There’s been a new wave of anti-foreigner sentiment in the township of late, but the Alexandra in which Thabo Mopasi grew up in the 1970s was happy to embrace residents from beyond SA’s borders.
"I was born next door to people from Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland [Eswatini], Zimbabwe, and I did not care," the activist tells the FM. "I attended church with them at the Twelve Apostles Church. I [went to school with] and peacefully played with children whose parents came from other countries."
This past week, however, the "peace ambassador" has found himself working with community programmes to resolve social conflict after a flare-up of tensions related to the Alexandra-based Dudula Movement.
Xenophobic violence is sadly not unusual in Alexandra’s recent history: there have been several waves of attacks on foreigners since the first major outbreak in 2008.
Still, Mopasi doesn’t believe it’s fair to say xenophobia is a widely shared prejudice in the community. "A population of 900,000 can’t be xenophobic when things are done by less than 100 people," he says, referring to the recent eviction of supposedly undocumented foreigners from their homes and spaza shops by the Dudula Movement.
According to some in the community, commercial motives, rather than outright xenophobia, are driving the sinisterly named "cleansing" operation.
Agnes Malatjie, the Dudula Movement’s spokesperson, did not answer her phone after initially agreeing to an interview with the FM. But she was adamant last week that the organisation is "not xenophobic".
Speaking to eNCA’s Annika Larsen, she said the movement had begun just three weeks ago as Operation Fiyela (meaning "sweep" or "reclaim"). "When we say we ‘clean’ Alexandra, we are reclaiming back the township economy of Alexandra," she said. "We want all undocumented illegal immigrants to vacate the township because they are suppressing the township economy."
The initiative seems to be a copycat of a 2015 police operation that sought to quell xenophobic tensions by arresting foreigners who did not have the correct documents.
This time, however, in Malatjie’s telling at least, the community stepped in to check that traders and foreign nationals had the requisite permits after the authorities failed to do so.
"All these undocumented illegal immigrants, they commit crimes. They do things that are unspeakable," she said. "We are now classified as xenophobic but it’s not true. When must we stand up for the truth? SA is in a mess."
Despite the eviction of people from their homes and the closure of their shops, Malatjie denied that Dudula Movement members have been violent. Instead, she claimed they had been "engaging with illegal immigrants until March 7 when the foreign nationals/illegal immigrants started retaliating and attacking us". (Three Zimbabweans and one South African were injured on that day.)
A subsequent call for a total shutdown of Alex for a "cleaning" campaign failed — in part because of an apparent lack of support, but also because of a more visible police presence on the ground.
Still, there are fears that Alex could see a fresh eruption of the kind of violence seen in 2008, when two people were killed (one South African), at least 60 were injured and several women were raped. Hundreds were forcibly evicted from their homes by gangs of armed men.
That wave of violence started in Alex, before fanning out to other areas. Though there have been subsequent waves of xenophobic violence, none has so far been as bad.
Alexandra is known for its radical democratic politics, which date to the squatter movements and bus boycotts of the 1940s and 1950s, as Wits University historian Noor Nieftagodien writes in Go Home or Die Here. Residents also successfully pushed back against the apartheid government’s plan to forcibly remove them as part of its racial restructuring of the urban areas.
The ruling party is very anxious to try to take up Mashaba’s call. They are playing a very dangerous game
— Paul Verryn
Activists in Alex, "in many respects, defined radical civic politics", Nieftagodien writes. But while he isn’t familiar with the current dynamics, he believes "the involvement of small businesses and the probable intersection with political forces" mean the Dudula Movement, on the surface at least, seems different to earlier campaigns, including those that led to the 2008 bloodshed.
High levels of unemployment and inequality in the area "are of course root causes" for the community’s unhappiness, he says, "but on their own [they] are not sufficient explanations for the mobilisation of xenophobic movements".
A number of observers have said much the same. As Mopasi notes, the Dudula Movement seems, in part, to have political ambitions. In that sense, it taps into the xenophobic sentiments that have increasingly been used by politicians to mobilise support.
For example, Herman Mashaba, who became DA mayor for Joburg in 2016, made unashamedly xenophobic pronouncements about city centre traders. He has continued with this line in his new party, ActionSA, which garnered an impressive 16% of the Gauteng vote in last year’s local government elections. Among others, his party appeals to a conservative urban black middle class looking for an alternative to the corruption-ridden ANC.
The Patriotic Alliance, led by former fraudsters and businessmen Kenny Kunene and Gayton McKenzie, similarly achieved pockets of success by pushing a xenophobic line.
Even the EFF, once lauded for its pan-Africanist stance, has hopped on the bandwagon, calling for undocumented foreigners to leave — a likely ploy to grow electoral support.
As for the Dudula Movement itself, records from the department of social development show it was registered as a nonprofit organisation just last month — which would make it easier for the movement to open a bank account and raise funds.
But Mopasi believes its roots stretch further back in Alexandra’s history — 10 years, in fact, when allegations of nepotism and corruption around the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP) were rife.
The ARP, launched in 2001, fostered high expectations of improved living conditions in Alex. But these were dashed when homes built as part of the project went to some of the friends and families of those working on the ARP. They, in turn, allegedly sold on the properties.
As a result of court action, some of the irregular owners were expelled. And as some of Dudula’s forerunners apparently helped with this process, they were rewarded with homes of their own.
Violence flared again in 2019 during the Alex Shutdown campaign, brought on by the lack of homes, poor water and sanitation services, underpolicing, overcrowding and the mushrooming of illegal housing structures.
That led to an inquiry by the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which referred allegations of corruption surrounding the R1.3bn ARP to the Special Investigating Unit. It also found evidence of serious maladministration.
More than six months after it produced its report, the SAHRC is still awaiting a response from the provincial government. And despite high-ranking ANC politicians being implicated in controversies around the project, nobody has yet been prosecuted.
Of course, the state of the township doesn’t help social tensions.
"These cramped and overcrowded conditions, combined with a lack of planning and infrastructure development as the township grew, and high rates of unemployment and limited access to socioeconomic rights make Alexandra a ticking time bomb in terms of service delivery problems," SAHRC commissioner Jonas Sibanyoni said at the launch of the report, according to GroundUp.
Xenophobia, on display in Alexandra again this month, is unfortunately being embraced by mainstream politicians
— What it means:
Mopasi is suspicious of what political and financial interests may lie behind the Dudula Movement. The organisation did some canvassing around the local government elections last year, even though it wasn’t a registered political party. And, like its counterpart, Operation Dudula in Soweto, it’s buoyed by a professional-looking social media campaign.
There are suggestions that current anti-foreigner antagonism is aimed at discrediting President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is accused by some businesspeople of not doing enough for them.
The anti-foreigner campaigns also appear to take place around the same time as service delivery protests, says Government & Public Policy think-tank director Ivor Chipkin.
"They are interlinked," says Chipkin, who recently collaborated with the Institute for Security Studies on a paper titled "Dangerous Elites: Protest, Conflict and the Future of SA".
The study, released this week, found that protests increased during times of strong factional contestation within the ANC. These rose significantly in 2008, and have been a fixture of the SA political landscape ever since.
Chipkin says if it is true that protests and xenophobic attacks are related to ANC infighting, it wouldn’t be a coincidence. "The rents extracted from those foreign shops could be used for political campaigning," he says.
In an apparent reaction to the Dudula Movement’s actions, the police over the weekend swooped on Alexandra, Diepkloof and Hillbrow, arresting about 400 suspects as part of Operation Restore. Of these, 380 were "foreign nationals suspected to be in the country illegally", the police said in a statement.
But Loren Landau, professor of migration & development at the University of Oxford, believes this is no solution to the troubles. "Rather than address those overtly threatening others by organising extralegal vigilantism, the police are being led by them," he tells the FM. "In the past we had indirect rule where thugs and tsotsis were the hidden hand of a police state. Now we have the police working for them."
Instead, he believes a more holistic solution is needed that will address the failures of government, too.
For Methodist bishop Paul Verryn, who founded a centre for migrants in Soweto, good leadership is key to resolving tensions. The false narrative that foreign nationals are driving crime is being pushed by cabinet ministers for political gain, he says, and that’s simply making the situation worse.
"Seeing as they got hammered in [last year’s local government] elections, the ruling party is very anxious to try to take up Mashaba’s call," Verryn tells the FM. "They are playing a very dangerous game."
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