Cape Town — "My worry is that my children are going to be slaves because they won't have anything. These foreign people come to South Africa with nothing, but tomorrow he has cash, third day he owns a shop and fourth day he has a car. Where do these foreign people get this money?"

Small business owners are venting their frustrations on 'foreign nationals' - among them many Somalis - who own shops in the country's townships, causing experts to warn that xenophobic violence could increase.

Businesspeople from four of Cape Town's impoverished communities - Delft, Masiphumelele, Samora Machel and Gugulethu - held several meetings in late May and early June to discuss ways of ridding their communities of foreign-owned shops.

The meetings echo those held a year ago in the Gauteng townships of Atteridgville and Alexandra, shortly before over 150,000 foreign nationals were displaced by a wave of xenophobic violence that swept the country, killing 62 people with thousands more beaten or raped.

On Jun. 14 this year, an unidentified man delivered letters to all 'Somali' shops in Gugulethu, giving the shopkeepers until Jun. 20 to leave the area.

The handwritten, photocopied letters purported to come from the Gugulethu Business Forum, and even though some members distanced themselves from the letters, others accused Somali shopkeepers of having a deliberate agenda to 'kill off' local business.

"Somalians want to be the cheapest business people in town. If they see that am also pricing my goods like them they are going to find ways to undercut me," said one woman shopkeeper who declined to be named for this story.

Fear and loathing in the Western Cape

Foreign nationals who own shops are not the only ones at risk. John Kwigwasa arrived in South Africa from the DRC eight years ago. He has legal refugee status and doesn't own a shop but says he has been attacked over seven times since 2002 - most recently when he was shot in the hip in Gugulethu at the end of May.

Since last May, Kwigwasa has lived at the Blue Waters displaced peoples camp, which city authorities want to shut down. Aware that the camp will not be open forever, Kwigwasa has been looking around for alternative accommodation for his family.

He told IPS "the city is forcing us to reintegrate so I decided to get a job and look for a place in Gugulethu. I was with my friend, Rajab Ramazani, when a group of local guys told us 'why don't you go to your country, you are taking our jobs and driving nice cars'. Then one of them shot me in the hip".

"They drove away with Rajab and kept in the boot of the car all night. They took him to a railway track early the next morning. While they were deciding to kill him or not, he ran away and they shot him in the leg" said Kwigwasa.

Kwigwasa and Rajab are recovering from their injuries as best they can in the cold, windswept Blue Waters camp.

"At the end of the day there is going to be a lot of trouble in my township. If I had money I would have left long time ago because there is no peace here. And those boys from Somalia have come and created more troubles," said another, who identified himself only as 'Boyce'.

Add the plans to remove 'Somali shopkeepers' to the steady number of attacks and murders of 'foreign nationals' and the mix becomes deadly, says Loren Landau, director of the University of the Witwatersrand's Forced Migration Studies unit.

"Violence against foreigners is rapidly becoming fully integrated into the standard politics of some townships," says Landau.

In May 2008, over 150,000 foreign nationals were displaced by a wave of xenophobic violence that swept the country, with thousands being murdered or raped.

But since the "officially recognised" outbreak of xenophobia ended last June, police have not kept official statistics of xenophobia-related murders, claiming instead that any deaths of foreign nationals are the result of South Africa's generally high crime rate.

This itself has fuelled xenophobia, says the Somali Association of South Africa.

"There is a culture of impunity developing. When Somali traders are murdered the police don't act on it. There is a perception that if people kill or do whatever to Somalis, nothing will happen to them," says the Somali Association of South Africa's Western Cape co-ordinator Hussein Omar.

Omar's fears appear to be borne out by recent events - in the last fortnight, two young Somali shop assistants were burnt to death, one Zimbabwean and one national of Bangladesh murdered, three shop assistants injured with gunshot wounds in Delft, and another 'Somali shop' in the Cape Town suburb Khayelitsha set alight.

Omar is investigating the deaths of the Somali shop assistants - Omar Josef and Hazim Amad, who died when their shop - where they sleep - was set ablaze at two a.m.

The local police told IPS they have already ruled out xenophobia even though the investigation is still under way. Somali residents in the community say the shop was doused with petrol before being set alight but the investigator, Detective Constable Eldoret van der Merwe, would only say "at this stage we can't say how the fire started".

In Gugulethu, a local activist group - the Gugulethu Anti-Eviction Campaign - tried for three weeks to convince the Gugulethu Business Forum not to vent their anger on Somali shopkeepers, but instead to ask government why it was not doing more to support small business.
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But the Gugulethu Anti-Eviction Campaign's Mncedisi Twalo says after the businesspeople delivered the threatening letters to 'Somali' shops, he was forced to ask the police for a guarantee that they would protect the Somali shopkeepers.

The police have since arranged meetings between local businesspeople and the Somali shopkeepers, which they have closed to the media.

Omar fears that the actions of small groups of local businesspeople could become a catalyst for other people to vent their frustrations on 'foreign nationals'.

And Landau says that as people come to accept that it is legitimate to plot against "foreign" business people, "the violence will only spread".

You would have to pay me to ever step foot into that country.

Why are those lazy South Africans so busy complaining about foreigners becoming successful, and not finding new ways to compete with them? It's like they're missing an entire segment of their brains.

Foreigners in South Africa should just leave, it's beyond me how they put up with these barbaric individuals for so long. . . . .

. . . .Out of control Xenophobia, one in four men are rapists, baby rapers, murders every 20 or so seconds, etcetera. Viva la South Africa!

/rant over

@ onenaija

I'm a black south african, and I do not support xenophobia; my own people's activities shame and pain me.

Having said that, why are u always the one reporting evry crime story that takes place in SA
GET A LIFE MAN, surely there's more to your life than sitting all day googling and reporting SA crime on nairaland I can just imagine that the grosser the crime, the wider your grin. The whole world knows knows SA is crime-riddled so your exposes are not telling anyone anything new. Whats with the SA obsession, do we threaten Nigeria in any way? is that why u so hellbent on exposing us??

D fact is most south africans re yet to recover 4rm aparthaid,infact after somalis,the next ppl they blame for thier woes re nigerians.My Uncle is a living witness to dis brutality,reason of course is dat we re taking dier jobs.It's high time d SA government did sth abt d menace cos in the root of dis xenophobic behavior is poverty.The reality in SA is dat U see a lot of wealth but in d hands of d minority whites and other foreign nationals,income isn't distributed evenly or atleast close to it.The economy of a country shouldn't rest in d hands of a few minority else they can hold d country to ransom as in the case zimbabwe.D SA Government should come up with policies dat make it easier for blacks to get more involved in d ownership of big corporations,give them more preference in educational dev,sth like d positive discrimination we ve in d US and support dier small biz so that they can compete favorably with other nationals in thier line of biz without feeling threatened.Zuma it's time to walk d Talk.

hi rhymz

i agree with u, south africans need to stop blaming foreigners for our woes. the post-94 government has put measures and policies in place to improve the life of the black man on the street, these measures and policies still need a lot of refining and polishing as many blacks are still to benefit from them.

for starters, the department of education has a National student financial aid scheme (it provides bursaries/affordable loans at a low interest to financially needy, academically deserving university students. I would know, i used the scheme myself in my student days).
Then there's the national youth development agency, previously called umsobomvu. its aim is to fund young enterpreneurs who have sound business proposals. then there's the land redistribution programme, where the government bought back farms from whites and are leasing it to blacks, who have the responsibility to make the farm profitable within a pecific time, or risk losing the land. many blacks who were forcefully removed from their ancestral lands by the apartheid govt have gotten their lands back.

then there's affirmative action and black economic empowerment, here corporations are "forced" to give opportunities to deserving blacks who would previously not been given a chance becoz of skin colour. the aim is to gradually introduce blacks into large corporation top managemnt, then ownership (as u correctly pointed out wealth is still in hands of whites).

recently large corporations have put up a percentage of their shares on the market, to be bought specifically by blacks (indians, coloureds and chinese too), examples are sasol, vodacom, nedbank, fnb bank.

as u imagine some of the above measures have brought unwanted results, eg few elite people getting enriched. a lot of work still needs to be done, the systems are not perfect.
as Mandela said: "the struggle is not over, it just changed shape". blacks south africans still have to change our mindsets, change the blame and finger-pointing culture, do something about crime, HIV and hopefully we'll get there.

@wmzansigirl,i lyk d fact dat U truely grasp the goings-on of Ur country.Nice one.The good thing is that there is purposeful leadership in SA,I am a nigerian but seriously I can't say dsame for Nigeria.We are cursed with the worst of leaderz,U know?Evry1 looking out for himself alone,just don't want bore U with the sorry tales of this country whose direction of progress has been downwards since it's inception.The only thing i like about nigeria is just our resilience,we go through a lot of horrible things in this country and still come out unscathed or atleast make others belive so.No wonder Fela,a very famous nigerian muscian says Nigerians are a classic case of people suffering and smiling cos certain issues that could cos a country to break up will be kicked in d ass,it will die a natural death and get a decent burial, Hahahahaha, My country! Don't mind Us Jare! Anyway U will know a typical nigerian when U see him,so blunt to a fault,just like now, Have good time dear.

@ poster

The comment on your post which states ""My worry is that my children are going to be slaves because they won't have anything. These foreign people come to South Africa with nothing, but tomorrow he has cash, third day he owns a shop and fourth day he has a car. Where do these foreign people get this money?"

This should answer your question and make you understand the mindset and educational level of the person making that comment.

morpheus24:

@ poster

The comment on your post which states ""My worry is that my children are going to be slaves because they won't have anything. These foreign people come to South Africa with nothing, but tomorrow he has cash, third day he owns a shop and fourth day he has a car. Where do these foreign people get this money?"

This should answer your question and make you understand the mindset and educational level of the person making that comment.

_{am tired of commenting on these people's xenophobic traits}

IFELEKE:

_{am tired of commenting on these people's xenophobic traits}

I am tired of dikc heads who can't deal with their problems who feels good when talking bad about SA
dan iska ka rubuta domin matan ka ta gani ko

For me, we should have seen this coming a long time back but for the corrupt, inept and direction less prism through which the handlers of our foreign policy saw their brief. We failed to seize the golden moment for Nigeria when Nelson Mandela came into his own! Our management of the end of the apartheid years lacked creativity and proactivity so much so Nelson Mandela shut down and went to his grave appallingly disappointed at what Nigeria had become! I commend his utterances about Nigeria to my readers. All things being equal, Nigeria should have been his second home thus affording him and our leaders an opportunity to weld the two countries together for all time as partners and not bitter competitors we have now become culminating in this so called xenophobia.

My views on this issue may not be celebrated but it does indicate the rot goes deeper! For example, how many know that Thabo Mbeki should be able to find his way around Ojuelegba in Lagos unassisted and better than many Nigerians? Truth is, he and several other South Africans who later came into leadership positions in their country lived in Nigeria educated and fed on our bill because the apartheid regime longed to have them for breakfast!

When payback time came for Nigeria at the end of apartheid and commencement of black majority rule in South Africa and Thabo became President we did not leverage at all to have favours done them reciprocated. Instead our knees went weak and buckled at the altar of greed, corruption, avarice and unpatriotic zeal with our leaders cutting private deals with priviledged South Africans to compromise our wellbeing. The South Africans have so far played along as it suits them fine! What with mtn, shoprite, dstv et al reaping our large market to sustain their own economy.

The result was a large exodus of about 800,000 Nigerians to South Africa in search of a better life not in sight in Nigeria. The exodus has till date been largely unplanned, uncoordinated and without well articulated goals to further our homeland interests. Informed South Africans know all these and more - it therefore cuts no ice with them when we scream xenophobia and ingratitude in the face of current unsavoury happenings under review. We need to look inward instead!