DIEPSLOOT, SOUTH AFRICA—Late one brisk night in mid-June, Bongani Mdiki was having a beer at Willie's Tavern in Diepsloot, a township north of Johannesburg, South Africa, when men burst in to break his head. After forcing their way in, the group of at least 15 men stripped the tiny one-room bar and its 20-odd patrons of all they had. It was the second such robbery at Willie's Tavern in a month, and this time the burglars made off with a generator, about $264 worth of Black Label beer and snacks, and $330 in cash. Then they approached Mdiki for his phone -- and that's when one of them pulled out a machete.
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Mdiki, a baker who is employed off and on, is convinced the robbers were Zimbabweans -- hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of whom have come to South Africa in recent years, fleeing desperate conditions at home. "These guys aren't coming for job; they're coming for fight," Mdiki muttered, shaking his head softly. He says he could tell they were foreign by the language they spoke. And he made a dire promise: "After World Cup, [the Zimbabweans] must pack and go."
Anti-foreigner violence -- temporarily suppressed by the World Cup -- is about to boil over again. Diepsloot was an epicenter for the 2008 rash of attacks against Zimbabwean refugees that left at least 62 people dead -- a third of them technically South African -- and displaced more than 100,000 across the country. During the last few months, extra cash from World Cup jobs, as well as scrutiny from the international media and the government, kept things mostly quiet. Fans have been unanimously impressed with how few incidents of theft and assault -- both commonplace in South Africa -- there have been. But after that temporary work dries up, the foreign media leave, and the government relaxes its watch, observers fear that the brewing animosity toward foreign nationals will re-erupt. If rumors are to be believed, plans to attack the foreigners are in the works.
In fact, the first signs of violence are already apparent: Foreigners' shops were looted in the Western Cape province townships of Mbekweni, Paarl East, Wellington, and Nyanga yesterday, and police there urged the mostly Somali immigrants to stay out. The New York Times on July 9 also reported on the threats of violence. In some townships the rumor has become more like a pledge, and organized groups say they're simply waiting for a trigger -- potentially an initial outbreak, like what happened yesterday near Cape Town -- to begin beating, robbing, and burning their neighbors.
Attacks on immigrants are nothing new in South Africa, and it's very easy to see where the tension is coming from. Mdiki lives in a densely populated squatter camp known as Extension One, where South Africans and non-nationals live packed together in metal shacks, with garbage piled along the dirt paths that pass for roads and hungry dogs brooding over open sewers. Crime and lack of housing are the two biggest grievances here -- South Africans are still waiting for the four walls and electricity that were promised them after the end of apartheid. Blame for at least some of the trouble is placed on foreign-born residents. From one end of the country to the other, the complaints are the same: They steal our jobs, they steal our houses, they rob us, and so they must go. It doesn't help that local politicians, in pursuit of the popular vote, sometimes fan the flames in the lead-up to elections, using foreigners as scapegoats for social ills. And as it happens, municipal elections are set to take place in a few months.
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