Football matches, music festivals and other cultural events hosted in South Africa were boycotted. Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe hired buses to ferry their citizens back home and Nigeria chartered an airplane to evacuate its citizens. In 2019, similar attacks drew continent-wide condemnation. In April 2015, and again in September 2019, new large-scale attacks against ‘foreigners’ were recorded, this time mainly in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. Since then, xenophobic attacks have occurred at regular intervals. Approximately 80,000 to 100,000 were displaced from their homes, and more than 200 shops were burnt. During two weeks of violence, at least 62 people were killed nationwide. The worst episode of anti-immigrant attacks took place in May 2008. Only a year after the first black majority government was elected, the Southern African Bishops‘ Conference, in a report on immigrants, refugees and displaced people, noted the prevalence of xenophobia in South Africa: “There is no doubt that there is a very high level of xenophobia in our country…a variety of people have been lumped together under the title of ‘illegal immigrants’, and the whole situation of demonizing immigrants is feeding the xenophobia phenomenon.” People were forcefully evicted from their homes in a campaign called ‘ Operation Buyelekhaya’, meaning ‘go back home’. In late 1994 and early 1995, the Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association along with the Concerned Residents Group of Alexandra accused migrants from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi of causing crime, sexual violence, and unemployment in the township. The first incidents of such violence were recorded only a few months after the country’s first democratic elections. ![]() Xenophobia has a long and bloody history in post-apartheid South Africa.
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