Illegal immigrants face violence in S. Africa

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RAMAPHOSA, South Africa -- Alberto Chivethle built a small empire in his yard. He erected a tiny convenience store, barber salon and telephone booth, and two single-room apartments to rent out. Chivethle had a day job at a gold refinery at the edge of Johannesburg that didn't pay much, just $370 a month. But it was enough to build up the small businesses, and from these he earned enough to send his children to a good school, to buy a five-piece living-room set and a DVD player.It was also enough, he knows now, to breed envy and resentment in the hearts of his neighbors. Chivethle arrived home from an early shift last Sunday in time to see dozens of men pry off the metal roof of his house and set his bedroom curtains alight. He fled as smoke poured out around everything he had built."They were whistling, shouting, saying things like, 'How can Shangaans have houses when we citizens don't have houses?'" he recalled. Chivethle, 53, was born in Mozambique and is an ethnic Shangaan; his family was living in a low-cost house built by the South African government.What the mob didn't know, or chose to ignore, is that Chivethle has been a citizen of South Africa for 22 years and he obtained that house legally.At least 50 foreigners, and several South Africans, have been slain in a horrific outburst of xenophobic violence.That violence has also left 30,000 people displaced or homeless, and seen the army called out into the country's streets for the first time since the end of apartheid 14 years ago.If Chivethle were to make the trip down the road, he would find some people he knows in the wreckage of his former home. A neighbor named Rosina Kaibane lost her hair salon when the mob burned the Zimbabwean shack next door, so she has moved into Chivethle's barber shop. His former tenant, a woman who would give only her first name, Maria, is considering moving out of her single room and into the main house, if she can clean up the soot damage. A third neighbor plans to take over the convenience store. They are all native-born South Africans.In the story of Chivethle's house lie clues to the causes of the startling events of the past two weeks. Competition for resources is fierce in neighborhoods such as Ramaphosa. Government initiatives, such as the housing program, have failed to meet the massive need and they have sown great bitterness about the failures of democracy. Yet the political freedoms of post-apartheid South Africa, and the comparatively thriving economy, have lured people here from all over the continent. There is a sharp culture clash between immigrants such as Chivethle -- most of whom work astoundingly hard -- and many South Africans who have a sense of entitlement about the change the democratic era was meant to bring to their lives.At the same time, this country is in the midst of a political crisis, with both a glaring lack of leadership, and a swelling sense of impunity -- at the highest level, and now, apparently, at the lowest as well. And there is a cultural memory of brutal violence and mob retribution leftover from the apartheid era.When years-old frustrations over crime, unemployment and lack of basic services finally erupted two weeks ago, people turned on the easiest target, their illegal immigrant neighbors, rather than the government."I didn't have a problem with him, but he had to get out," Kaibane, 30, said of her neighbor, Chivethle, as she moved into his hair salon. She came to the squatter camp from a rural village five years ago; she struggles to get by on about $80 a week and she lives in a scrap-metal shack. "He won't be coming back. I think things are going to work out for my salon."Yet the foreign victims like Chivethle are in many ways misplaced targets of wrath: the unemployed shack-dwellers who dominated the mobs could equally direct their anger at the African National Congress. In the 14 years it has governed since apartheid, the ANC has delivered electricity, piped water and primary health care to many parts of the country that were deliberately underdeveloped by the apartheid regime. The aggressive free-market tactics pursued by President Thabo Mbeki have created a growing black middle class.But those policies have not been nearly as successful in reaching the great black underclass. Unemployment is estimated at 40 percent and, over the past decade, millions of low-skilled jobs have disappeared. At the same time, prices of food, clothes and transportation are skyrocketing here -- some estimates put them as much as 20 percent higher over this time last year. Squalid squatter camps like Ramaphosa are springing up all over, not disappearing.Manie Jika, 41, admitted he joined the mob that last week burned three Mozambicans alive, but said he did it only out of fear he would lose his own home if he didn't. He surveyed the ruins of Chivethle's house regretfully; the Mozambican, he said, "was a nice guy." But Jika knows why people are angry: he lost a $200-a month-job in a falafel shop a year ago when the manager replaced him with a Zimbabwean. Last month, he lost his new job, pumping gas for $250 a month, to another Zimbabwean."My employer would rather hire foreign nationals. They don't strike. They just do what they are told, even if they are being mistreated," Jika said. Meanwhile, he has been on a waiting list for a house Chivethle's for six years.(E-mail Stephanie Nolen at snolen(at)globeandmail.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)