SA police attack on Mozambicans part of pattern

The horrifying video showing the unleashing of police dogs on three black men from Mozambique by six white policemen serves as a reminder that South Africa has not fully escaped its pernicious apartheid legacy.

The use of black men as - to quote the African National Congress - "human bait to train police dogs" is reminiscent of the worst excesses of white minority rule.

Racist attitudes are not yet extinct in the white minority (though many whites have undergone a political metamorphosis). As Mr Peter Mokoba, the former president of the African National Youth Leagues, remarks: "The brutal assaults . . . should send a message to those who deny that racism is still a problem in South Africa." His point is reinforced by recurring reports of racist behaviour.

To quote three episodes prominently reported in recent months: a young man who, suspected of trespassing on the land of a white farmer, was stripped naked and painted silver from top to toe; a teenage girl who, suspected of shoplifting, was forced to take her blouse off and painted white from the waist up; and a man who, having irritated his employer, was tied to a truck and dragged to death.

In each of these cases the perpetrators were white and the victims black. Anti-black racial bigotry, inculcated over nearly five decades of apartheid, has not been eradicated in a mere six years of non-racial democracy.

It may in some respects have even been inflamed by the transition from the old order to the new. The episodes cited above may be viewed as a form of revanchism.

That said, however, there is another perspective to the video which was relayed on public television. It is contained in an article written Mr Dapo Oyewole, a Nigerian living in South Africa and working at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria. His essential point is that the brutal attack on the Mozambique nationals is part of a consistent pattern of assaults on foreign nationals in South Africa, particularly those from African countries to the north.

Noting that the attack took place in January 1998, he states that it should be seen in the context of "deplorable treatment of foreign nationals by the South African Police Service generally and not as an isolated assault by aberrant policemen driven by nostalgia for the past". The attack is the product of attitudes which are pervasive in the police service, "irrespective of racial origin", he adds.

While the "disgust" and "outrage" expressed by many South Africans is welcome, the brutality depicted in the video footage is neither shocking nor new to foreign blacks in South Africa, he writes.

Mr Oyewole's observations suggest that the dog assault is more correctly a manifestation of the xenophobia which some observers believe has become a distinguishing feature of post-apartheid South Africa. It has certainly attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

THE South African-based Human Rights Committee describes xenophobia as "racism of a special kind". In its monograph, Xenophobia, The New Racism, the Human Rights Committee states: "Xenophobia and racism [are] two sides of the same discriminatory coin, a fear and hatred of difference, either on the basis of race or nationality or both".

The main victims of xenophobia in South Africa are black people from African countries, who should, in terms of President Thabo Mbeki's dedication to the notion of African Renaissance, be considered as brethren by South Africa's black citizens.

But the evidence garnered by sociologists shows that foreign blacks generally, even those who have entered South Africa lawfully, are disliked and feared by their South African-born racial kinsmen. Apart from being seen as economic competitors in an economy which has shed 500,000 jobs since 1994, they are blamed for the high crime rate, abused as kwerekwere (a derogatory term for foreigners), physically assaulted and even murdered.

Perhaps the unleashing of the dogs on the three Mozambicans should be linked to the murder in the same year on a train of three foreign nationals - two Somalis and a Mozambican - by black South Africans returning from a protest against unemployment. Though there are differences between the two events, there is an underlying commonality: the belief that violence against foreign nationals is legitimised by their perceived status as illegal immigrants, economic competitors and potential or actual criminals.