A t first glance, the photograph flashed on news reports around the world—an image of a man burning in South Africa, necklaced with a rubber tire that had been doused in gasoline and set aflame—looked like a relic from the days of apartheid. Necklacing was common then: it was the way that enforcers of the revolutionary African National Congress made an example of informers who betrayed their struggle for majority rule. That struggle was finally won at the ballot box fourteen years ago, but the photograph of the burning man was taken last month, as South African mobs tore through the country’s townships and shantytowns, hunting down foreigners. The young men who formed the core of the mobs were armed with everything from hammers and whips to machetes and guns, and they were not easily deterred. Even when President Thabo Mbeki, who sat silently by during the first ten days of the pogroms, called out the Army, the violence continued, and once again the photographs of the confrontations recalled the township showdowns of yore: uniformed sharpshooters firing into the throng, albeit with rubber bullets.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Roughly five million of the fifty million people who live in South Africa are migrants from elsewhere on the continent—Malawi, Nigeria, Congo, Mozambique, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. They came in the years since apartheid, seeking political refuge or economic opportunity or both, and their presence could be seen as a measure of South Africa’s success: the nation that once produced asylum seekers had become a place of asylum. But the banishment of white-supremacist rule did not bring an end to South Africa’s divisiveness and inequality; the terms were merely reconfigured. In the place of political violence, the nation has been plagued by one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. Most of the victims, like most of the perpetrators, belong to the vast black underclass. Rising unemployment (twenty-three per cent nationwide, and two or three times that in the townships) and rising food and fuel prices have led to rising desperation for those chronically excluded from the promises of the new South Africa. The tabloid press and the political demagogues freely blame the social situation on foreigners, and in the last weeks of May more than fifty of them (as well as several South Africans mistaken for foreigners) were killed by the mobs, while more than thirty thousand were driven from their homes, stripped of their possessions, and left to huddle in makeshift camps around churches and police stations or to flee for the borders.

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The man in the now iconic photograph was Mozambican; thousands of his compatriots bolted homeward, and the government of Mozambique declared a state of emergency on its frontiers. The great mass of South Africa’s foreigners, however, are from Zimbabwe, and for them—some three million people, or a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population—repatriation is not an option. They have fled the incessantly escalating hunger, degradation, and violence of President Robert Mugabe’s dispensation. In fact, even as they are hounded in the streets of South Africa, more of their compatriots are risking their lives to escape Zimbabwe and join them. In late March, Mugabe, after three decades in power, did not win reëlection—this time, he had failed to rig the vote sufficiently—and in the months since, in preparation for a runoff vote on June 27th, he has unleashed his soldiers and militias to run a campaign of systematic terror against supporters of his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai.

Last year, after Mugabe’s torturers battered Tsvangirai almost to death, regional leaders appointed Mbeki to mediate the crisis in Zimbabwe. But Mbeki has been utterly unwilling to show any spine in dealing with Mugabe. On the contrary, he has exhibited a sinister solidarity with his fellow onetime liberation fighter. With strenuous unreality, he has gone so far as to deny that Zimbabwe is in crisis, and he has refused to extend formal refugee status, and the protections that come with it, to millions of the Zimbabweans in his country, lest he insult Mugabe. Mbeki is a lame-duck President, required to step down next year, and he has lost control of the A.N.C. party apparatus to his chief rival, Jacob Zuma. But his coddling of Mugabe has made him complicit in Zimbabwe’s devastation. So perhaps there is some justice in the fact that the Zimbabwean crisis he denies threatens to become the defining crisis of his Presidency. After all, the recent mayhem in South Africa only serves Mugabe, creating a distraction as he bleeds Zimbabwe in the final stretch of the election, with forebodings of greater slaughter hanging over the outcome.

It is not obvious what leverage there is on Mugabe. Defiance is his element; he loves to tell the world, “Go to hell.” But there is no reason for the world to abide his desire to carry out his crimes unheard and unseen. In April, South African stevedores refused to unload a shipment of seventy-seven tons of rockets, mortars, and other munitions from China destined for Zimbabwe—a cargo reminiscent of the deliveries to Rwanda before the genocide of 1994. And, in deliberate contrast to Mbeki’s obliging absence, the American Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, has been making his presence felt, leading his colleagues in the diplomatic community into the rural areas to investigate and report on the extent of the torture. On a recent excursion, he collected testimonies, notebooks, and photographs that document how Mugabe’s goons flay their victims and break their bones. McGee offered this evidence to Mbeki’s representatives; they declined to meet with him, and Mugabe threatened him with expulsion. Still, at a time when America’s international prestige as an arbiter of political justice carries the stain of Abu Ghraib, it is heartening to see one of our diplomats operating as if he’d never heard that waterboarding and other forms of torture are now his country’s policy.

To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed. The best hope for both their countries now is for the voters of Zimbabwe to be allowed to show their courage on June 27th and liberate themselves. ♦