African turned on African. Mobs looted shops, threatened lives and smashed anything they could get their hands on. There were languages from across Africa shouted through the streets of the capital of Pretoria on this confusing afternoon – one language was heard above the rest; the language of the boot.
By 11AM, in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, angry youths stood by the side of Townlands Road – rocks in hand. Earlier they had thrown rocks, witnesses said, at any vehicle entering where the so-called foreigners live. A police van stood by, just out of rock range.
For the mob, getting rid of fellow Africans, they call foreigners, was their aim; bigotry their game.
“All those who are selling drugs, nyaope (South African street drug), doing prostitution and human trafficking should voetsek (go away in Afrikaans). Would Robert Mugabe allow me to sell drugs in Zimbabwe? No, never! So why is our government failing us. This is war that’s not going to end. As you can see, it started slowly but let me tell you it’s going to get huge,” says Thembi Skhosana, a South African protester in Marabastad.
In many ways Skhosana epitomized the ugly threat on the streets.
“If our government doesn’t tell these people to go, people are going to die. [The government] is used to killing people, like they did in Marikana, so even now blood will be spilt,” she says.
Skhosana criticized the authorities for failing to clamp down on foreigners without permits.
“It’s best that we take the matter into our own hands. Police have failed. When they take bribes that means they’re also taking things into their own hands; we might as well deal with this our own way.”
On the other side, people also prepared to deal with things in their own way.
In Marabastad, Somali immigrants took up machetes, sticks‚ rocks and knives.
A Somalian shop owner, who sells groceries, Ali Abdul Hasen, came to South Africa as a refugee in 2006 to escape terrorist attacks.
“I came to South Africa for peace, stability and to provide for my family. When I came here I believed I would forget the sound of bullets, and killing each other. In Somalia there are terrorist attacks; you can get injured and die, but not from knives and axes to cut you into pieces,” says Hasen.
“They’re attacking us so we have no choice but to fight back. We have closed all our shops in the townships and came to this area, and now they’re attacking us here, again. We have to counter attack; it’s just tit for tat,” he says.
A woman wearing a peach-colored dress emerged waving a machete and shouting in her mother tongue. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but she wasn’t stopping for anyone.
Then we heard screams and shouting of enraged Somalians, everyone running to the left, chasing a young man in his twenties. When they caught him, the Somalis beat him up. We thought they were going to kill him. Police fired stun grenades to disperse the attackers. A journalist in the crowd was hit in the back by a rubber bullet.
Protesters looted the clothing and home appliance shop of Pakistani Muhammed Yaqoob. The floor was strewn with broken glass and debris. A dismayed Yaqoob walked gingerly over the broken glass, counting the cost of his empty shelves.
“I was at home when I received a call that my shop has been broken into. They took mattresses, shoes and blankets which amount to R50,000 (around $3,800),” he says.
“Life is better when there is peace. We are here to work for our families. And I believe that we are providing jobs, in this shop alone we have three ladies we hired. I’m also involved in feeding schemes providing food to local churches and giving blankets to street kids. But these are the same people who were among the group that stole our stuff,” says Zahid Afzal, chairperson of the area’s business forum.
In 2003, Afzal traveled 7,617 kilometers from Pakistan to Pretoria for business. He makes about R5,000 ($380) a week and sends half of it to his wife and two children. He’s contemplating going home, even if it’s not that safe there.
“Most of us are here because we are under threat of terrorism in Pakistan. There’s lots of bomb blasts happening in every part of the country. If this continues we have no choice but to go back home,” says Afzal.
About 40 shops have closed in Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, in Pretoria, and 12 houses were burned in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg. According to Brigadier Sally De Beer of the South African Police Service, about 136 people were arrested for looting and being in possessing firearms and drugs.
“I’m actually not willing to stay in South Africa as I can see the situation is like this now, I’d rather go back to Somalia. I’m sure if I’d be killed in my country I would be killed by a terrorist, not by civilians,” says Hasen.
While we were in Atteridgeville, police arrested South African protesters, confiscating a firearm as well as needles and drugs wrapped in a black shopping bag. By this time it was chaos.
“I was born to die. If I die today, it’s fine. But your mother will be killed first. F**k you,” shouted a man, believed to be a Nigerian, raising a middle finger to the mob.
“The dislike of foreigners in the use of foreign labor from Africa, India, and Europe to undermine black economic and political power during the apartheid period… this has conditioned people to see foreigners – particularly Africans, but also those from other regions – as a threat. This sense of threat has been exacerbated by public statements and actions from officials in all parties, police, and people in society at large,” says Loren Landau, from the African Centre for Migration &amp; Society at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Inequality and unemployment make it worse.
“Unless the conditions leading to these attacks change, violence will continue,” he says.
“Public education is a start, but this will not counter the incentives and benefits of violence for those who lead it. We will need the police to hold organizers responsible; to reconsider how we plan and manage our cities and to hold politicians to task when they demonize any group in our society, including refugees and other immigrants.”
According to the Nigerian Union South Africa spokesperson, Eneka Ezinteje, about 800,000 Nigerians are currently in South Africa.   According to reports, about 116 Nigerians were attacked in South Africa in the last two years. In 2016, 20 were killed.
How many Africans have to die before something is done?

There Will Be Blood, Brother

Terrorism in Africa did not begin on September 11, 2001. It began in Sudan in the 1990s, where Osama bin Laden operated and where an attack against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was organized.
Three years later, in 1998, Al Qaeda cells blew up the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
In retaliation for these attacks, the United States (US), in addition to an attack in Afghanistan, bombed a chemical plant in Sudan, claiming that it was producing elements for chemical weapons for Al Qaeda.
From the time of these attacks, US policy in Somalia became preoccupied with searching for, capturing, and killing the perpetrators of those attacks who were believed to have taken refuge there.
<div id="attachment_2882" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2882" class="size-medium wp-image-2882" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/000_Par7496840-300x221.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="221" />A picture taken from a video distributed to Nigerian journalists in the country&#8217;s north in recent days through intermediaries and obtained by AFP on March 5, 2013 reportedly shows Abubakar Shekau (C), the suspected leader of Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, flanked by six armed and hooded fighters in an undisclosed place. The suspected leader of Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram denies any ceasefire deal with the government in a video obtained today. Abubakar Shekau makes no mention of kidnappings in the video, including last month&#8217;s abduction of seven members of a French family. Boko Haram was blamed for the kidnapping that occurred just over the Nigerian border in Cameroon. RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE &#8211; MANDATORY CREDIT &#8220;AFP PHOTO / BOKO HARAM&#8221; &#8211; NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS &#8211; DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS</div>
The seeds of later US policy and all that has followed in Somalia were planted then.
Yet the vast majority of conflict and terrorist activity in Africa is not linked to international sponsorship or any vast conspiracy against the West.
The Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, the various militia in eastern Congo, the militants in the Niger Delta, the extremist sects in Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere are the principal security threats to the African population.
Africa is no more immune to the threats from terrorism than any other continent.
Its combination of relatively weak states, ethnic and religious diversity and sometimes discrimination, its poverty, and in many places its ungoverned space all lend Africa a significant susceptibility to the growth of radical and sometimes internationally connected movements that employ terrorism.
Some of these are aimed specifically at African governments, for example, the radical Islamic Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Mombasa Republican Council in Kenya.
These groups pose serious security challenges to key countries and potentially even a threat to the continent’s new success.
The biggest story in Africa south of the Sahara over the past few years hasn’t been plague, famine or war but the emergence of the world’s poorest continent as one of its fastest growing – thanks to factors that include fresh investment, economic reform, the spread of new technology, higher prices for commodity exports and generally greater political stability.
Nigeria and Kenya, the most important economies in West and East Africa respectively, are pillars of the change in Africa as well as having the largest and most easily accessible markets for foreigners.
Both now face growing battles with Islamist groups; Kenya throwing troops into neighboring Somalia in pursuit of Al-Shabaab fighters, Nigeria struggling with bombings and shootings by its home-grown Boko Haram sect.
Kenyan forces pushed into southern Somalia to drive back Al Qaeda-linked militants, blamed by Nairobi for a string of border incursions and kidnappings, including the abductions of foreign tourists from coastal resorts which have damaged one of Kenya’s most important industries.
Al-Shabaab has in return called for all-out war on Kenya and ‘huge blasts’ by its unknown number of supporters there. Grenade attacks, that have seen many killed and several wounded, jangled nerves in Nairobi, where more than 200 people died in an Al Qaeda bombing of the US embassy in 1998.
Killings by Nigeria’s Boko Haram sect &#8211; whose name means Western education is sinful &#8211; had been largely confined to a remote corner of the semi-desert northeast and ignored by much of the country until bombings struck the capital Abuja, killing hundreds. A suicide car bombing on the United Nations headquarters in August killed 24 people.
Boko Haram is now by far the biggest security headache for President Goodluck Jonathan in Africa’s most populous nation – which, if estimates of population and the Muslim-Christian balance are to be believed, might have more Muslims than any country in the Middle East.
While Islam in Africa has traditionally co-existed comfortably with other religions, more heavily populated Muslim regions are often relatively marginalized economically and politically. This leaves plenty of ground for radicalism to sprout.
Getting sucked into a foreign war against a Somali enemy, which drove out Ethiopia’s far more experienced army in 2009, is just what Kenya doesn’t need at a time when it is already in the doldrums due to drought, soaring inflation and a plummeting currency.
It is not only the cost in lives and money that count.
Counterinsurgency wars – even in regions distant from the main centers of business – can harm foreign investor sentiment starting to warm to Africa. They drain resources that might better be used improving infrastructure or education and lead to a greater role for security establishments at the heart of power and policy making, rarely a recipe for success in post-independence Africa.
Beyond the biggest countries, poorer neighbors may be at greater risk. A flood of weapons across the Sahara desert from Libya’s civil war – as well as hundreds of thousands of now unemployed former migrant workers – could further destabilize West Africa’s Sahel countries, already prey to kidnappings and attacks by Al Qaeda’s regional offshoot.
The challenge in combating terrorism in Africa is balancing a legitimate program of security improvements with a continuing and sustained attack on poor governance, poverty, and deprivation of human rights.
Getting the balance right is particularly acute because the democracies in Africa are fragile, and any crackdown on terrorist activity has to be carried out with great sensitivity to the historic grievances of marginalized groups, the incipient struggle for human rights, and the relatively weak civilian oversight of the military and security institutions.
Overall, optimism remains strong. Businesses compare Africa with China and India in past decades and eye a market of a billion consumers with money to spend on more than just basic survival.
Whether or not the threat of Islamist militant groups can be contained to the margins, the extra strain could certainly be felt in a continent where many have only recently seen good reason to believe in a better future.

Tag: Threats

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

There Will Be Blood, Brother

Be Afraid