South Africa's Epidemic Of Hate

From the highest levels to the grassroots, the country is scapegoating migrants from the rest of the continent

- Antony Sguazzin

In early September, Faayif Yosif, a 41-year-old Somali who moved to South Africa as a refugee in 2004, lost everything he owned in minutes. A mob of South Africans began doing the toyi-toyi—a dance with a jogging rhythm associated with protests—outside his general store on the outskirts of the capital, Pretoria. “They broke into my shop and took everything, including a lot of money,” he says. Since then, he’s lost his appetite and become depressed, and he spends his days sleeping. “They told us to get out if we didn’t want to die. My heart was broken because I watched something I worked hard for being destroyed.”

Every few years, bouts of xenophobic violence in South Africa—which mainly target black Africans from elsewhere in Africa and, occasionally, poor migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh—make headlines. In 2008 about 60 people died and more than 50,000 were displaced in a wave of violence across the country. Ernesto Nhamuave, a Mozambican man, was set alight and burned to death east of Johannesburg; the photograph of his killing spread around the world.

There were similar episodes in 2015. From the end of apartheid in 1994 to Dec. 31 last year, at least 309 people have been killed in xenophobic attacks, 2,193 shops have been looted, and more than 100,000 people have been displaced, according to Xenowatch, a program run by the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “The frequency of the brutality we see in South Africa is making it unique,” says Jean Pierre Misago, a researcher at the center who’s been working with refugees since the early 1990s. “Burning people alive, destroying property.”