The man appeared dead, lying motionless in the dust of the squatter camp. His body seemed almost like a bottle that had been turned on its side, spilling blood. His pants were red with the moisture.
Nearby was evidence of what he had endured. A large rock had been used to gouge his torso. Embers remained from a fire that had been part of some torture. Shards of a burned jacket still clung to the victim’s left forearm.
Then, as people stepped closer, there was the faintest of breath pushing against his chest.
“This guy may be alive,” someone surmised. As if to confirm it, the man moved the fingers of his right hand.
The jaded crowd neither rejoiced nor lamented. Horrific attacks against immigrants around Johannesburg had been going on for a week, and in their eyes the victim was just some Malawian or Zimbabwean, another casualty in the continuing purge.
This nation is undergoing a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in unrelenting mayhem, police said.
Thousands of immigrants have been scattered from their tumbledown homes. They crowd the police stations and community centers of Johannesburg, some with the few possessions they could carry before mobs ransacked their hovels, most with nothing but the clothes they wore as they escaped.
“They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this one is a foreigner and this one is not,'” said Charles Mannyike, 28, an immigrant from Mozambique. “It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.”
Xenophobic violence, once an occasional malady around Johannesburg, has become a contagion, skipping from one area to another.
Since the end of apartheid, a small percentage of the nation’s black population — the highly skilled and the politically connected — has thrived. But the gap between rich and poor has widened. The official rate of unemployment is 23 percent. Housing remains a deplorable problem.
At the Ramaphosa settlement camp, a squatters colony southeast of the city, six immigrants have been killed in the past two days.
“We want all these foreigners to go back to their own lands,” said Thapelo Mgoqi, who considers himself a leader in Ramaphosa. “We waited for our government to do something about these people. But they did nothing and so now we are doing it ourselves, and we will not be stopped.”
A familiar litany of complaints against foreigners are passionately, if not always rationally, argued: They commit crimes. They undercut wages. They hold jobs that others deserve.
Zimbabweans, who make up this country’s largest immigrant group, benefited from a strong educational system before their homeland plunged into collapse, sending an estimated 3 million across the border to seek refuge. Schoolteachers and other professionals — their salaries rendered worthless by Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation — come to work as housekeepers and menial laborers.
