One of the proposed speakers at the event, I told the Khayelitsha students, was a Somali national.....

Recently, I went to Khayelitsha township for what I thought would be a harmless encounter with a group of high school pupils.

'We can also leave our mark on this event,' was one of the messages behind the violence threatened after the World Cup, 'by writing our anger all over it. Look at how you rush to bring in the army. Look at how we have made you jump' 
I am helping to organise an event titled "To Whom Does Cape Town Belong?" and wanted to sound out the idea on young people from the city's largest black township.

One of the proposed speakers at the event, I told the Khayelitsha students, was a Somali national. "His experience of South Africa has been very bleak," I said. "He has opened trading stores in four different townships across the country and he has been chased out of each one. In May 2008, his shop in Khayelitsha was burned to the ground. He has been living ever since in a remote shack settlement out on the sand dunes, too scared to work in South Africa and unable to get travel papers to leave. I thought we should include his experience."

An icy silence descended. Some people fidgeted. Others stared out of the window. Eventually, a young woman spoke. "You do not need to find a Somali to show that Cape Town is unsafe," she said, her voice loaded with sarcasm. "As a young woman, I feel unsafe here in Khayelitsha. And if I go to a coloured area, I feel very, very unsafe. It is not a question of whether you are foreign. It is a question of whether the police are protecting anyone properly."

We spoke some more, but the anger my story had triggered did not go away, and it became hard to communicate about much. The young people in the room were hardly xenophobic. Some had in fact bravely spoken out during the violence of May 2008. Their anger was directed at me, not at any foreign national, and behind it was a complicated story about the relationship between South Africans.

When violence descended in May 2008, the middle classes, and especially racial minorities among them, responded in their thousands. They volunteered at police stations, churches and camps; they gave clothes and money; they demonstrated in the streets. South Africa's well-off had not shown such vigorous commitment to a public cause in many years.

Why did it take attacks on foreigners? To put it bluntly, the middle classes were also afraid of mobs. They identified with the ones who had run for their lives. They feared that at some point in the future, the crowd's anger would be aimed at them. "No more of this," they were saying. "It is too close to home."

The silent anger the Khayelitsha students threw at me when I spoke of the Somali man was about precisely these things, I suspect. Had they expressed their anger bluntly, rather than through innuendo, they probably would have said something like this: "Of all the terrible things that happen in this city, why is it the Somali's pain that captures your imagination? What precisely are your motives when you feel for him?"

I think I saw for the first time what the middle class outpouring of sympathy for foreign nationals looked like through young, black South African eyes.

Which made me wonder. When the middle classes protest against xenophobic violence, they are speaking to the South African poor: "We fear you," they are saying. "We must find a way to share the future." Could it be, similarly, that when some among the poor hurt foreign nationals, they are communicating with the rich? "It is when we do terrible things," they are saying, "that we make history."

The last scare of nationwide violence came on the closing day of the World Cup. We had invested billions in a vast demonstration of national pride. That is surely why the rumours of impending violence created such brittle energy. "We can also leave our mark on this event," was one of the messages behind the threatened violence, "by writing our anger all over it. Look at how you rush to bring in the army. Look at how we have made you jump."

I am not suggesting that the poor are all xenophobic, the rich happily cosmopolitan. Most of those who gave people shelter in May 2008 were themselves poor. But among all the other things it means, the violence has become the site of a skirmish between classes. We are sending back and forth a series of angry and fearful missives, written in the blood of foreign nationals. What we call "xenophobic violence" has come to mean far too much. That is one of the many reasons why getting rid of it will be hard.

John Steinberg

Steinberg is with the Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town

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