XENOPHOBIA

"We're all migrants": Xenophobia and rebuilding trust in South Africa

"Every single time I've seen it done, I've been amazed at how, even in a matter of two hours, by simply sitting and listening to others talk about where they come from you actually come to the conclusion that we're all migrants: whether economic or otherwise. We have come to where we are because we all come from somewhere," says Mothomang Diaho, head of the Dialogue Programme at the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF).

In 2009 I spent a few weeks interviewing refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa for the United Nations refugee council (UNHCR). The focus of the project was those who had been seriously affected by the so called xenophobic attacks that rocked South Africa in 2008 and tarnished its image among its neighbours in Africa. The story I heard over and over again from refugees - mostly from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia - was one of civil war or persecution in their home countries, followed by an often dramatic journey to South Africa. These stories should have ended in the asylum seekers settling into a life of relative peace and prosperity in their new country of residence. Unfortunately, for many of those we interviewed and many economic migrants from neighbouring countries it ended with being violently chased out of the communities they were living in, with their homes and shops looted by armed gangs.

"On 23 May 2008 around midnight I was asleep at home when I heard someone break through my door. I switched on the light to see who was breaking in. It was a neighbour, who told me to turn off the light and hide him and his family. I didn't want to, because I was too scared. There were about 200 people in the streets outside my house, shouting and throwing stones. Some had pangas. We managed to escape around the back and get away to where the other Somali's in the area were gathering." This account, told by a Somali refugee, echoed hundreds of similar stories.

At the time, listening to their stories, it seemed near impossible for these migrants to re-integrate into South African communities and for trust to be rebuilt.

However, a pilot project started in 2008 by the Nelson Mandela Foundation's Centre for Memory and Dialogue has shown that something as seemingly simple as getting communities to sit down and talk to one another about the issues within the community can help people of different nationalities learn to live peacefully as neighbours.

The CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Achmat Dangor, said at a recent seminar on Dialogues for Social Change hosted by the Foundation that "We don't want to oversimplify the issue of the movement of human beings, but we can't take a problem and bottle it inside".

He added that there are underlying causes of the xenophobic attacks that still need to be explored. "We need to understand the complex issue of migration of people. It is not just an African problem," said Dangor.

The NMF project used the Community Capacity Enhancement-CCE Methodology developed by the United Nations Development Programme to start a dialogue in five areas affected by xenophobia in the target provinces: Gauteng; Western Cape; KwaZulu Natal; Mpumalanga; and the Eastern Cape. The goal was to investigate the reasons for the violent attacks and equip communities with tools to prevent it from happening again.

According to the head of the Dialogue Programme at the NMF, Mothomang Diaho, the aim of the dialogue was to start a healing process. She says the methodology focused on bringing people together and helping them to listen to each other, to understand where they all come from, and that "we're all migrants: whether economic or otherwise".

During the program the NMF works through established community structures and institutions to find locals that can be trained as facilitators, with roughly halve of the facilitators being South African, and halve of them migrants. The dialogues happen at monthly sessions at local halls or churches, where six dialogues are structured to allow community members to talk about the issues within the area, and then move on to solutions.

According to a report compiled by the NMF, some of the burning issues that communities raised were language barriers, lack of proper documentation and lack of trust that provide barriers to accessing resources; poor communication and selfishness among community leadership; and an apparent lack of participation by migrants and migrant organisations in community initiatives.

Diaho says many people battle with the term xenophobia, since it's not just a South African problem and xenophobia is usually a manifestation of something much deeper.
"The victims of the violence in 2008 were from outside and inside South Africa; it's too simplistic to just call it xenophobia, because when you dig deeper, what you find is deep-seated frustration by people in poor communities. Let's be honest with ourselves, it didn't erupt in Bryanston or Sandton or Constantia. You do start getting answers when you look at areas that were affected" says Diaho.

She says the common denominator was people who were battling with meagre resources, and had to share these resources with other poor people who were also battling.

However, not every poor community that had many migrants living side by side with South Africans experienced violence. Diaho says there is a lot of power play within communities, and often corrupt elected officials or forces within the community stoked the violence and broke the stability.

Diaho says once there is an understanding of the issues that drove people to where they were, the community can start looking for solutions to work through the anger and pain. The result they were looking for was mostly cohesion, and that communities reach a certain understanding of where their problems had come from and how they could work together to improve their situation by accessing resources from institutions like churches, NGOs and the state.

"Often, amazing things have happened," says Diaho.

One example is a community in KwaZulu Natal where the dialogue took place that came up with three projects. One project focused on protecting orphans in the community. A community newspaper was also initiated to disseminate more information around issues of migration and service delivery to create greater understanding within the community, and a community radio station was started to link with local communities in a structured way.

According to Diaho, you could argue that this community moved from deep hatred and resentment to a community that is now working together to find solutions for their problems.

However, she says they did meet resistance from formal and informal structures within the communities.

"It's never easy. You have to start slowly by building trust. It's only once they trust you that you can move on to ask them certain questions, and it takes a while, you have to spend time in building trust."