car, four Xhosa-speaking men gunmen approached him. The men shot him four times in the chest and head as he attempted to escape.
Witnesses allege the police did nothing to assist Mr. Ahmed as he bled to death in his car. Unofficially, he was the 27th Somali to have been murdered in the city in August. This is not a resurgence of the ‘black upon black’ political violence of the 80’s and early 90’s – much of it cynically and purposely fuelled by the apartheid regime. Local Somalis believe the perpetrators were local traders on a mission to wipe out the competition. This is the unofficial violence of the underdog but no less brutal and vicious for that.
During apartheid communities lived in isolation from each other and from other African countries and cultures. Only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the country’s borders to work in the diamond and gold mines settled into wider South African society.
The home affairs department estimates over 7 million undocumented immigrants have arrived in the country since the demise of apartheid. This has coincided with a rise in internal migration as locals relocate from rural to urban areas to find employment. The relative success of the South African economy fuels the influx. Poor migrants and refugees land up penniless in city centres, squatter camps or crime-ridden, low-income areas, where they compete with thousands of locals for scarce jobs. Addressing the social and economic context of xenophobia is therefore essential in resolving the problem.
It’s not all bad news and real achievements have been made. Over a million and a half homes built for the poor, 70 per cent of households with access to electricity; nine million with access to water, indications that efforts to curtail gun crime and to stem the AIDS/HIV pandemic are paying off.
The ideal of the Rainbow Nation is not going to be drowned in rivers of blood – but the government needs to take a lead. The South African constitution places human rights and equality at its masthead. But in its treatment of refugees and migrants, the authorities fail to live up to their exalted standards.
Zimbabweans especially are bearing the brunt. A recent report by Human Rights Watch, ‘Migrants: Zimbabweans in South Africa’s Limpopo Province’, reports that Zimbabwean migrants are especially vulnerable to abuse by officials of South Africa’s Home Affairs Department and the police. “Police often mistreat undocumented workers when they arrest them …while awaiting deportation at police stations, undocumented migrants are given inadequate shelter and food, and some are detained beyond the 30-day legal limit.”
It’s this official hostility to the plight of Zimbabwean asylum seekers that sets the standard for the treatment of all African asylum seekers and migrants in South Africa. As one compatriot of the slain Mr Ahmed put it: “Who is going to protect us? This city [Cape Town] is supposed to be a home for all. If this country can’t protect its refugees, how will it protect the millions who will visit the city in 2010? – Franco Henwood writes for The Zimbabwean in his personal capacity.