Ndebele migration linked to SA violence

BULAWAYO

The xenophobic attacks that have rocked South Africa in recent weeks, claiming the lives of an estimated 60 people and displacing and dispossessing tens of thousands of legal and illegal immigrants, continue to resonate in the southern regions of Zimbabwe where they threaten the livelihood of whole communities.

Local researchers say virtually every person in the Matabeleland region has a relative working in South Africa. While the Zimbabwean government puts the official figure at a little over one million, according to other estimates more than three million Zimbabweans, most of them from Matabeleland, live in South Africa.

There is no love lost between Robert Mugabe’s government and the people of Matabeleland. The tendency, therefore, among the Ndebele people of the region, has been to look south, where they have found jobs waiting for them in South Africa’s mines. It is an emigration that has been going on for decades – well before Zimbabwe’s independence.   

Since the early years of Zimbabwe’s economic decline, the steady stream of emigrants has become a flood, with millions of skilled and unskilled nationals fleeing economic hardship in what was once Southern Africa’s second largest economy.  

They sought jobs and earned a living that enabled them to feed whole extended families. A new culture, known as omalayitsha, developed, whereby young men transported groceries and other goods back home in South African-registered vehicles and became the pride of their region.

Herein lies one of the sparks that lit the flames of xenophobic anger. Among the complaints raised by those who turned on their immigrant neighbours were that foreign nationals were responsible for the increase in the price of commodities in local shops.

While appalled South Africans reacted with shock to the scenes of bloodshed and looting that filled their television screens and newspaper pages during two weeks of mayhem, rights activists in Matabeleland were not totally surprised.  

Qhubekani Dube, an activist with local pressure group Ibhetshu Likazulu, which, among other things, seeks compensation for the Gukurahundi atrocities, says the mass exodus to South Africa had always carried with it the seeds of a possible backlash.

While not defending the actions of the killers, he believed their anger was understandable in the context of their own economic survival.

“These people [South Africans] are suffering from the failings of their own government,” said Dube.