The only time I have heard [Western Cape premier] Ebrahim Rasool speak was at the launch of a book of Sufi philosophy I had helped edit.

The Somali section of the Soetwater camp – flimsy catering tents offered as shelter

The now notorious refugee camp called Soetwater is a few kilometres from where I live. Three thousand people have been living there in bitter cold, increasingly wet tents for two weeks, tortured by uncertainty. They were wrenched from their homes and businesses by violence and terror. Overnight, the patient, painful work of years was plundered, burnt or crumbling behind them. The response of the authorities, and the UN, to their plight has been to insist that they must return to the communities that turned on them so suddenly and brutally. In other words, preserving the illusion of national harmony and tolerance is considered more important than the feelings of those who know more than anyone else that it is, at present, just an illusion.

Many of the refugees, many of them, have fled violence, unimaginable violence, elsewhere in Africa. Some have been running all their lives from killing, torture and rape. They ran to the rainbow nation, to the land where human rights are guaranteed by what those who framed it like to call the world’s most progressive constitution. Increasingly, though, it seems we should just call it a piece of paper.

Last Monday night, at 8 o’clock, buses arrived at Soetwater, at this encampment as dismal as the authorities that created it. In the dark, buses and armed men descended, and started urging people onto the buses. They gave no advance warning. They did not say where they were taking people. They did not force people onto the buses, but their very arrival and presence must have been extraordinarily intimidating. They were acting in the name of the province, and the premier, the man once known as Ebrahim Rasool.

Again, on the Tuesday evening, the same pattern. Large numbers of buses, armed men, destinations uncertain, despite official claims that explanatory pamphlets have been distributed. For people who have escaped state violence elsewhere on the continent, what could be more terrifying? Then the premier’s “social transformation consultant” consultant, one Zelda Holtzman, threatened the refugee leaders with the removal of tents, food and medicine unless they would meet with her individually, and not collectively as they preferred.

There is something about power that seems to corrupt inevitably, and the corruption of the soul is rather more scary than that of the hands that must wave away gifts. How does it happen?

You start out, perhaps, with the best of intentions. Perhaps. But then you must wrench yourself through one bitter compromise after another, make payment in word or in kind to the unscrupulous, ward off or absorb the insistent counsel of sycophants and fellow-travellers, till finally you stand in an office determined, you think, to do good. But you are now surrounded with the machine of bureaucracy. You are no longer a single human being of flesh and blood. The person who began the journey to power no longer exists. You have become a vast and sprawling creature made of officials and databases and the steel of public machinery; and the blood that runs through your veins is dark with the self-interested prejudices of those who elected you. As your time in office flows out, you wither into a creaking husk pulling levers to guide the mighty armoured machine that encases you.

For the middle classes of this city, aside from the many who have gone so very far out of their way to assist, it is quite easy to forget altogether that there is a refugee crisis. But the forces that created that crisis and the meanness of the response to it are the very same thing. They are connected by a fundamental disregard for the full humanity of others. Unchecked, this force can only spread in this nation. In Zimbabwe too, the early signs of tyranny began with the persecution of minorities, the slaughters in Matabeleland. But other Zimbabweans did not think it affected them. It is the old pattern.

In the developing world, it is rarely the case that a country becomes and simply remains a democracy. A more typical history is that after an early experiment with ballots and parties and candidate, people brutalised by the past regain the upper hand, and the tentative democracy is strangled, for years, before another painful resurgence of liberty. Sometimes these oscillations between liberty and tyranny repeat themselves several times. Is democracy eternal, as we like to imagine? We will only know when we can stand at the end of time and look back. In the meantime, the precautionary principle suggests we should assume it is eternal only as long as we are fighting for it on a daily basis.

The cycle of democratic advance and decline will not necessarily be restricted to the developing world. Close study of the laws and edicts deployed in the US and UK over the last several years show an unmistakable and relentless retreat from democratic values so painfully won. Since there are no obvious countervailing forces, there is little reason to doubt that in twenty years time the phrase ‘Western democracies’ will no longer cover those two noisy and belligerent states. Even if the person Barack Obama survives the election of his body, and the signs that he will are not good, he is but one man. What hope there is for his country lies not with him, but with the human wave that may carry him to office.

There is no reason why this pattern of democratic advance and retreat should not repeat itself in South Africa. Indeed, if our country’s people persist in their pursuit of material things while neglecting the warp and woof of society, and the endless but indispensable tedium of engaging with fellow citizens whom one does not much like and with whom finding common ground seems improbable, then democratic retreat is a certainty. Democracy withers behind a large screen tv, or the wheel of a large, locked and sealed vehicle, or long walls barbed with fear; and this country is full of them.

We like to think that our comfort, if we have it, is secured by noble values. But at present this is only true if we are prepared to list exploitation and inequality alongside freedom of speech, the right to vote and habeas corpus.

When refugees we’ve nearly forgotten are intimidated, treated with extraordinary disregard, and mustered at night for travel to unannounced destinations, we should know that there is a part of us that is also being pulled away into the darkness. Unless we respond with the same anguish and fury as those who are being treated as human cargo, we too will be lost.

Hope? That comes when when our voices are speaking louder and stronger, and our legs are moving, and our hands are writing, and our hearts alive and thinking, and we know, finally and certainly, that the madness of xenophobia, and the xenophobia of bureaucracy, affects us no less than than the refugees of all camps, and of Soetwater.

This is a young woman’s experience of xenophobic violence, and police complicity, in her community:

I live in Joe Slovo settlement, in Milnerton. It was Thursday afternoon (22 May). Me and my friends were talking, and my friends were saying, “These foreigners, they must leave the country.” My feelings were different, that these are Africans, and we must stand together, but my friends said their parents feel betrayed by these foreigners, because they’re losing their jobs to these foreigners. So if someone’s standing with foreigners looking for a job, the foreigners will say to whoever’s going to hire them, “You can give me less money than to the South Africans.”

That’s where the complications come in, like say, the Somalians, they have these shops, where the prices are cheaper, which makes it difficult for the other black people, like the Xhosa, because people are going to go to the Somalian shops. So that’s where the conflict comes in.

And the other issue that came up in our discussion is that [my friends] believe that these foreigners come to South Africa with drugs, and that these drugs are affecting their children and their lives. But me, in my own opinion, there may be some who come in and sell drugs and stuff like that, but the other [foreigners] who are innocent, they work very hard, like five to five a day for minimum wages . . . But my friends say, “They’re not supposed to be here, they must go back to their country, ‘cause they’re simply messing up our country.”

But at the same time, while these riots are happening, our brothers, our brothers who are very close-minded, criminals who normally do stuff, get a chance to do things. So that night, when the riots were happening, they were burning people’s containers, you know, where [the foreigners] do business. People were burning these containers. Some of the foreigners were rushing into the containers before their things were all burnt up and they would lose a lot of money.

It was messy. People were running and screaming. It was women and children, and men were trying to protect their wives and their kids. And they didn’t know where to go, and the people were standing and yelling and screaming at them.

And the flames were going and the police were there all over, and the police were trying to stop [the mob]. But people didn’t listen and they were throwing stones. But at the same time, there were policemen who were not helping. There were policemen who went into Somalian shops and they took their money. You know, they took their money but they were the police. I was expecting them to protect these people, but they were not protecting them, they were just corrupt, they would take the money and leave and allow the mob to come into the shop and take their stuff. It was so sad. You know there was this Somali guy on the TV who said, “I worked very, very hard for everything that I have. Why is this government not protecting us? We are not criminals.”

Then there were two guys who stood up for the Somalians, two Rastafarian guys, South African guys. They were not afraid to stand up and say, “What you are doing is wrong.” And what happened to them? They got stabbed, and now they’re lying in Somerset hospital. The [mob] stabbed them just because they were trying to protect the Somalis. The rest of us, when we saw that happen, we feared, even though we knew it was wrong, we feared to let our voices be heard because we saw what could happen to us. If we were to say, “What you are doing is wrong”, they would hurt us too.

So we just stood there and kept our emotions inside ourselves. It was just horrible.
Ninety per cent of the people in the community hate the foreigners, ninety per cent blame the foreigners for losing their jobs and every bad thing that ever happens to them. And ten per cent actually feel for the foreigners, but they don’t have a foot to stand on. Ten per cent. That small. It’s very messy.

How did it start in specific places? I don’t have the facts for this, but apparently there’s a letter that arrived from Johannesburg that was delivered to each police station in Cape Town [saying] that they [Cape people] must chase these people [the foreigners] away, and if they don’t do it then the Jo’burg people will come down to Cape Town and they will do it themselves the violent way. So that’s how it started.

I’m not saying the police started the violence but that’s where the letter was delivered, the letter was delivered there [to the police] because the police have contacts in the community. So I wouldn’t say that [the police] started the violence but it started somewhere because the letter was delivered at the police stations ordering them that these people must get rid of the foreigners. If they don’t, they would come from Johannesburg and make a mess here. So, that night, people did it.

My own opinion – I think it was started by criminals, criminals wanting a chance. When they heard that [about the letter] they found a gap to do these things they always wanted to do. Neighbours, next to me, boys . . . when all these things were happening, they were carrying big screen tvs into the yard, and a tv stand and such big hi-fi speakers, things that they stole from other people.

So when [the violence] started, the people were running [after] these foreigners and burning their places. In our black community, when something like that happens, everyone leaves their home. They run to [where everything’s happening] so nobody’s left at home. So the criminals get a chance to break in and they take things and stuff like that. So South Africans were being robbed as well, it was not only the foreigners.

A Somali woman in the Cape Town city Youngfield refugee camp. Pic: Miriam Mannak

And people, you know, the Somalis, their shops were locked, but people broke them open, it didn’t matter how locked they were, they broke it open, they took … [It was] our mothers, big women… The other thing I don’t understand . . . our parents, they go to church. They practice this Christianity that says that I shall not kill, you shall not, things like that. But the things they did . . . I was so ashamed when I saw it, it was our parents running into these shops, taking their stuff.

And I was like, these people practice [Christianity]! Like even yesterday [Saturday 24] I was going past a church and I heard them sing and I thought, not too long ago they were robbing people, chasing people, throwing stones at them, and right now they were at church. I don’t know why they go to church when they do all these things.

Because it wasn’t only youngsters [looting], there were mothers, fathers, grown-ups breaking and shouting and going into the shops. They came out with big bags of food and dish liquids and all those things. And in their own way they feel they’re entitled to it, which was wrong. It was unbelievable. They were supposed to stop their kids, but they were doing it with their kids. I don’t care what they say but in my eyes they were criminals, they were stealing because those things did not belong to them and they took them; that was theft.

And the funny thing is this, during the day, it’s quite quiet, people just shush-shush here, shush-shush there, they talk about it. [But] at night people come out of their houses and they do these things. Why do they do it at night if they feel like they have the right to do it? Why not do it during the day when everybody can see? [But] they do it at night when it’s dark, you can barely see.

It’s wrong. People don’t feel safe, you know, when they walk. Yesterday, I was passing by, there was this child sitting there, it’s a girl, she was probably about 13 years old, she’s sitting there, she’s crying, very loud, it’s a foreigner, she was foreign, I could see, she was looking around. I think she misplaced her parents, she doesn’t know where her parents are, she’s crying. And then there are people standing around her. Nobody went over and asked her, “Why are you crying, where’s your parents?” . . . whatever. People just passed by like it’s nothing. She didn’t know where her mother was, her mother probably didn’t know where she was

I wouldn’t be able to say if there’s any way of stopping it [the violence]. If people change inside their hearts, the way they feel . . . They are far from getting over this. But apparently today the president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, will be arriving here in Cape Town to talk to the people and plead with them to stop what they are doing. I don’t know if that is going to help. But you know even if the Lord himself were to come down and say, “Please people, stop,” I don’t think [it would stop]. They want to do this, this is something they feel like they are entitled to.

You know the food prices are up and things like that now. My friend says that if these people leave the country – at the moment she’s not working – then she’ll get a job. And things (arguments) like that: if they leave, our parents will have work, they’ll get the pay that they want, because the foreigners, they get themselves small pay. If I were to work for somebody, I might ask for R100 a day, and that person, he wants to charge R40 a day. It’s their right, you know, to say that they’re going to work for R40 a day. But now people [South Africans] are losing their jobs. ‘Cause even me, if somebody said to me, “I’m going to sell this to you for R20,” and the other one says, “for R100”, I’m going to buy the R20 one, I wouldn’t buy the R100 one. So that’s how they (South Africans) feel. They feel betrayed.

But the worst part of all this is that they may not realise this now but what they’re doing is they’re being racist against their own, at a very wrong time, because this is supposed to be Africa month, we’re meant to unite and stand together but here we are falling divided.

Some people, they make jokes of this, they make fun. Me, it makes me sad. When I’m around people I know, I do voice up but again when I’m around a lot of people and I can see these people can hurt me, I don’t say anything, but I do feel that what they’re doing is wrong.

You know, the foreigners walk around, they have to look behind their shoulders every five minutes because they don’t know what that [some] person might do to them . They have to hide, and I can see they’re frustrated. And yesterday – it’s a pity I didn’t go – but yesterday they held a meeting, the Joe Slovo community held meeting. Not too many people were there, but people did go, to decide whether to continue with this riot thing. But I can assure you that the foreigners were not there . . . I don’t know who organised the meeting. In some open field, they were discussing it.

You know, the foreigners, they’ve lost a lot. The other thing is, if they must go home as people say they must go home, some of them do not have the money to go, it’s very expensive to go. They have their places, they’ve bought houses here and now they must leave and drop everything. Because if you live in your house and you are a foreigner, they will burn you alive in your house. They wouldn’t think, they wouldn’t hesitate to burn you alive. So people just have to run. Because I wouldn’t choose to burn in my house either.

Some of them have babies. You must see there in the [budget] Formule 1 Hotel in Joe Slovo, the people sitting there, the foreigners booked themselves in there. The hotel’s full, they just sit and the women cry, they don’t know which way to go, who to turn to, who to trust because even the police, some of the police, they’ve got the same dirt in their hearts, they do the same thing. [The police are] supposed to protect [the foreigners] but they steal their money, they do everything.

Slovo is messed up, you can drive past there. Places have burnt, it’s just ashes everywhere.

Rastafarian waving a flag in protest against xenophobia, at a vigil outside Parliament, on May 23. No politicians attended the vigil. Rastas have been brutally assaulted when standing up against xenophobic mobs.

The use of the term “internment camps” for the City of Cape Town refugee camps, by the Treatment Action Campaign, has become somewhat controversial. This is my view, posted as a comment elsewhere. I omitted to mention the sheer terror with which many refugees, victims of state violence elsewhere on the continent, respond to official action :

["Internment camps" is] a very emotive term — but the city was at one stage undoubtedly heading towards creating places that would have been internment camps in all but name.

I have absolutely no doubt about this, because I heard discussions amongst city officials myself, in person, with my own ears, showing that they were at times considering lockdowns on the camps and sites, for ’security reasons’, and that they thought they might end up forcibly removing people from certain locations. At least one of the sites was in fact locked down over Sunday night. What’s more, the city wanted to remove people from all the smaller refuges and concentrate them in the camps.

God alone knows what might have happened if people had been handed into the power of our unspeakably corrupt and brutal Home Affairs department for “processing”. There is no doubt in my mind at all that this is what would have happened if this emergency had been left to the authorities, and not headed off by the huge civil society response.

TAC used inflammatory language, sure, in this statement. But if it helped clarify the issues, clarified where we might have headed, then it was absolutely warranted, even if it now looks a bit excessive.

As for the politics surrounding the authorities’ handling of the response — well, you have to have your head stuck in the sand not to know that both the ANC and DA have long been at loggerheads in this province. That they could not set aside their differences long enough to deal properly with a humanitarian emergency shows neither really has the interests of ordinary people at heart. I have, at different times, and in different contexts, admired both Zille and Rasool — but no longer.

It’s a cheap shot to level a charge of politicking against TAC. I quite often feel uncomfortable with the militancy of TAC myself — on the other hand, I do not see ANY less militant organisations fighting as hard or as successfully for the human rights of ordinary South Africans. In this country, unless you are militant, or if you show signs of weakness, you are all too often brutally trampled. As has been amply demonstrated in the last week.

David Le Page, currently TAC volunteer

Refugee leader Theo addresses his fellows outside Caledon Square police station, in central Cape Town

I can’t get the stench of urine out of my nostrils. It’s the smell of fear, anger and humiliation.

I smelt it last night, when I spoke to the refugees outside Caledon Square police station. I saw it running thick in the gutters a couple of feet away from where people were sleeping. I smelt it again this morning, when I went round to advise them that lawyers and press were about to visit to take statements. The refugees were preparing to embark on a hunger strike. Theo, a published author from the DRC, was standing on a milk crate, addressing his comrades. They were refusing to abandon the pavement, in protest at their treatment by the government.

There must have been a whole lot of developments during the day which I was unable to track, as this evening they were being driven to a community hall in Sea Point, awaiting a visit by the provincial premier or his representative.

After talking to the refugees at Caledon Square, I crossed the road to the District Six Museum, to request they open up toilet facilities. Filled with righteous indignation at the doors I’d found barred the night before, I embarrassed myself fairly thoroughly, as it turned out the side doors had been open, and the museum staff had been doing a great deal for the refugees.

Then I drove out with another volunteer to assessments of the refugee sites, one of several teams with that task today. We expected to see signs of misery, and to run into obstructive and unpleasant officials. Fortunately we did not. Others, however, did.

Silwerstroom, which is one of the six official city camps, is 45 mins drive out of the city, north, near Atlantis. It’s a resort. Now there are six large tents erected there, the kind events management people erect for banquets. Carpets cover the earth.

Refugees queue for ‘brunch’ at the Silverstroom camp, 45 mins north of Cape Town

The site was created to cater for 2000 people. Fortunately, only 250 are there, and in what seemed like relatively decent conditions, though as the rain pours down now, I dread to think how miserable they must be. Though they have many blankets and sleeping mats, many said they’d been terribly cold at night, and I know from experience how cold it can get right next to the Atlantic, even in the middle of summer.

The Red Cross is now leading efforts to feed people, albeit inconsistently. They get just two meals a day, and the ‘brunch’ we saw served late at 12.15 was little more than two slices of bread.

Officials from the Department of Home Affairs were visiting. One of the DRC refugees pointed at one of them, and said he had told her that her son, born in South Africa, is not a South African national.

Many of them came from Du Noon, and again I heard reports of how police in that area had collaborated in the looting of their homes and shops. The refugees now have a fairly universal distrust and fear of black South Africans, by all accounts. At one of the sites, some were threatened with throat slitting gestures by people erecting tents. Officials running some of the sites are siphoning off supplies and selling them or giving them away to non-refugees.

TAC volunteers sort clothes for distribution to refugees, with frenetic speed – Sunday 25 May

We then visited several churches in Rondebosch, Claremont and Mowbray, each housing between 20 and 100 people. In all of them, the local communities had provided amazing support. At one church in Claremont, doctors, even counsellors, had been organised. There are many hundreds of people around the city working very hard to support other refugees in similar circumstances.

But the situations do vary. Twenty people holed up in a church in Mowbray will not venture onto the streets. They were hounded by an angry mob outside a church right in the middle of Cape Town, an incident which has gone completely unreported it seems.

The vast majority of refugees seem to be Zimbabwean and Congolese. In other words, from two of the most conflict-ridden countries in the region.

Someone from TAC this evening heard the following statement from one of the refugees departing the pavement at Caledon Square. They embarked on the buses in terrible fear, dreading where they might actually be taken. This man, a Burundian, spoke along these lines:

“Many of us have been running all our lives. Since I was six, I have been surrounded by death. I escaped genocide in Burundi to go to Rwanda. I fled genocide in Rwanda to the DRC, and fled from mass killings there to return to Rwanda. From there, I went to Tanzania, and then came to South Africa. Now, this happens, and I must flee again.”

Here’s a New York Times article on everything that’s happening, written in their customary remote and genteel tones.

This evening, I stood outside the Caledon Square police station, where 150 displaced South Africans of other nationalities are sleeping on the pavement, amidst a heavy smell of urine. They’ve been here for two nights already. The rain is about to come, heavy rain for the next three days. Around them swirls a fight between the city authorities and the provincial authorities. No more than 20m from a fucking police station, and they’ve not after two days been provided with anything other than food and blankets by members of the community.

Zimbabweans who have been holed up in a backyard shack in Khayelitsha for three days, after being stoned by locals, prepare to leave

My armchair theory that South Africa is in fact one of the continent’s least developed countries, when one looks at human decency and not at numbers of shopping malls, looks dismayingly substantial.

A group of 12 people from the DRC and Tanzania and Rwanda and Burundi and Somalia surround me (not threateningly) and grill me on what’s happening. “My business of ten years has been destroyed, how can I go back to my mother empty-handed?” “How will we get restitution?” “This government treats us like animals.” “Where is the government, why do they not come to talk us?” “We don’t trust anyone any more, we want the UNHCR.” “They must send us to Namibia, to Zambia. There we will be okay.”

John, from the DRC, had two businesses which he ran from containers in Nyanga. He is married to a South African woman. He has two South African children. Yet he has been hounded from his home to sleep on a stinking pavement outside a police station. He has no idea whether he will ever be able to return to his family.

They are all sleeping on the pavement across the road from the District Six Museum, a museum supposedly dedicated to the rights of forcibly displaced people. Yet tonight, with dozens of forcibly displaced people on its doorstep, those doors remain tightly barred. [update on Wednesday: I was completely wrong about the museum, they are doing lots to assist]

Earlier this evening, we heard that officials from the Department of Social Development, were telling the manager of one of the sites out on the flats, Father Louis, to keep out TAC, and to keep out journalists. So government officials are trying to muzzle the media and block civil society assistance.

Fortunately they are not succeeding. While there are now 21 000 people in recognised sites around the peninsula, many in church halls and mosques, there are many as well in private homes. They are the fortunate ones. I spoke today to a man in Paarden Island whose non-profit company is cooking meals for 6 000. Here outside Caledon Square, I meet Bilel, a Muslim whose community is feeding hundreds of people in the Youngsfield Military Base. Donations are pouring in to TAC. Many are helping. Conditions in the camps are bad, in many instances. Tomorrow I’ll know more.

What should I tell the people around me? That the mayor, Helen Zille, once considered a determined leader for human rights would rather shut them up in internment camps than allow them into smaller, more humane community halls – because to do so would disrupt some weddings!!? That she, the mayor of an entire city of millions, was indignantly telling TAC (the small volunteer-based organisation with which I’m working) this morning that the city had done at least as much as us? That the government has spent the last two weeks mostly sitting on its collective backside while the president contemplates his evaporating legacy through thick glass and amber fluid? That the authorities are now forcibly preventing people from leaving some of the camps, camps even the likes of TAC initially supported.This is a tourist city. But it does not welcome those who are black. At the foot of Africa, something revoltingly close to apartheid is alive and kicking.

And during the day, the suburbs and the city move on, most people mostly unmoved, as always, by the disaster a few feet away.

Update: Wednesday morning

Going, at least, by what I read in the Cape Times, it seems some measure of order may be descending.

The UNHCR has spoken against the camps established by the city. Reading between the lines, there seems to be a greater measure of consensus amongst the various parties. Let’s hope dialogue continues. The challenge seems to remain getting information about what is actually happening, and where, and properly coordinating (to whatever degree is possible) the multitude of efforts.

Vast amounts of resources are now being mobilised. There’s probably even a danger that too much may be pushed into the situation.

I am, more than ever, convinced that in situations such as these, it is the efforts of ordinary people working in their immediate environment, that truly makes a difference, as much if not far more than the efforts of large organisations. All have their place, but the first kind of effort is more valuable. And when people start shouting at each other, and pointing fingers, it simply strengthens those who are neglectful, apathetic or incompetent, while undermining those determined to do good in allegiance with others doing the same.

Archbishop Thabo Mokgatho addresses a protest meeting in Cape Town’s St Georges Cathedral. His plea for an end to the furious finger-pointing that surrounds us has so far gone unheeded.

I’d prefer to be doing something more ‘useful’ but I’m sitting in St. Georges Cathedral, waiting to play into a microphone, a sound clip of refugees speaking of their experiences. It’s one item on the programme at a public meeting protesting xenophobia. I’m wearing a t-shirt that says ‘foreigner on the front’, as are many. Archbishop Mokgatho’s wearing it over his long purple robes. I haven’t had a chance to read the back yet.

Themba Baleni, my soundman from Beat It days, greets me – we haven’t seen each other for over two years. He tells me that Peter, the cameraman we used to work with, is now living on the streets in Muizenberg. This I had heard already; but had hoped might have changed.

The cathedral is filling up with people from all Cape Town’s communities, archbishops, imams and chief justices will speak alongside the activists.

“I’m not sure I’m going to be chief justice for much longer,” says Chief Justice Pius Langa. Perhaps he means that he doesn’t expect to hold onto his position when speaking against the inaction and apathy of the government.

What follow are excerpts from his address.

“We come here [St Georges Cathedral], when there is great emotion in the nation, when we ask ourselves if there is something we have lost along the way.

“I was there [in the 80s] when we said, ‘I want my fundamental human rights.’ What we really meant was that we wanted everyone living in South Africa to enjoy those fundemental human rights.”

“Human rights are indivisible. They do not belong to you alone.”

“In 1994, the South African nation endorsed the demand for our freedom, for our fundamental human rights, by adopting a consitution that guaranteed just these things. This was not just for a few people, this was for all people within South Africa.”

“Are we as a society going to allow ourselves to be sabotaged?”

“We put socio-economic rights in the consitution. The constitution represents a positive fight.”

Zackie dashes up to adjust the microphone for the Most Reverend Archbishop Thabo Mokgatho.

“We meet today to sorry to our neighbours. We meet to say the appalling violence that has been visited on them is unacceptable.”

“This is not the time to point fingers at each other.” He’s perhaps aware that TAC, the city, and the provincial government are doing just that. I fear his plea will go unheard.

Archbishop Lawrence Henry “It’s not spaza shops that must be destroyed, it’s a culture of not caring that must be destroyed.”

I pass a note to Zackie, “South Africans of other nationalities, not foreigners.” Perhaps he used it when speaking; I don’t know, as I left before the meeting finished. I don’t have the stomach for two hours of speeches, and I suspected I might be better employed elsewhere.

Nokhwezi Hoboyi, from TAC, who is managing the speakers: “Is this how we treat our brothers, our fellow Africans, who gave us refuge during the time of apartheid?” The mike’s just that bit too high for her, and she stands on her toes to speak.

Police at anti-xenophobia ‘vigil’ outside Parliament on Friday 23 May

This was written on the night of Sunday 26. By Monday midday, fortunately, it seemed sense had prevailed, in good part due to strong pressure from the likes of TAC, and the authorities had retreated from insisting that all refugees be concentrated in a few large camps.

I’m sitting in the Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre, around a square of desks, cables, microphones and cables. It’s 2am, and half the eight people in the room are asleep. They’re not being neglectful – out on the flats and in the townships, the violence has, for tonight at any rate, subsided. No more bullets fly in Du Noon, that we know of. (“Who’s shooting?” “If there were names on the bullets, we’d know.”)

In front of me is the carefully tabulated Treatment Action Campaign/Aids Law Project/MSF assessment of the refugee situation: “Displaced persons, Sunday 25 May: 8969”.

Phrases: “entirely lacking in all supplies”, “incidents of intimidation at hospital”, “desperately need more ablution blocks”, “seems to be well-kept and under control”, “military providing protection”, “crowd unsettled, concerned for lack of safety; lack of drinking water”.

Over 650 people are in the Gant’s warehouse in Somerset West, 500 in the Desmond Tutu hall, 1320 in the Kraaifontein Youth Centre.

I’ve always been curious about the ways in which social evil is created, how it’s created almost inadvertently by organisations of mostly well-intentioned and individually moral people.

The social evil lurching towards us is the creation of what effectively will be internment camps filled with scared and angry people suffering from dislocation and exploitation.

How will it happen? City managers, finding that they’re unable to effectively provide services to a multitude of sites, are deciding that refugees must be consolidated in a few particular sites. The mayor, Helen Zille, is pushing hard for that. After all, it’s just logical. And, apparently, there are lots of weddings scheduled for these halls, and they just can’t easily be rescheduled to accommodate frightened and desperate people.

But displaced people, in scattered community halls and sites around the Peninsula, are resisting being pushed into the camps. They don’t want to move. They’ve been uprooted once already. They trust the refuges they’ve found for themselves, refuges working on a fairly human scale. They don’t trust the authorities, they don’t trust the servants of a government which runs the massively abusive Department of Home Affairs, which has created so much suffering for so many of them (as it does for South Africans, as well).

Managing a camp filled with hundreds of people is a massive task. Problems emerge like hydras. The people managing some of the site housing refugees often don’t have the skills for the tasks. In some instances, we hear, they’re only cleaners.

In the DRMC, the words “drugs” and “alcohol” are heard quite often. The problems of managing criminal or simply unruly people quickly loom larger in the minds of city managers than the needs of quieter people. Faced with the problem of keeping alcohol out and order in, the authorities are starting to lock at least one of the camps at certain times.

A lock-up may temporarily alleviate one problem, but it’s likely to make people feel like prisoners. Which will create many more problems. Again, a completely logical decision which when applied to a complex human system may wreak havoc.

These logical decisions, taken in good faith, could end up creating much suffering.

As for solutions, they certain start with ensuring that basic needs are met.

But they must continue with really encouraging refugees to create committees and structures, that allow them to start managing the resources that are going to them. And then to start managing, with the authorities, and with the assistance of mediators where necessary, the processes of either relocation or reintegration.

Those are the temporary, bandaid solutions. The deeper solutions lie in gearing up for greater social justice for all citizens. At present, there’s no sign that our country, as a whole, yet sees the need for that. The middle classes and the wealthy stand firmly in the way without even realising that they do.

Further impressions from the DRMC

More people coming to Summer Greens. They put in 20 security guards – but the security guards ran away. Private security. Summer Greens has been a hotspot. Refugees have been aggressive, non-cooperative. No-one is keeping a record of people coming in and out, nowhere. Allegation that people are moving in and out with drugs and alcohol. Metro and SAPS trying to stabilise.

Harmony Park. They’ve locked the gates. “There’s enough alcohol and drugs inside there to keep them busy for the night.”

Reported shooting and stoning of refugees and Metro police by community, in Belville South.

Du Noon – they’re burning shacks in Site 5. 30 people trapped. They organise transport to Silverstroom.

If people at the Bothasig Community Hall refuse to move, “they must be moved”. “I’m quite sure the word ‘force’ has been removed there.”

Man set alight in Makabeni Road, Khayelitsha. SAPS, Metro, EMS in attendance. “He’s okay”

They’re planning to move people out of Khayelitsha. People cannot move around freely. Khayelitsha is the worst area tonight.

Police coming under fire in Du Noon. “Who is shooting?” “If there was a name on the bullet, we would know.”

“We were not able to deliver on the mandate from the mayor”, to move people from the community halls to the centres.

“The reply from the mayor was that we must just transport those who wish to be transported. And in respect of others, she will give us direction tomorrow. We have managed to transport some few.”

“If people don’t want to move tomorrow, we will have to divert transport resources to move those at police stations, mosques and community centres.”

Someone repeats the notorious recent statement of the deputy minister of safety and security, Susan Shabangu, that police should just “shoot the bastards”.

“Soetwater [refugee site] is too full.”