small businesses in South Africa (61 per cent opposed) or to
obtain South African citizenship (68 per cent opposed)
The government
attempted to reduce the perception of the terror meted out on foreign nationals
as benign, unexceptional acts of criminality. If they were orchestrated
attacks, they said, ‘a third force’ was behind the violence, apartheid parlance
for acts perpetrated by outside forces, or intelligence agencies.
SOURCE:AL-JAZEERA
NB: The South
African government is not bad. But the people…. that was how one migrant sum up
the act of criminality in South Africa. To be blunt with the South Africans indigene,
it is so common with South African blacks to blame their woes on others...if
they are not complaining about apartheid, they complains of racism. Having said
that, South African men are bunch of lazy, good for nothing, #ukomboti
drunkards, criminals that hide behind job equality to commit crimes!!!
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