Foreigners attacked across the country

THE AWFUL events of May 2008 were captured – around the world – in the grim photograph of 35-year-old Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, hunched over and in flames in a South African street, the victim of a brand of hostility that still afflicts the country and which many believe has never been adequately addressed.

Like the other 50 to 60 victims of the horrific xenophobic violence of that time, being a “foreigner” in South Africa meant he was the target of enmity and aggression that has, in the years since, often seemed to give the lie to the notion of p a n - Af r i - canism or continental solidarity.

This is the context of the front page story that follows. The upheaval had yet to reach the Cape.