“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

Cape Times, 2 July 2008

GREETED by a booming standing ovation, Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu visited Masiphumelele yesterday to thank the community for its leadership in welcoming back foreigners after May’s xenophobic attacks.

Non-profit Celebrities for Humanity organised Tutu’s visit as part of its blanket drive for the small township near Fish Hoek.

“We hear that the people of Masiphumelele say no to xenophobia, and the people of Masiphumelele asked people to come back to their homes, and for that we say thank you,” Tutu said in Xhosa and English.

“We thank you, we thank you, we thank you, we thank you!”

As the beloved archbishop stepped off the stage, he stooped to high-five and hug children in the front row. About 400 young children filled the community hall to the brim, with some sitting two to a seat.

Community leaders swarmed around Tutu, trying to shake his hand as they followed him outside.

“He’s our tata,” said a beaming Shirley Madlingozi of Masiphumelele NGO Homes for Kids in South Africa (Hokisa). “He’s always here in Masi.”

“There is some hope in this community that we can change the lives of people,” said Hokisa’s director, Lutz van Dijk.

A home for children affected by HIV/Aids, Hokisa was opened in 2002 by Tutu.

A panel of celebrities, including actor Nico Panagio, rugby player Breyton Paulse, Ferdinand Rabie of television reality show Big Brother, supermodel Tammy-Anne Fortuin, and singers Darren Green and Vanessa Nolan, lined up to hand over 100 blankets.

Local pastor Mzuvukile Nikelo will transfer these blankets to children of disadvantaged households.

He is the chairperson of the 15-member Masiphumelele Community Forum, which was founded in 2003 to address problems between foreigners and locals in the community.

Meanwhile, Sapa reported that foreigners displaced by xenophobic attacks will be re-integrated into their communities by the end of August, a senior Home Affairs official said yesterday.

“We will integrate those displaced at the end of July and August,” deputy director-general for immigration Jackie McKay told reporters during a media conference in Pretoria.

Thousands of foreigners were displaced in the attacks that started in May. Since then they had been living in various camps around the country.

Public Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, who chaired the briefing, said the Home Affairs Department had speeded up issuing identity documents.

Two days after immigrant-owned shops were looted and foreigners attacked on May 22, Masiphumelele residents publicly apologised and asked them to return.

The residents, led by community leaders and police, went door to door to retrieve stolen goods and report the perpetrators to the police.

A small group of leaders went to the Soetwater refugee camp to read out an apology and ask the victims to return.

by Jean Yung and Michelle Jones, Cape Times, 3 July 2008

The city’s Disaster Management Centre says an estimated 5 800 displaced African expatriates remain in places of safety, down from an estimated 20 000 at the height of the xenophobic attacks.

Head of the centre Greg Pillay says the city has spent R70 million on relief efforts.

Some of the expatriates are staying in temporary camps – 620 at Youngsfield, 440 at Blue Waters, 430 at Harmony Park near Gordons Bay, and 130 at Silverstream on the West Coast, according to staff at the camps.

The rest are being accommodated in municipal halls and on private properties, such as churches and mosques.

At the Chrysalis Academy in Tokai, where 165 expatriates are being accommodated, the displaced people and volunteers were upset when the provincial government took over responsibility for the supply of food two days ago.

Volunteers had been cooking three meals a day, using a kitchen at the academy. Now the expatriates are receiving the same food as those in safety camps.

“The food has obviously changed and people were frustrated, but it’s wrong to tempt them with stuff they cannot afford when they leave here – it creates expectations,” Chrysalis chief executive Nomfundo Matroos said.

A Muslim relief organisation, Mustadafin Foundation, was feeding 3 600 people a day, down from 12 000 four weeks ago, spokesperson Alia Lambada said.

The organisation allocated R5 for breakfast and R12 for supper for each person each day and had spent more than R1m, Lambada said.

The SA National Zakáh Fund has spent about R1 million.

The Salvation Army has spent about R250 000 on blankets, food and petrol, while Historically Disadvantaged Individuals Support is feeding 1 700 people, down from 7 600 a few weeks ago.

Cape Times, 26 June 2008

A month after xenophobic attacks forced Rais Sewika and his family out of Philippi, the 14-year-old Congolese boy’s sheer perseverance to return to school was rewarded on Monday when he finally earned a place at high school.

At Tokai’s Chrysalis Academy, where Sewika’s family has been staying for four weeks, Sewika was the last child to go back to school.

“Rais was so motivated to go back to school, I couldn’t believe it,” said Chrysalis volunteer Nicola Tyson.

According to volunteers at the camp, two representatives dispatched by the Department of Education to place the camp’s 20 children were slow in responding to requests, so they started contacting schools and arranged transport for the children themselves.

They could not place Sewika because all the English-speaking high schools in the area said they had no available places.

So Sewika hopped on a bus last week to ask the principal of Muizenberg High School himself.

Faced with the same answer, he went to a nearby Pick n Pay and stayed there for seven hours until the bus returned to Chrysalis.

Only after Metropole South circuit manager Yusuf Kader personally went from school to school on Monday to speak to principals did Sewika get placed.

“Most of the time we try our best, but when you get to a school, and the principal says he’s got 45 children in the class, you know the teachers are struggling to cope, and one more makes it very difficult,” Kader said.

When Sewika was 12, his parents emigrated from the DRC with his four sisters.

They left him behind with a family friend and said that they would send for him when they could support him.

Three months later, in January 2007, the family Sewika was staying with took him to Johannesburg.

From there he took a train to Cape Town alone to join his family.

Said UCT Professor of Psychology Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who has been providing counselling to both adults and children at Chrysalis Academy: “When children are exposed to trauma like this, they are desperate to belong somewhere.”

She said that the children were eager to talk about how much they’ve gone through – how they lost their books and their pens and how they wished to return to school.

“Unfortunately, it takes a bit of time to place them because we are pressed for space,” Education MEC Cameron Dugmore’s spokesperson, Gert Witbooi said.

Because displaced foreigners had been moving between camps and into community halls, the Department of Education found it difficult to maintain an accurate record of the children who still needed to be placed in schools, Witbooi said.

Cape Times, 5 June 2008

A Congolese man, separated from his young wife and baby for 11 days following the xenophobic attacks in Philippi, has found them safe and sound and staying with a family in Pietermaritzburg, thanks to a Cape Times reader.

Adam Degol was overjoyed to speak to his 20-year-old wife Mafuthi Myid on the telephone on Tuesday evening after a stranger phoned him with information on her whereabouts.

“I’m feeling so nice now,” said Degol from Tokai’s Chrysalis Academy where he has been staying. “I was so worried.”

The stranger had seen Degol’s story in the Cape Times and knew of a displaced Congolese at an Athlone mosque who had been in touch with the family with whom Myid is living.

Then it was a matter of minutes before Degol was reunited with his family on the phone.

The kindness of strangers along the way had helped the mother and baby to safety.

The night of the attacks, Myid was home alone with her eight-month-old child, waiting for Degol to return from work.

She heard loud knocking at the door, then six men forced their way into her home in Philippi.

“They wanted to get inside the house to take our things. There was nothing I could do. There was no place to hide,” said Myid.

After the mob left with the family’s possessions, she dug up some stashed savings and took off running with her baby.

She found a group of people gathered behind her house and asked for directions to Cape Town Station, where she intended to board a train to Durban.

She had briefly stayed with a family in Pietermaritzburg on her way to Cape Town a month ago.
On the train, Myid met a South African woman from Durban who took her under her wing until they arrived safely in Pietermaritzburg. The woman gave only her first name as Nonhlanhla.

Myid would like her husband to join her and the baby in Pietermaritzburg, but he would rather bring them back to Cape Town as soon as his job is stable.

Degol was especially grateful to three volunteers at Chrysalis Academy who had made 400 flyers and called police stations in search of his family – Benedicte Bergman, Nicola Tyson and Tamaryne Lindeque.

Cape Times, 3 June 2008

AN ERRANT beach ball bounced towards us, chased by a small Somali boy.

I stuck out my foot to stop it. The boy giggled and hugged my leg with all his might – a warm welcome to the Chrysalis Academy.

Here in the idyllic surrounds of the Table Mountain National Park in Tokai, past the towering pines, the campgrounds and the barbecues, has sprung one of the largest informal shelters for displaced foreigners.

It’s also one of the nicest. The 310 Somalis, Congolese, Zimbabweans and other displaced foreigners are staying in dormitories regularly used for at-risk youth who come to take part in free social crime-prevention programmes and leadership classes.

In the small parking lot where we pulled up, volunteers were serving lunch outside, piling rice and chicken high on to hot pink plastic plates.

A group of women sat on stools in a circle washing clothes in a plastic basin. Behind them, on beds of green plants, kids’ shirts and pants were laid out in the sun to dry.

A toddler peeked out of the driver’s side window of a royal blue bakkie. I asked him how old he was.

“He’s three,” came a voice from behind me – his mother, Horia Ahmed Hassan.

She wore a brightly coloured sweater over a full-length hijab, and her head was draped in a scarf.

She arrived from Vredenburg two weeks ago with her kids, she said. Her husband died in a fork lift accident eight months ago.

“They didn’t even given him a funeral. They didn’t do anything.” Tears fell from her face on to the ground like seeds.

The family came from Mogadishu 10 years ago. Her husband had worked for the contractor for seven years.

Since then, the stay-at-home mother of four has been staying with her brothers, who owned a grocery shop, and living on the financial support of her friends.

Then, the shop they’ve had for six years was attacked by xenophobic South Africans. They packed what they had left into the blue bakkie and went to the police, who directed them here.

Safe for the time being, she’s now worried about her 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter, both of whom should be in school.

“I’m worried for the education of the children,” she said. “What do we do? Life is |expensive.”

By now, a crowd of Somalis had gathered around us. All had similar stories.

One man held out a string of keys, “Left the bakkie, but still have these!” Everyone laughed.

Now that there was an audience, Ahmad Mohammed Ali, an ex-policeman from Somalia came over and began raving angrily about the South African police.

“They make the problems!” He yelled, swatting at the air with his baseball cap. “They are criminals.”

Under the guise of protecting their shops, the police would tell them where to park and then steal their vans and their money, he alleged.

The crowd murmured its agreement.

It’s nothing we haven’t already heard, so I asked them to show us their living |quarters.

We wound through a small path in the grass and crossed into a courtyard large enough for a soccer game.

In front of us was a two-story, grey-concrete building with outside hallways facing the courtyard.

We climbed up a flight of green wooden stairs to the sleeping quarters. Clothes hung everywhere.

The foreigners had separated themselves into rooms by nationality, one of my guides said. Each room was jammed with 14 single beds set so close that the metal frames touched each other.

There were nearly enough mattresses for everyone, though some sleep on the wooden floors.

Back downstairs, I got a tour of the open showers and the sole toilet in the camp. They take turns cleaning it.

Next, they took me to see the cafeteria. A large assembly hall had been cleared out, a small group sat at the far end watching a small TV, donated by a church volunteer.

Because I’m a reporter, they took special interest in showing me their news collection. On a large chalkboard, they had cut out articles and pictures of the xenophobic attacks and taped them into a collage.

Someone makes a daily run into town for newspapers, they said.

Behind a screen, I saw cardboard boxes stacked high with donated clothes. Every day at 4pm, the residents form a line and are given five minutes to choose their new clothes.

“We won’t forget that they are helping us,” said my guide, showing me the white plastic wristband that entitles him and anyone who has one to food and supplies. On it was handwritten with a black marker his name and number: Abderahman Hassen, 155.

We went back outside and into another courtyard. Twenty kids of all nationalities chased each other around.

A 25-year-old student from UCT, who heard about the camp from her roommate, held a crying girl in her arms.

“We are waiting for someone to tell us what to do,” said Hassen.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen. But nothing will be the same as before.”

Photo by Michael Walker

Cape Times, 2 June 2008

THE last time he saw them was on the eve of the xenophobic attacks in Philippi.

Ten days later, Congolese Adam Degol still has no leads on the whereabouts of his 20-year-old wife, Mafuthi Myid, or their eight-month-old son, Zico.

He’s lost everything he owned, but can only think about his wife.

He called for her to join him just a month ago, only to lose her just as quickly.

As Degol was returning home to Lower Crossroads on the evening of May 25, seven teenagers he’d never seen before surrounded him.

They said: “We don’t need any foreigners in this area,” as they took his money and cell- phone. Then they told him that they’d kill him if he stayed.

So, the man who has lived in Cape Town fir five months ran.

When he didn’t see his family at the police station, he tried to go back to Philippi. His friends held him back, saying the mobs would kill him.

That night, as displaced foreigners were dropped off by the busload, he waited up to see if they would be among them.

Then, a bus came to take him to a church at N1 City, and over the next three days, Degol was shuttled from church to church, wherever there was space for the night.

He asked everyone he met about his wife and baby, but he doesn’t even have a photo to show because couldn’t go home and fetch one.

Now he is housed with over 200 other displaced foreigners at Chrysalis Academy in Tokai.

Last Wednesday, Tamaryne Lindeque, a volunteer at Chrysalis, heard his story and together they drove out to all the churches and community halls in Rondebosch, Youngsfield, Nyanga and Philippi.

They returned empty-handed.

Because Myid arrived less than a month before the attacks, few people knew her, said Degol. He hopes that she escaped to Durban to her brother or has taken refuge at a stranger’s house.

“I heard some people are hiding foreigners in their homes,” said Degol. “I hope someone is doing this for her.”

Cape Times, 30 May 2008

AS THE tide of xenophobia swept thousands of foreigners from their homes and businesses in Cape Town, a strong outpouring of support from ordinary people rushed in.

An estimated 10 000 people have dropped off food and supplies at Red Cross in a week.

At the Treatment Action Campaign offices, more than 300 volunteers have turned up to sort and send 14 tons of food and blankets, three times a day, to the camps.

Said Mustadafin Foundation’s Alia Lambada said the organisation goes through 800kg meat, a ton of potatoes and onions and 400 loaves of bread every day to make lunch and dinner for 11 675 displaced foreigners.

“Now we are looking frantically for a place to store our donations and for people to help distribute the things,” said Lambada.

Mechanical engineer Richard Muller, who also leads a church in Du Noon, took it upon himself to organise relief for 264 Du Noon residents taken to Silverstream near Atlantis.

Alistair Moulton Black teaches a youth drama class in Masiphumelele.

When he heard from his students that mobs were planning attacks last Friday evening, he immediately gathered his friends who used their private vehicles to evacuate some of the 1 000 Zimbabweans and Somalis living in the area.

At His People Centre in Goodwood, houseworker Linda Dyantyi from Khayelitsha volunteers her time to play with the 120 children housed there.

And at Helderberg Distribution Point, where supplies were still desperately needed, Coenie van Niekerk had something to celebrate.

Two babies were born there in the last week.

“That is something good that’s come out of this,” said Van Niekerk.

“It gives us hope.”

Independent Newspapers, the parent company of the Cape Times, has established a fund to aid refugee relief efforts, and has kicked off the fund-raising initiative with a R250 000 donation. Funds collected will be donated to Gift of the Givers and the SA Red Cross for relief work. Donations to the fund can be made to: Independent Newspapers South Africa Cares; Standard Bank, branch number 041026; Account number 0000250914085.