We are xenophobic monsters

SA is again besieged by its own, homegrown terror

By Justice Malala: They are killing foreigners again. They are not waiting for the World Cup to come and go. They have started killing them now.

Last week, in a case that has not been reported anywhere, a Somali shopkeeper was robbed and murdered in Soshanguve, Pretoria. He was easy prey, like all Somali and Pakistani and Bangladeshi shopkeepers. Like all foreigners.

The murderers came in the night. There were two Somalis in the shop. When the robbers arrived, one man ran into the storeroom at the back of the shop and locked himself in. The other tried to run out of the shop, into the community at large. They shot him five times. He died in a pool of his own blood. They killed him for a mere R3000 and cellphone airtime.

On Thursday night, in the newish F4 section of a village called New Eersterus, Hammanskraal, a Bangladeshi shopkeeper was shot and killed during a robbery. New Eersterus, where I grew up and where, just a few months ago, the police mowed down and killed an innocent Olga Kekana, is just 10km from Soshanguve.

The village is serviced by the Temba police station, 15km away. The police were not there on Thursday when the Bangladeshi shopkeeper was killed.

On Friday evening, a friend of mine who rents his shop in New Eersterus to a Bangladeshi, was fielding calls from foreigners throughout the region who were worried that, when the sun goes down, murder walks the land.

"The word is that criminals want to make cash to spend during the World Cup. This is their chance. The attacks are picking up. Things are getting worse," he said.

Foreign shopkeepers, most of them Somalis and Bangladeshis, have been murdered in their hundreds in South Africa over the past 10 years. In Eastern Cape, the Daily Dispatch has written amazing exposés about the fear in which foreigners live.

I have heard young men talk about how vulnerable the foreigners are. Because many of them are in the country illegally, they do not have the paperwork to open bank accounts, the thugs reason. That means that they have a lot of cash on the premises.

They are unarmed and the community around them is too scared to come out and help them."

The thugs attack them because they are thought to have cash and because they are foreigners.

In one Daily Dispatch exposé, the killer chillingly intimates that foreign lives are worthless; that it is OK to kill them.

Last week, the ANC in Gauteng said that more service-delivery protests are likely in the province and that there is a possibility that they will be accompanied by xenophobic attacks in the coming year.

The spokesman for the ANC in Gauteng, Dumisa Ntuli, said the party's investigations showed that there was an increasing trend of protests that might provide fertile soil for xenophobic attacks in areas beset by political infighting.

"The report says there will be more protests in the run-up to the local elections, targeting councillors and their property. This is something that worries the leadership.

"There is also a disturbing trend of protests organised by schoolchildren. We are conducting research to look into the possibility that xenophobic attacks might happen again," he said.

Ntuli is wrong on one point. Things might get worse as the local-government elections approach, but the truth is that the killing is happening now.

And it is not just about money. The killings are happening because, as we showed in that terrible winter two years ago, we are stupid and crazy and ignorant and poor and economically insecure ("they are taking our jobs") and even sexually insecure ("they are taking our women"). And we are also inhumane.

We know not what Steve Biko was talking about when he spoke about ubuntu. We have to call this spade by its name: We are xenophobic.

The examples I make above are related to crime. But we know now that it is not just crime. It is also a misguided belief that Somalian lives are worthless. And Zimbabwean lives. And Nigerian lives. And so on. It is xenophobia.

The ANC's warning last week came just a week after the SA Human Rights Commission warned of a new wave of xenophobic attacks ahead of the local-government elections next year.

This potential terror must be nipped in the bud. There have been reports that our country might be targeted by terrorists during the World Cup, starting next week. We will probably throw millions in resources into fighting that threat.

The truth, however, is that xenophobia is our own terrorism. We must stop the attacks before they overwhelm us again.