South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” turns dark as immigrant attacks rise

• Anti-immigrant clashes kill at least seven

• South Africans say immigrants “steal” jobs

When he heard angry screams and the hammering of hatchets on the door of his shack last week, Malawian Folias Sakai thought he was about to become the eighth person to be killed in anti-immigrant attacks that have swept South Africa this month.

Instead Sakai managed to escape the mob by scrambling over the metal rooftop of his shack in a Johannesburg slum into the safety of a nearby alleyway.

“They were going to kill us,” said Sakai’s Zimbabwean friend Tendayi Chimukako, who helped him escape.

Police say they have arrested more than 300 people in the last three weeks since influential Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini, an ally of South African president Jacob Zuma, said foreigners should leave the country, local media reported.

Zwelithini’s comments resonated with many poverty-stricken South Africans who say foreigners have taken advantage of lax immigration rules to flood the country and “steal” jobs. TV stations across the country have broadcast scenes of angry mobs armed with machetes looting immigrant-owned shops.

According to census data, South Africa has an estimated 1.7 million foreigners living within its borders, though many claim the figure to be much higher. Though it is one of the continent’s economic power houses, the country is nonetheless grappling with high unemployment, poor services and crime.

Zwelithini has since said his words were taken out of context. But the xenophobic violence they sparked is the worst in the country since 2008, when at least 67 people were killed.

As a result thousands of immigrants from countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique have fled to refugee camps.

Some of them spoke to Reuters from a packed camp outside Johannesburg, where armed police patrolled the camp’s razor wire fenced perimeter.

Chimukako explained that he had left his home country of Zimbabwe because of its economic collapse, blamed by many on nearly three decades of President Robert Mugabe’s rule there.

“There are no jobs, even the food is hard to get,” he said. “If I go back to Zimbabwe I will starve.”

But many South Africans for whom the day-to-day is equally tough, struggle to sympathise with the immigrants.