SMe WU aa es eg sa) DCR Camu aC CCL Ia TeeGate RU nC ee a Cees COR Ca Os es a AS SSR Ta Renee Co Seis CU Sree Cen net oe N La ‘Asareporter for The Star, | was dispatched to cover the violence SOE CRA eee em mC aun ee eRe CLC MR aR CCE) Pee ae ea On ee) hundreds of people fleeing the township, their belongings piled up Se Cn Se ener RO cee ea eRe u ae Cn ane Cees eC the night hiding under her bed as her husband stood guard at the door. She had lived in Alexandra, in peace, for five years.GO HOME OR DIE HERE Suddenly, up the road, a gang ran up behind a youth and flung a brick at his head. He collapsed on the ground, his head falling at the edge of the pavement. Blood flowed down into the gutter and was carried off by a small stream . That night we filed our stories inside the police’s heavily armoured Nyala as it drove up and down the township, police officers firing rubber bullets into the alleys. The storm was just beginning, but from our position at the epicentre it was clear that something was very wrong. ‘Outside the bulletproof glass [of the Nyala] something frightening has engulfed Alexandra,’ I wrote at the time. ‘The scenes that play out in the streets belong somewhere else. Anywhere but in the new South Africa.” Technology allows experts to forecast deadly storms and raise the alarm. But in this case, the service delivery protests and scattered murders of foreigners near Pretoria and in the Western Cape were almost entirely under the radar. And then, after one night of bloodlust, the storm struck. For most of the first week we covered Alexandra. We watched as bodies turned up in the dusty slivers between shacks. As mobs went on the rampage in Extension 7, forcing residents to show them their identity books, | remember a vicious stick fight that began in slow motion and then turned into a bloody blur. Police sprayed tear gas into the faces of the men and shoved them into police vans ~ but the violence was swelling. We piled into Toyota Tazzes and tore around the township in packs made up of crews from various newspapers, radio and television stations. We took cover inside Metro Police vans as the rocks rained down, shaking the vehicles as they found their target 2BAFTER ONE NIGHT OF BLOODLUST, THE STORM STRUCK.ATORN NARRATIVE OF VIOLENCE We ran with the panga-wielding mobs and then behind the police officers with their shotguns. We took frantic calls from our editors who tried to pull us out of the danger zones. We wrote our notes as police saturated the area, battling the mobs, while their stations filled up with thousands of refugees The foreigners - many in the country illegally - were so desperate they were turning to their enemy for protection By Thursday, the violence had been quelled. There was no count of how many people had been killed, wounded, raped or displaced. And there was silence from our leaders. Aweek of savagery wound down and for two or three days there was little bloodshed. The skies were clear of the black smoke that had been rising from the flames cleansing communities of unwanted residents. It felt as if the worst was behind us. That Saturday | spent in the Pilanesberg nature reserve. The contrast of what | had witnessed during the week, and what surrounded me in the sanctuary, was surreal. | left early on Sunday morning and by early afternoon | was in a squatter camp in Honeydew, moving on later to Diepstoot. The violence had spread like wildfire across the province and my colleagues were dispatched across Ekurhuleni, Exactly a week after the first attacks, the real nightmare had become visible. The eye of the storm had passed, and what came now found its way on to the front pages of newspapers across the globe ‘As Ernesto Nnamuave, a miner from Mozambique, was stabbed, beaten and set on fire, the course of South Africa's history shifted That moment - with its angry orange flames and dark plumes of smoke ~ allowed the press to drag the horror inside the rainbow auATORN NARRATIVE OF VIOLENCE nation’s townships into the living rooms of the wealthy, into the hallways of the Union Buildings and across the borders The following nights, in Diepsloot, the danger of what we were doing set in. We were wearing bulletproof jackets and trailing police across the pitch-black settlement. | remember a bullet passing over our heads and the sound it made as it sliced through the air. | recall how we ducked behind a giant waste bin as rubber rounds bounced off the shacks around us like the inside of an old pinball machine. Tuesday morning brought more horror. Before sunrise we were in Ramaphosa, watching the sky for smoke and listening to the radio. Luckily Shayne Robinson - the photographer | was working with - had brought a flask of hot coffee. | stood next to Joao Silva, one of the legendary Bang Bang Club photographers who had documented the country’s turbulent townships in the early 1990s. | never imagined | would work alongside Silva in the burning settlements. ‘It's déja vu,’ he said. That morning we went to the scene of three small houses that had been petrol bombed. We were first to discover the flames and called the firefighters. Small suitcases had been neatly packed but abandoned in the yard. From there we sped to a mine hostel in Reiger Park. There was word that several miners had been attacked during the night. Shayne pulled our Opel Corsa into the yard and brought it to a stop on the gravel. We jumped out and | walked towards the police's Nyala. As | arrived at its back tyre, | realised | had stepped in a deep puddle. | looked down and saw red. From there the blood trails ran around a corner and into a dry mielie patch. They led us to three bodies, lying face down in thick 33GO HOME OR DIE HERE blood. Their heads were swollen and the skin had broken from the beating. Like bags of trash, they had been dragged out of the hostel and dumped in the back. When | looked at the scene all | could see were the images that emerged from Rwanda. Later, our newspaper ran the photograph of the hostel massacre next to a file photograph of Rwanda’s genocide and the similarity was as frightening as it was in my mind. Miraculously, two of the men were still fighting for their lives. They were taken to hospital, but it is not known whether they survived. At the hostel, an old man with a deep wound through his eyebrow told us that a mob had arrived the previous night and had gone room-to-room hunting foreigners. They had beaten one to death and left him in room 21. Three had been dragged outside and he had escaped to tell the tale. But when | returned to the hostel later, in search of the names of the slain, it emerged that the mob had vented their fury on the old and the weak. The man murdered in room 21 was 76 years old and a South African citizen. The one attacked in room 51 was nearly 60. The man who survived, and told the media how the attackers had used steel pipes to beat their victims, was also 76. Like predators in the wild, the mob had gone for easy targets. For me, the hostel massacre defined the xenophobic attacks. The mob arrived under cover of night and began searching the hostel - knowing that foreigners from Mozambique come to South Africa to take jobs on the mines. They were a fearless, faceless mob accusing their victims of taking their jobs. They went from door to door and sniffed out the foreigners. They tortured them and dragged them - feet first - out of the hostel, sending their 36 ‘NAZILID NVOIAV HLNOS V NV (10 SUVIA 9Z SVM 12 WOOY NI G3YIGYNW NVA FHLA TORN NARRATIVE OF VIOLENCE message of hate. The victims lay in the field all night as police failed to arrive. And in the wake of the attack, hundreds of miners fled in fear. A secret safe house was eventually set up for them by the mine In Ramaphosa, we continued to cover the violence. We ran with the mobs as they chased foreigners up the mine dumps, scraping their machetes against the ground. We found another man who had been beaten and set on fire. The locals told us he was dead and called us to have a look. When we got there it turned out he was alive but paralyzed by pain, his legs soaked in blood. We called for help and police carried him out of the township on a mattress. Some of the time we waited on the outskirts, watching as victims were brought out. Panic in their eyes. Blood drying on their skin. Steel cords wrapped around their throats. We also worked inside the township, where tense negotiations were shattered with a single glass bottle crashing at the feet of the Metro Police, where a photographer was shot with live buckshot and a victim of rubber bullets lay semi-conscious with an axe tucked into his underwear. During that week cars burned, helicopters swooped to the ground to disperse crowds and the army was eventually called in The number of refugees grew into tens of thousands and by the end of the week the violence had spread as far as Cape Town I remember working until three in the morning, filing stories by four and going home to crash, then waking up and doing it all over again. We were running on adrenalin. And it was incredible how quickly it drained out of your body once an assignment was finished 7ATORN NARRATIVE OF VIOLENCE The politicians were doing damage control as the death toll climbed towards 60. The weeks that followed exposed the true size of the refugee crisis, and brought with it the humanitarian disasters. The focus shifted, and South Africans opened their hearts to support those caught up in the violence. Protests against the attacks were organised and the country began dealing with the aftermath while trying to understand what could have caused such an abomination. The long process of re-integration, or escape, began. Life began to tick over again. The storm had passed. But its bloody winds have changed us forever. 39