Lesotho, the hole in South Africa’s heart

(The Star op-ed 10 July 2015)

- Michael Schmidt

When I was growing up, Lesotho was a mystical mountain kingdom where black and white boys enjoyed true friendship as in the idyllic 1975 film e’Lollipop, which I probably saw at the old Star Drive-in, perched on top of a hillock of mine tailings just south of Johannesburg’s city centre. Of course that dream was as fake as the brutal reality that unfolded across South Africa just a year later, for Basotholand was born in warfare as a redoubt against the Zulu, British and Boers, and has suffered from insurrection ever since independence.

And with Sunday Times reporting last weekend that Lesotho is on the verge of sliding back into military dictatorship, “as the army unleashes a reign of terror… arresting, torturing and killing opponents,” the mountain kingdom has entered another period of armed crisis. This is despite South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s shuttle diplomacy over recent months in an attempt to stamp out the fires – which is as starkly at odds with President Nelson Mandela’s gunboat diplomacy in invading Lesotho in 1998, as it is with Thabo Mbeki’s alleged clandestine diplomacy in the 2000s with the SA Police Services kidnapping Basotho opposition activists.

Lesotho’s remote geography, as one of only three countries in the world entirely surrounded by another state, not to mention an economy almost entirely made up of foreign aid, earnings from the Southern African Customs Union, and remittances from migrant labour in South Africa, is dominated by its industrial neighbour which lies coiled around Lesotho like a fat python whose inconsistent foreign policy towards Lesotho has helped fuel the conflict there.

By legend, a man named Lepoqo of the Bamokoteli tribe, with cheekbones as steep as the mountainsides he rode, earned his chops in the late 18^th Century in a raid in which he emasculated his enemies by shearing off their beards, the sound of the shears giving him his battle-name, Moshoeshoe. When he succeeded his father as chief of the Bamotokeli in 1820, he united the refugees and his tribe into the Basotho nation and built a defensive position at the Mountain of the Night, or Thaba Bosiu.

Incorporated as a British protectorate in 1868, the vertiginous snowcapped Maluti gained independence in 1966 as Lesotho, and a great-great grandson of its founding father, King Moshoeshoe II, took the throne under a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliament dominated by the Basotho National Party (BNP). But peace did not come with independence: the 1970 nullification by the BNP of elections widely believed to have been won by the opposition Basotholand Congress Party (BCP) caused such instability that in 1986, a military coup d’etat transferred executive and legislative powers to the king, who ruled under the advice of a Military Council headed by General Justin Lekhanya, although in 1990 Lekhanya stripped Moshoeshoe II of his powers and exiled him. Lekhanya intended to restore civilian rule, but as experienced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the communist coup attempt of 1991, the old guard’s fears of change saw him toppled in a coup the same year.

Moshoeshoe II was succeeded by his son Letsie III who ruled under the 1993 constitution which cut the king out of political life, still BNP-dominated, but who abdicated in favour of his father in 1995. Yet stability remained illusory as Moshoeshoe II was killed in a car accident and Letsie III had to reassume the throne – this time with political ambitions, for the liberation of South Africa in April 1994 had raised high expectations of change in Lesotho and the country was wracked by mutinies in police, army and prison services. In August 1994, Letsie III lead a faction of the military in staging a coup.

International pressure forced the king to revert to civilian rule within a month, but the damage was done and another incendiary cycle was initiated, with a critical split in 1997 in the ruling BCP which saw veteran leader Ntsu Mokhele take two thirds of MPs with him to form the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD). The LCD won the 1998 elections with 79 out of 80 seats, but despite a Southern African Development Community (SADC) commission ruling that the LDC landslide was legitimate, opposition parties, and in particular the BCP-linked military, refused to believe this was so.

Violent protests in Maseru set the stage for a mutiny by junior officers who believed they were toppling a corrupt edifice of South African-swayed senior officers and politicians. The panicked LDC government appealed to SADC for assistance and on 22 September 1998, SANDF and Botswana Defence Force armoured columns rolled into Maseru under SADC auspices, while SADF parachutists secured key points such as the Lesotho Highlands hydroelectric system. I was present and the shock of the invasion was intense: Maseru was looted and burned by armed mobs outraged that SADC armoured vehicles had stationed themselves on the grounds of the Royal Palace, traditionally seen as a sacred safe-haven; and SANDF armour suffered an eight-hour fire-fight at the hands of rebels armed with recoilless rocketry, in capturing the main Makoanyane Military Base.

At diplomatic level, South Africa made the mistake of claiming the mutiny was a coup attempt, which infuriated the opposition all the more. Many Basotho I spoke to at the time feared that South Africa was staging a thinly-disguised annexation of Lesotho as its tenth province. I assured them that South Africa wanted to control their water supply without the burden of healthcare for mountain peasants. Ironically, there is a move within Lesotho to have South Africa annex it – largely driven by migrant labourers who want to be able to move freely and repatriate their earnings easily, and is strongly supported by the ANC-aligned National Union of Mineworkers.

Even Lesotho Foreign Affairs Minister Mohlabi Kenneth Tsekoa stated in 2013 at a ceremony to consolidate cultural ties and enhance business flows between the countries that “Lesotho and South Africa have been one from time immemorial.” At the time, Khadija Patel quoted Johnny Steinberg, writing for the Institute for Security Studies in 2005 , as saying that commentators had argued “that the raison d’etre for Lesotho’s sovereignty vanished at the end of apartheid, and that political incorporation into South Africa is inevitable – or at very least, highly desirable – in the long run.”

But before we get all revanchist and start planning ski lodges in the Maluti, we have to decide what our policy towards Lesotho truly is. Mandela’s kragdadigheid was replaced under Mbeki by a sneaky practice – if not policy – of the SAPS kidnapping opposition activists, for example the abduction by helicopter from her place of exile outside of Bloemfontein of BNP Women’s League deputy leader Malefa Sefora Maphaleba in October 2004. I interviewed her for Saturday Star and she told me that she had been interrogated for eight hours in a remote forest about Basotho politics by policemen who all the time held over her head the threat of forcibly returning her to Lesotho where the previous year she had suffered torture for eight days at the hands of the Royal Lesotho Mounted Police. That threat was real enough as another prominent opposition leader in exile in South Africa had been kidnapped by the SAPS, bundled into the boot of a car and illegally driven across the border into Lesotho to be handed over to his pursuers.

Lesotho remains the hole in South Africa’s heart; ignored for much of its existence, yet desired for its water and cheap labour, then battered in the ring by continual shifts in South African policy which stoked internal fires. It deserves consistent assistance to become a full democracy at last.

·         Michael Schmidt is a veteran investigative journalist and defence correspondent. He has written about the 1998 invasion of Lesotho and the illegal rendition of foreigners by the SAPS in his latest book, Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War (2014).

Lesotho: the bitter harvest of Mandela's gunboat diplomacy

This is the bitter harvest of the seeds sown by Mandela's gunboat diplomacy in the illegitimate SANDF-BDF invasion of Lesotho in August 1998 to crush a pro-democratic mutiny aimed at these same military strongmen who now run Lesotho as their fiefdom (although we lied to the international community and pretended it was a coup d'etat). Read my field reports from that mutiny, and about how the SAPS has been involved in kidnapping Lesotho opposition politicians, in Drinking with Ghosts:http://www.timeslive.co.za/…/…/Reign-of-terror-grips-Lesotho

A great review by Ian Edwards (GIBS) in the SA Journal of Science

Drinking with Ghosts: The Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War is a powerful work dealing with South Africa’s violent political struggles, its political transition, and the ways dark and secret pasts continue to haunt post-1994 South Africa. South Africa’s modern political history is covered in an ever-increasing number of books, both scholarly and more popular. Similarly, there is an ever-increasing amount of scholarly work concerned with trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation. Taking their cue from the post-1994 South African government’s internationally heralded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many research and publicly engaged institutes now address these very issues.
Schmidt’s book is quite different. He doesn’t share the notion that forgetting can be part of healing, and is sceptical of narratives of the ‘miracle’ ‘Rainbow Nation’ or the ‘New South Africa’. Whilst respecting the scholarly, he will have none of the celebratory. Schmidt’s view is succinct: South Africans will neither reconcile nor develop a common humanity unless its many hidden and covered-up abodes of darkness and terror are exposed, confronted, and written into history.
This book is also unlike other recent books by journalists writing within this broader field. It is not a biography, such as that of Eugene de Kock, or ghost-written accounts of tortured victims of MK camps in Angola. It’s not a conspiracy story on the trail of red mercury, or ‘reds under bed’. Nor is it in the heroic grensvegter mould. Nor is this a current journalist publishing in book form lengthy texts of his own press reports. The journalist’s personal story of self-enlightenment is not highlighted over the real story – as it is in a recent study of the Marikana massacre. Nor is it a cut-and-paste book from journalists’ courtroom media tweets amidst international press attention. Nor is this journalism as exposé making or celebrity seeking. And, the book is well published – by the Human Sciences
Research Council’s BestRed imprint – and includes scholarly footnotes, a bibliography and index; all of which are refreshingly different from other recent publications in this genre.
This is ‘dark and stormy night…’ journalism, but only in one breathless sense. There are plenty of dark nights, conspirators and conspiracies, burning dwellings, atomic explosions, different poisons, armoured battles the likes of which were last seen in Africa in 1943, global geo-political plots and calculations, and ruthless plotters and calculators. There’s a sniper rifle to be aimed at Mandela that passes hands between the two major political adversaries. And there are plenty of bodies – tortured,
screaming, writhing, poisoned, burning, rotting and, in their many hundreds, being thrown alive out of aeroplanes over the Atlantic. There are many hanging questions – which in a novel would be mysteries and riddles. But this is not creative writing. As Rian Malan rightly observes, here is a ‘high speed ride through the nightmares of recent South African history, with a nerveless, dead-eyed journalist at the wheel’ (back cover).
But this book is more than what South Africans would usually see as South African history. It has a truly southern African and global reach. Schmidt understands his southern Africa better than most. Implicitly he sees an area with vital common threads. This area was not just within the imperial sway of European powers. Nor was it just colonial penetration – ports, towns, plantations, mines, roads and railways. The greater southern African area was a vast area of settler colonialism. The challenge to these settler societies involved Marxist–Leninist or Maoist national liberation movements – all of which embraced various forms of armed struggles in a Cold War environment. So too Schmidt challenges South Africans’ senses, from the National Party’s to liberation movements’, of their uniqueness and exceptionalism. South Africa bore marked similarities to the military dictatorships of the South American region, particularly Chile. Botha’s mirror image was Pinochet. They were cold warriors using terror as a means of internal repression and part of a wider geo-political bulwark against communist expansion. Schmidt challenges liberation movements’ triumphalist narratives of democratic transition. Post-apartheid South Africa is a child of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Cold War. As Schmidt sees it, from 1990 to 1994, international and national political forces, crossing the previous Cold War political divides, came together to hammer out the political
consensus on which the new South Africa was founded. For Schmidt it is these forces which have no interest in uncovering the country’s dark and haunting pasts.
As an investigative journalist, Schmidt has real concerns over the direction his chosen craft is taking. For him, investigative journalism is being supplanted by reporters presenting incidents in isolation. Without giving names he gives examples of such conduct. Schmidt has two core conceptual and methodological understandings. He recognises the difference between what the French refer to as verité (truth) and veracité (veracity). He sees both the historian and the journalist as having as their task the search for veracity, rather than truth, for there are many truths, yet it is out of verifiable, established facts that the strands of different, sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and often illuminating truths emerge. (p. ix)
To gain this veracity he employs what he refers to as ‘forensic meditation’. Using his investigative work on the Marikana massacre he develops the point further: …in returning to the scene of a massacre – walking the paths of the killers to their termini, re-interviewing the victims and perpetrators, reconstructing the details and teasing out discrepancies. I have been 2 km down the Implats platinum mine, on the stopes where the rock-drillers sweat in 55 °C heat, the air thick with the bite of ammonia. I’ve yet to see our  journalists walking the paths of the rock-drillers they are reporting on. (p. 307–309)
What this means is that Schmidt needs to ask people question after question, find primary material sources, and find people to assist him. He is dogged in all regards, sometimes with absurdly amusing consequences. Importantly, this book is based on his notebooks, with some tidying up. It is so rare that journalist’s notebooks make it into archives. This book is thus a fascinating look inside the craft of a good investigative journalist in a very dangerous high-stakes world. Indeed the book is comprised of such notes, placed within wider contexts. One chapter begins with comment on judicial hangings in South Africa, to which is attached, appropriately, his January 2005 note of his investigations in Upington into the events of November 1985 and the ‘Upington 14’ and how these
issues carry forward into the present.
Evelina de Bruin was the only woman amongst the ‘Upington 14’ sentenced to death for the murder of a municipal policeman in 1984 amidst street protests, rallies and running battles with police, who had opened fire on and tear-gassed protestors. Schmidt interviewed her in 2005. Ouma de Bruin has forgotten her name, but the only other woman then on death row was a meisiekind – a girl – from the Western Cape. She had just been moved to ‘Die Pot’, the preparation cell, and was to be hanged the following morning. As the ‘fat warders’ took her to the gallows, she called out to De Bruin ‘… I have hope that the cup that is passed to me will pass Ouma by’. In 1991, De Bruin and her husband
and the other ‘Upington 14’ walked free, the Appellate Division having reduced their sentences to suspended sentences on the lesser charge of public violence. By that time they had spent 2 years on Death Row.
Sadly her husband died 10 years after release, wracked by traumatic memories of the gallows doing its ‘hungry work’. And, in a grotesque nuance altogether in harmony with so much else in this book, the only person who did give his life for the ‘Upington 14’ was their defence  lawyer, Anton Lubowski, who was gunned down by an operative of the appallingly misnamed South African Police’s Civil Cooperation Bureau outside his Windhoek home in 1989 (p. 284–289).
But, as Schmidt believes, the cup must pass to us. ‘[O]ur beloved fractured would-be ‘nation’ is withdrawing again into mutually hostile racial laagers [so] it is time that we sit down together and drink with our ghosts’ (p. xiv). South Africans across the political spectrum have to unravel their own version of the Chilean ‘Pact of Forgetting’. Across South America their ‘drums of bones’ are beating as they now seek to come to terms with their brutal age of the generals. Our ‘drums of bones’ are already beating. With the recent xenophobic killings, the imminent Constitutional Court hearing into why the state has consistently shied away from prosecuting the security policemen responsible for the death in detention of MK operative Nokuthula Simelane, and with ‘Prime Evil’ Eugene de Kock now seemingly assisting authorities with more than finding long-lost and ill-buried corpses of people who were brutally killed, the timing of that ghostly wake may come sooner than expected or preferred. For South Africans, a first date with our ghosts, and subsequent ‘daylight’ (p. 356), is to read the gritty body of this book. Schmidt could win prizes for this work. All South Africans will benefit by
reading this book, episode by harrowing episode.

Franschhoek Literary Festival 2015

I am pleased to say that I'll be visiting the Franschhoek Literary Festival on the evening of 16 May to hear the announcing of the Alan Paton Award shortlist and I'm looking forward to chatting to my fellow authors!

DWG on the 2008 Pogroms - and my new take on the problem as terrorism & genocide

In Drinking with Ghosts, I wrote about visiting Atteridgeville, Tembisa, Jeppestown and Soweto, in September 2009 to revisit the causes and aftermath of the 2008 Pogroms. At Madelakufa, I interviewed Mozambican Paul Nhanguva, 40, who said: "I am not afraid... If [the attackers] knew what they are doing to their own future, they won’t do it again. I have lived through two wars [in Mozambique] and can go without food for five days, but they have never seen war. They are like children playing with matches – and they will burn their own house down!” Last week, The Star ran my op-ed on my argument that the current attacks should be treated by the police as terrorism under the 2004 Terrorism Act, and prosecuted as intent to commit genocide under the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide:http://www.pressreader.com/…/20150…/283334700826459/TextView

DWG long-listed for the 2015 Alan Paton Award

I'm proud to announce that Drinking with Ghosts has been long-listed for this year's Alan Paton Award - up against some really stiff and extremely able competition. Congratulations to all my fellow authors on the list - and I'll no doubt be seeing many of you at the Franschhoek Literary Festival next month! http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-times/20150405/283609578705717/TextView

Robert McBride, an intriguing yet divisive character

Read the DWG section on my rather unique relationship with McBride, straddling my friendship with his sisters and one of his Magoos victims' only-child daughter. Here's City Press' take on his suspension this week: Robert McBride suspended

Remnants of SA nuclear weapons programme worry the USA

The Washington Post has written about a long stalemate between US and SA officials as the prior try to convince the latter to surrender SA's stockpile of highly-enriched uranium (HEU): US unease about SA highly enriched uranium stockpile. DWG tells the tale of the acquisition and eventual dismantling of nukes by the apartheid regime, though certain "dual-use" elements, like the HEU stockpile - sufficient to build six Hiroshima-yield nukes - remain under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision and have been used to produce medical isotopes - a huge foreign-exchange earner for SA. The US is concerned about the HEU stockpile's security after a narrowly-foiled robbery at Pelindaba in 2007. I had argued in DWG that dual-use electronic relays and detonators were inadequately supervised and in 1998 - five years after the nuke programme was declared dead by FW de Klerk - caused a premature detonation east of Pretoria that killed four workers.

DWG sales figures so far

I received the sales figures for Drinking with Ghosts from our sales agents and my publisher says "it looks rather good for a new title in its first year. The total sales to date: 819 copies. We have also submitted it to Exclusive Books for the yearly sale promotion Homebru, where they showcase local books and we hope this will give it a further boost."

Weird reversal of SA-Israeli relations on missile tech

For those of you following the Spy Cables saga currently unfolding (which is *everybody*), the bit where Israeli citizen Yitzhak Talia stole Denel anti-tank missile blueprints and gave them to Mossad is a weird reversal of times past when, as related in DWG, the Israelis sold ballistic missile technology to apartheid SA for its nuke programme:  Al Jazeera story on Israeli theft of SA missile tech

Was SA the conduit for July 2005 London bombings?

The Times' story today on alleged al Qaeda-linked terrorists perhaps eyeing South Africa as a safe operating base reminds me of the DWG tale of how Africa's biggest arms dealer, Viktor Bout, may have organised the laundering of ₤1-million to transship 10 Pakistani and Afghan men, given them false identities as SA businessmen and inserted them into the UK just ahead of the 7 July 2005 London Bombings: al Qaeda at the gates

DWG author Michael Schmidt in conversation with Mzilikazi wa Afrika

Drinking with Ghosts author Michael Schmidt will be in discussion with Nothing Left to Steal author and investigative journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika at the University of Johannesburg, at the Auditorium, 6th floor, APK Library, 4,30pm, 24 February 2015.

DWG e-book soon!

I'm pleased to announce that my publishers, BestRed, have informed me that the e-book version of Drinking with Ghosts should be available in April.

DWG sister volume now complete!

I'm delighted to be submitting my fourth book to the publishers today. "Under the Rusted Rainbow: Perdition and Promise in the New South Africa" (BestRed, Cape Town, due September 2015) is the sister volume of "Drinking with Ghosts," but covers conditions of exclusion in democratic SA: poor whites, Bushmen, illegal coal miners, land claimants, squatters, the AWB, etc. John Pilger asked me to send him a portion of it to read, which is great! It weighs in at 80,000 words.

The Anwa Dramat case and extraordinary renditions

The Anwa Dramat claims reminds me of the tales in Drinking with Ghosts of the SAPS conducting extraordinary renditions:

a) In 2004, Malefa Sefora Maphaleba, deputy leader of the Women's League of the Basotho National Party, living in exile near Bloemfontein, was kidnapped and flown by SAPS chopper to a forest where she was interrogated for four hours about Lesotho politics - and threatened with deportation (she was terrified as she had been sexually assaulted in jail in Lesotho by goons of the ruling party);

b) In 2005, Burundian IT specialist Nestor Niyonzima and his psychologist wife Gertrude fled to SA because he had blown the whistle on bank fraud in Burundi. With a Burundian hitman on his tail, crooked SAPS members who appear to have been in the pay of the bank fraud syndicate illegally deported Niyonzima back to Burundi under false charges. Facing assassination in jail by the syndicate, it took an emergency intervention by the Central Methodist Church to get Niyonzima released and into asylum in Sweden.

Michael Schmidt on DWG in Sunday Times Books' Jacket Notes column

Sunday Times Jacket Notes 2 Feb 2015

What kept Soweto apart then, in 2008?: DWG extract run as op-ed in The Star 29 Jan 2015

The 2008 pogroms shattered the illusion among many leftists – which they had continued to hold onto despite numerous early warning signs – that South Africa’s poor were an essentially undifferentiated class of the righteously angry oppressed. The killing spree left 62 people dead, 670 wounded, more than 100 000 displaced and 35 000 languishing in displaced persons camps. Although most of the dead were foreigners, 21 were South Africans – demonstrating that all of the victims were seen as ‘outsiders’ in one way or another by those wielding the pangas. Some of the killers used the unrest as an excuse to settle personal scores, some were driven by ethnic hatred, others by calculated greed. A year after the killings, I am travelling to four townships around Gauteng, three of which saw pogroms in 2008 (Atteridgeville, Tembisa and Jeppestown) and one of which, Soweto, did not, speaking to community activists and to survivors of the attacks to try and take the temperature at the grassroots regarding ‘outsiders,’ – in other words, to see if the threat of killings has receded.

After all, for the first week of the 2008 killings the authorities sat back and cynically watched the damage being done, assessing, perhaps, xenophobia’s potential usefulness in the future as a divide-and-rule strategy. The bad news is the ugly fact that many in our townships believe another pogrom is being planned for sometime after the 2010 World Cup, once the world’s eyes are turned elsewhere. So how did the original pogroms flourish – and how can they be stopped in future?

I first interview Serge Lwamba and Benjamin Simunyola of the African Diaspora Forum (ADF), an umbrella grouping of African migrant communities which have settled in South Africa. The ADF was established as a direct organisational response by migrants to the attacks on their communities. Lwamba hails from Lubumbashi in the south-eastern DRC, and holds me spellbound with his harrowing tale of how he came to settle in South Africa. His family owned a big restaurant in Lubumbashi, but Lwamba had been active in student opposition politics and was forced to flee with his brother and mother when rebels entered the city. His brother died of an illness during their difficult escape from the DRC, weaving back and forth trying to avoid being shanghaied by the various rebel armies, finally entering Zambia months later. Lwamba is clearly deeply affected by the things he saw during the DRC war: ‘Imagine a young boy with an AK-47 and a man’s private parts hanging around his neck like a necklace, saying he wants to sleep with your mother! The rebels have no morality,’ he says, shaking with rage.

Eventually he entered South Africa in 2001 – but has been battling ever since then with the Home Affairs authorities to establish his refugee status. In the meantime, he cannot get a job and is unable to travel to visit his girlfriend in Lesotho. Simunyola, on the other hand, hails from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and came to South Africa in 2004 to visit his sisters who had settled here in 1991. His journey has been far easier than Lwamba’s – but he says he joined the ADF because he had seen the misery in United Nations refugee camps in Zambia.

Soweto proved to be an island of calm during the 2008 pogroms and I want to try and find out why, so I accompany Lwamba and Simunyola to the taxi rank opposite the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, where many migrants run shops and pavement stalls. There I interview, among others, Mohamed Khurae, a Pakistani national who before coming to South Africa had been living in the war-torn Kashmir region – on the Indian side of the border. His presence as a Pakistani living in Indian Kashmir had seriously threatened his life, so he felt he had little to fear in South Africa. ‘I arrived here only two months ago and got this job helping out at this store. I have an asylum-seeker permit and now live in Robertsham.’ A Bangladeshi man I interview says he and his brother fled his country for political reasons three years ago, and settled in South Africa where they are waiting for their refugee status to be confirmed.

‘I talk with my mother on the phone, but it is hard because I can never return home.’

It seems that the very heterogeneous nature of much of Soweto, where so many migrants from different countries as well as so many refugees from dangers at home and abroad gather, managed to prevent Sowetan residents from succumbing to pogromists’ sharp-edged appeals to indulge in violent chauvinism.

But that was clearly not the case in other townships where the blood flowed unchecked. I travel to Atteridgeville, the township west of Pretoria, then head south into its sprawling outlying squatter camps. I am headed for one in particular, nicknamed ‘Jeffsville’ after the local strongman, Jeff Ramotladi, who was among those who started the settlement in 1991. I am accompanied by Watson Nxele, chairperson of the Atteridgeville Community Policing Forum, and Ernest Tshabhuyo, secretary of the Atteridgeville Civic Organisation, both of which have pitted themselves against Ramotladi’s own township organisation. Ramotladi’s career is instructive in tracing the decay of many ‘liberators’, especially members of the ruling ANC at local level, from warlordism into sheer gangsterism. This is not to say that the ANC did not murder its way into power in certain areas – the former Azapo stronghold of Dlamini in Soweto comes to mind – but the warlords of the anti-apartheid struggle often had justification for their violent defence of their turf. In the bad old days, Ramotladi was a member of the ANC-allied South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco) that ‘ran the kangaroo courts’, dispensing summary street justice, Tshabuyo says. ‘He was arrested many times [by the apartheid authorities], therefore he got followers.’

Ramotladi set himself up in business selling water in the thirsty squatter camp, while gambling on the side; that was the start of his little shackland empire as a shebeen owner, butchery owner, then ANC ward councillor, his makeshift office increasingly controlling the trade in goods, jobs, services and plots of land in ‘Jeffsville’. In later years, Ramotladi split from the ANC, standing against it as an independent, backed, it is said, by Indian business associates from nearby Laudium. But although his grip on ‘Jeffsville’ is said to have waned, he is still strong enough to prevent the relocation of the squatters to new premises – a move he knows will break up his power base.

In ‘Jeffsville’ I meet Tshabhuyo’s staff members, Grace Chanaka, Sammy Botolo and Godfrey Mashigo. I am then taken on a tour of the settlement by Botolo and Mashigo to interview resident migrants – the two guides stressing that it is still dangerous for outsiders to be on the streets of the settlement unaccompanied. Among those I interview are spaza shop owner Shepherd Tungamirai of Gweru, Zimbabwe, who returned to ‘Jeffsville’ in 2009 after his previous store had been looted in 2008, with the loss of stock worth R4 000. He says those who attacked him are still around. ‘They shop here! They can smile to you, but they are biased. They say after the World Cup, they’ll do it again. I don’t feel safe,’ he says.

I am shown a bare concrete slab where another store belonging to a foreigner was burned down and not rebuilt (ironically, the remaining wall has been sprayed with graffiti: ‘Revolution Park’).

Another of those I speak to, Osman Ahmed of Mogadishu, Somalia, says he fled the war in his country to settle in South Africa five years ago. But in May 2008 he was forced to flee from Diepsloot north of Johannesburg when armed gangs attacked his supermarket; he lost stock worth R100 000 and his two South African employees lost their jobs. Ahmed says that although he has a South African Code 10 drivers’ licence, he has been forced to work in the retail sector because no-one will employ him without a South African identity document. Now he wants to return home to Mogadishu; even though it is one of the deadliest cities in the world, his wife and children are there and he feels South Africa is unwelcoming. ‘You can’t trust South Africa,’ he says.

Jeffsville remains Ramotladi’s stronghold – he has been cynically placed in charge of the reintegration of foreigners who were chased away in 2008, getting paid by the municipality, at ratepayers’ expense, for his ‘services’.

Next, guided by Flavien Gagoum of the ADF, I visit the rundown Jeppestown / Cleveland area east of downtown Johannesburg which was blighted by attacks in 2008 (including assaults on poor whites), and I interview resident migrants including Tino – he does not want his surname used – of Nigeria, who arrived here in February 2009 despite hearing of the 2008 attacks. He has even recently married a South African woman.

‘For any little trouble they [South Africans] call you makwerekwere [an insulting term mocking the speech of foreigners]. I don’t understand: we all have to travel; I came here to survive. In Benin where I travelled, there is no such thing as xenophobia, even though I don’t speak French. In Nigeria there are even South Africans and we don’t ask them for their papers except at the airport. South Africa is a nice country and I love staying here, but somehow as foreigners we are scared … scared for after the 2010 World Cup.’

Elsie Tandabantu, 38, of Chipinge, Zimbabwe, says she has been in South Africa since 2007. She was in Milnerton, Cape Town, when she fell victim to the 2008 pogroms.

‘I had a hair salon; they burned it and harassed me where I lived. I lost my equipment, TV, DVD and a lot of things. It’s a nice country, but I don’t want to be here – yet I have to survive. I came here as a border-jumper, but now I use asylum[-seeker] papers.’

Tandabantu tells me that she knows of a house that was owned by a foreign woman whose late husband was a South African and who left the property to her. But she was expelled from the house by thugs during last year’s attacks – and has been unable to return since. These thugs, it seems, operated within a power vacuum created when local councillors, as is often the case, went AWOL, moving to other areas and drawing salaries at ratepayers’ expense but never being on hand to deal with community concerns and conflicts. This absenteeism, combined with a failure to deliver on services already paid for via tax, is behind many of the protests that are sweeping the poor areas of the country, which is why the elites appear to encourage the diversion of class anger into xenophobia, racism and chauvinism.

To find out how such political vacuums developed, I travel to Tembisa where I meet Doug Scholz, the ANC ward councillor for Reiger Park, Boksburg, and former ward councillor of the Ramaphosa informal settlement which witnessed much of the worst of the 2008 violence. It was the sickening images of Mozambican immigrant and Ramaphosa resident Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave being burned to death in broad daylight which seared the pogroms into the mind’s eye of the world. Scholz and a colleague take me to the Madelakufa informal settlement in Tembisa, where I interview resident migrants. Scholz claims that the ineffectiveness of the DA ward councillor, whose area included Ramaphosa but who was ‘too afraid’ to enter the township, led to the rise of an informal group of unelected leaders who targeted Mozambicans – most of them long-time residents – because of their success in business. ‘Mozambicans have lived here on the mining belt for a hundred years, but in the 1990s when the migration law fell away, many settled here, started businesses and raised children,’ Scholz says.

So it was business competition and not ‘ethnic tension’ that made the Mozambicans a target. Scholz may be politically motivated to slag off his opposition party predecessor, but his story rings true, as much of the country languishes in a twilight zone where the poor are blatantly ignored by the authorities between elections. A march 5 000-strong to the Ekurhuleni Municipality complained that they had not seen the councillor in a year. The results of this neglect are often painful in a very personal way. At Madelakufa, shopkeeper Elijah Mhlangu, a South African, grieves over his Mozambican wife who has fled back to her country after the attacks, never to return. ‘She’s too afraid for her life. I miss her,’ he sighs.

But not all resident migrants are fearful and resigned. At Madelakufa I also interview Paul Nhanguva, 40, of Beira, Mozambique, a broad-faced man whose animated hands punctuate his speech; he says he has tracked down, confronted and forced an embarrassed confession out of neighbours who looted his well-built wood and iron store last year: ‘I told them “what you did wasn’t good”, and they apologised.’ Nhanguva hails from generations of Mozambicans who have worked on the mines here, including his grandfather, father and uncle. He has lived in South Africa since 1993 and is now naturalised as a citizen.

‘I am not afraid. If I have done something wrong, come to me and tell me. If [the attackers] knew what they are doing to their own future, they won’t do it again. I have lived through two wars [in Mozambique] and can go without food for five days, but they have never seen war. They are like children playing with matches – and they will burn their own house down!’

It is a passionately argued and sobering polemic. In Alexandra township, east of Johannesburg, a picture emerges of at least one community that shares Nhanguva’s indomitable spirit, standing up to the killers and stepping into the breach vacated by the ‘democratic’ state. Comparing Alexandra Section 2, known as Beirut, and Section 5, known as Setswala, Jean-Pierre Misago of Wits University’s Forced Migration Studies Programme and co-author of a report for the International Organisation for Migration on the pogroms, says that while Beirut succumbed to the pogroms Setswala fended off attempts by the pogromists to spark killings in their neighbourhood: ‘The Section 5 community comrades met the Section 2 pogromists at the border of the Section and told them “no, you can’t come in here; we will sort out our own foreigners, because you don’t know who they are”.’

You can bet the Setswala reception committee was armed to the teeth, to back up their ploy, but it worked, keeping the killers at bay while Setswala’s foreigners were helped to leave town quickly, and their vigilant neighbours kept watch over their homes to ensure no-one looted them. Perhaps the difference lies in the old fault lines between the worker hostels, which have always been a source of conflict between workers dominated by conservative indunas, and residents of the township proper who have a reputation for being more progressive. But the lesson is clear: when communities stood together, they managed to prevent the pogroms from spreading. I’m reminded of the small, though overwhelmed, community resistance in many parts of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.

Is Journalism What it Used to Be?

Annetjie van Wynegaard on DWG

Michael Schmidt pulls no punches in Drinking with Ghosts

Vernon Joshua on DWG

Giving Breath to a Dying History

The sister volume to Drinking with Ghosts, entitled Under the Rusted Rainbow: Perdition and Promise in the New South Africa (BestRed, Cape Town, due September 2015), looks at conditions of exclusion under democracy and has a substantial focus on the struggle of the Bushmen to reassert their language and culture. Here's a great Daily Maverick piece on that:

 Giving Breath to a Dying History