South Africa’s Epidemic of Hate

In early September, Faayif Yosif, a 41-year-old Somali who moved to South Africa as a refugee in 2004, lost everything he owned in minutes. A mob of South Africans began doing the toyi-toyi—a dance with a jogging rhythm associated with protests—outside his general store on the outskirts of the capital, Pretoria. “They broke into my shop and took everything, including a lot of money,” he says. Since then, he’s lost his appetite and become depressed, and he spends his days sleeping. “They told us to get out if we didn’t want to die. My heart was broken, because I watched something I worked hard for being destroyed.”

Every few years, bouts of xenophobic violence in South Africa—which mainly target black Africans from elsewhere in Africa and, occasionally, poor migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh—make headlines. In 2008 about 60 people died and more than 50,000 were displaced in a wave of violence across the country. Ernesto Nhamuave, a Mozambican man, was set alight and burned to death east of Johannesburg; the photograph of his killing spread around the world.