New wave of South African xenophobic attacks: What really happened?

The recent xenophobic attacks on foreign African nationals in South Africa has been the top of the news in African media houses and especially on social media. Loads of gory pictures and gut-wrenching videos had surfaced on the internet and it seems to spread angst and fuel riots all over the continent as of today. But the question on everyone’s mind has been; what really happened? How did these all begin? Did these South African guys just stand up and start killing other African nationals? What is the South African government doing about this?

Having lived in Europe for some years, I have had the opportunity to make friends with Africans from different countries, South Africa inclusive. So, when this new wave of xenophobia sprang out, I wrote my lovely, intelligent South African friend who is currently an Oxford scholar. We talked on the phone and she was able to give me origin of the current attacks.

This whole new wave started in Pretoria. It was reported in South African dailies that in the Central Business District of Pretoria, a South African taxi driver (Jabu Baloyi) witnessed a supposed Nigerian (according to many South Africans, Nigerians are known to sell drugs in the country) selling drugs to a young South African boy by the road side. The taxi driver on his part, tired of the menace that the drug dealers, who they believed are mostly foreign African nationals, tried to stop the drug dealers from transacting business as usual.. In the taxi driver’s attempt to do so, he was shot dead.

Mind you, transport workers unions all over Africa are known to be aggressive and dare-devils. It is the same with the South Africa taxi driver associations and its members. The death of the taxi driver therefore incited the taxi drivers in Pretoria to go on rampage with the plan to revenge the killing of their colleague and they started attacking businesses of Nigerians and later other foreign African nationals in the Pretoria region.

Complaining about the attack on its member, the Chairperson of the Gauteng Taxi Association, Abner Tsebe, was reported saying, “There are allegations that the police were there when one of the drivers was shot dead. Instead of arresting the perpetrator, the police rescued the perpetrator.”

The attack on businesses, burning of shops however, helped riff-raffs’ in the society get access to shops and private properties of these foreign nationals to loot. The foreign nationals being helpless also could not stand being persecuted and their lives wasted over the offence of a single man. They wielded dangerous weapons to protect themselves.

Johannesburg on his own was an entirely different story. It is no news that there is perceived suspicion of other Africans, especially Nigerians, by the black South Africans. This is very common with human societies, it is still evident in Western world today, many Western Europeans still have a perceived suspicion of folks from East Europe, Asia and Africa.

Many white Americans still get an air of inconvenience around black Americans and Latinos. Even in Nigeria, many Hausa still look at Igbos with a side-eye. Many Igbos still think of a Hausa man as a lunatic killer. Even the Lagos government recently arrested Hausa men coming into Lagos state.

So, with this riot going on in Pretoria, Johannesburg was expectedly charged. Unfortunately, a few days later, there was a fire outbreak in a building in the foreign national-dominated area of Johannesburg called Hillbrow. The charged populace therefore used this incidence as an opportunity to start the Johannesburg round of violence.

People got aggrieved and in countries like Zambia and Nigeria, the populace responded with reprisal attacks on perceived South African businesses.

The next question is, what is the South African Government and people doing about this? Let it be known that as this xenophobic attack is on-going, the nation is also going through a dark period of some sort of femicide. There seems to be a surge of femicide happening the same time the xenophobic attacks are occurring. The streets of major South African cities aren’t safe even for its citizens. The South African President on his own has been silent on all these happenings. Until Thursday, when he spoke briefly on the attacks, however majored on issues surrounding femicide.

My advice for my South African brothers and sisters however, is to borrow leaf from the Germans on how the people managed a similar situation in Chemnitz late last year. A big majority of Germans rallied round, organising anti-racism concerts thereby overpowering the small pockets of aggressive, angered Germans who thought they needed to kill every foreigner for the death of a fellow German caused by one foreigner.

For other African nationals like my fellow Nigerians. A pocket of people breaking South African businesses in Nigeria shows that we are not better than the riff-raffs’ that started this all in South Africa. Breaking ShopRite, MTN and others will do more harm to us and very little will be felt by South Africa. The majority of the shareholders in this companies are Nigerians. The bulk of its staff are Nigerians and the services they render are for Nigerians. The absence of all these businesses will therefore create a void to be felt primarily by Nigerians.

And for the future, its either as a human race we learn to drop these prejudices we have against people we don’t see as one of our own or we just wait for the next wave of riots. It might be xenophobia, racism, religious riots, election riots or any other name you decide to call it. But it will come!

Tosin Abdulsalam

Tosin Abdulsalam is a scientific researcher at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany