News Category: Sonke News

Through public murals, Sonke has found a compelling means of educating people about xenophobic violence.

>> read the case study

View a short documentary on Sonke’s use of street soccer to address xenophobia and promote reintegration.

>> View the Soccer for Reintegration video

The Sonke Gender Justice Network’s One Man Can project hosted a street soccer festival at Manyanani Peace Park in Khayelitsha to facilitate reintegration of people affected by the xenophobic violence into their communities. The event was based on the idea that encouraging communication and shared experiences between foreign nationals and South Africans within a community will help to ease relations within that community and encourage reintegration.

Fourteen teams were registered and attended the competition – each team composed of two foreigners and two South Africans.

The main message of the event was: “One man can halt xenophobia, stop violence, support reintegration, celebrate diversity, demand justice, and make a difference.”

To find out more about the event, read the article Street Soccer: A strategy for social integration, or watch the video.

The road towards unifying broken hearts and souls that once delivered hatred can only take stairs and not escalator. It is time-consuming challenge that takes a number of days or even years to re-establish love and implement social change. It only requires fresh strategies to reach to the climax, the society that everybody aspires and campaigns for.

It was drizzling early in the morning in Cape Town; and in its central and southern suburbs heavy rain was pelting to hamper a beginning of a new strategy.

Sonke Gender Justice, a non-profit making organisation whose slogan is “One Man Can” and one of its overriding outlooks is “Halt Xenophobia and support reintegration”, organised a friendly soccer at Manyanani Peace Park in Khayelitsha on Saturday last week.

The purpose of such a project is to promote social unity between the foreign and local communities. Hundreds of young people from diverse places in Cape Town attended the event to witness, mingle, play together and socialise; and so was born a new strategy for social unity.

At least fourteen teams were registered and attended the competition; and each team was composed of two foreigners and two residents including a goal-keeper.

There were no qualifications or pre-requisites as to who would participate to the competition. Even those whose legs and toes are unfit to play soccer are the good footballers required provided their hearts are moulded to social acceptance.

Games were played in a small ground that approximately measured thirty by twenty feet.

Among the teams that attended, to mention a few, were Abafethu FC, Shining Stars, Zim Dollar, Marshall Stars, Shona FC and Future Stars? Eventually Shining Stars ended the winning team by beating Future Stars 7-1 in the final.

A representative of Street Soccer, who also played a major role in sponsoring the event, promised the winning team to line up for 2010 Street Soccer. He said so when presenting certificates, gifts and trophy to the achievers.

The event was so colourful with people from all races (blacks, coloured and whites) all having one core message, “One man can halt xenophobia, stop violence, support reintegration, celebrate diversity, demand justice, and make a difference”.

Entertained by Bonga Magazi and Zoleka Mpotsho, the Chosi-Chosi Poets, young people heard none other than the sole message of peace and social unity that seems to no longer exist between the two communities after xenophobic riots.

While some were busy playing football, others were hilariously dancing. Listening to the euphony of African songs that was technically reported by a man on his wheelchair, Fungile Ngqoleka, everybody was warmed up though the climate seemed not to allow.

Following such an occasion, it had something to interpret. It connotatively said that disability is not an excuse for violence if a person is socially cultivated; so is poverty not an excuse for segregation if a person is socially informed.

Even so, One Man Can; let social unity be promoted by organising strategies of such nature. The road to reintegration and social acceptance can properly be paved if all could engage.

Copyright displacedrefugeenet@yahoo.com.

As news reports of anti-immigrant violence begin to surface in the international media, my family and friends back home have been writing to me to ensure that I am safe. I am, I tell them. They ask me if I feel threatened and if conditions “in my immediate neighbourhood” are stable. I don’t; they are.

So much so that, if I chose to, I could ignore the ethnic cleansing that has purged whole townships of foreigners, killing dozens of them and displacing tens of thousands. I have that option because I’m not That Kind of Foreigner; I don’t live in Those Neighbourhoods. I am an American intern living a few steps from Cape Town’s central business district. I am white.

Of course, I do not choose to ignore this crisis. I identify with the dreadlocked man on the front page of the Cape Argus who wore a bumper sticker proclaiming that “We are all Zimbabweans”. Along with the many South Africans who abhor this thuggery, I swam through waves of shock and mourning before arriving at a place of action. As emergency calls reached our offices Friday morning, I saw myself reflected in the dejected faces of my colleagues, who had hoped to prevent the violence from spreading to their neighbourhoods. That afternoon, I listened to a Somali woman shout over the radio, “I came here to get away from the problem in Somalia. Now, they make these problems. Where am I supposed to go now?” Her voice did not sound dejected or timid, as the majority of the news outlets had consistently portrayed the displaced. It sounded angry. Even though I am not That Kind of Foreigner, I am still A Foreigner. I came to South Africa to earn something, to better myself, just like the Somali woman. Morally, I cannot separate my plight from hers.

Yet it strikes me how easy that would be. Whatever pressures drove the mobs in Khayelitsha or Alex to loot and burn are comfortably separate from my life. Pap is not a staple for me; I could not tell you how much it costs today and how that price has increased. The power is always on in my house – no load shedding here. I have clean water, sewage, trash removal, and quiet nights. If there are killings in Khayelitsha, I read about them in the news (if anyone bothers to print a story). I don’t bother the townships with my relatively petty problems; they don’t bring their problems to me, either. Like good neighbours.

I guarantee you that Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, and Helen Zille also have such considerate neighbours; they also can choose how much to care. In fact, concern was shown for some of the foreigners who the mobs have threatened: amidst the reports of 20,000 African immigrants displaced, there were several attempts to reassure international tourists that South Africa is still safe for a rainbow vacation. Certain Foreigners must never, ever be offended.

And while tourists were shuffled up and down Table Mountain, a train to Jo’burg was packed to the gills with migrants returning to Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe; six extra coaches were added to accommodate their numbers and armed guards accompanied them the whole way. No government ministers were deployed to encourage them to stay – it was the most successful deportation scheme the city has ever seen. For the government, it was a solution to a problem; soon, it will be as if those people never existed. But I wonder, what songs were sung on that train? What did strangers say to each other when their eyes met? What stories were rolled up into bundles and packed out? As they watched the landscape open out before them, did they see their arrivals rewound, or was it all a terrible, unstoppable march forward?

Mbeki has done a brilliant job of fostering “good neighbourliness” not only between the cities and the townships, but also between South Africa and Zimbabwe. I have long said that he would pay for his friendliness with Mugabe. I was wrong. He hasn’t paid. He has sacrificed others. While he props up a dictator’s decrepit regime, Zimbabwe doesn’t eat. Zimbabwe is detained and tortured, dragged from the back of a bakkie. Zimbabwean Foreigners (for that is what they become when they cross into South Africa in order to buy bread) are unceremoniously repatriated from Lindela. Township tsotsis are not the only ones to blame for brutalising Zimbabweans, when even the President believes that they, unlike other Africans who take refuge here, should be left to starve or be persecuted for their political beliefs. Zimbabweans must be a completely Different Kind of Foreigner.

Whilst the government wrings its hands about how close to keep its neighbours, thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals have taken action. Over the weekend, my office at Sonke Gender Justice was converted into a relief hub, with hundreds of people streaming in and out, offering what services they could and being dispatched to safe havens around the province. Desks were pushed to the walls, and the floor became a processing center for the donations that flowed in as fast as we could sort and deploy them. On Sunday evening, I wound up at a church in Somerset West, where sandwich-making and clothes-sorting teams stepped gingerly around children’s Bible study classes. I didn’t even learn the names of the people working alongside me, mostly Afrikaner women and girls, and they didn’t learn mine. I am told that in some communities in Khayelitsha, South Africans refused to allow their immigrant neighbours to be evacuated, ensuring police that they would protect each other. I know that for every story of forced removal, there are two stories of those who mobilised to shelter the affected; for every marauding criminal who attacked his neighbour, there are twenty who resisted.

If anything is to rise from these ashes, it will have to come from the ones who resisted. We all have a responsibility to ask what happened, to walk down the alleyways and notice the spaces left behind, like missing teeth. We have a responsibility to ask why there is so much anger in the first place, and what each of us can do to address the ongoing tragedies in the townships: substandard public education that under-develops minds, soaring HIV rates that lay waste to bodies, and dehumanising living conditions in which only the hardiest souls can thrive. And we have a responsibility to support neighbouring countries as they struggle for democracy, just as they supported South Africa. Good neighbours don’t watch complacently while the house next door burns.There are many thousands of us who showed this weekend that we are ready to rise to the task. Now, when I ensure my parents that I feel safe, it’s not only because of the privileged status that my particular passport holds. It’s certainly not because the government is capable of protecting me or even has the will to do so. It’s a statement of faith that for the many who were jolted into action, this is only the beginning. I feel safe because I’ve seen thousands of ordinary South Africans put substance behind the slogan: We are all Zimbabweans.

I have been to areas in Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, Tshwane, where refugees and migrants have been displaced due to the attacks by my fellow South Africans. I have seen women and innocent children forced to live in unacceptable conditions without food, shelter, sanitation, clothing or any form of identification.

I have seen men in despair, helpless that they could not be of any assistance to their wives, sisters and children. Their image as fathers, men and husbands reduced to nothing.

But all that could not prepare me for the shock that awaited me at Jeppe police station. Here were hundreds of different foreign communities, all stranded together, squeezed at the back yard of the police station without hope, trust and no communication from anyone. All I could see from their eyes and hear from their silent voices was a cry for help, to whom? They do not know. I do not know.

I feel as a country we have failed our fellow Africans, refugees and migrants that are supposed to be protected and their rights upheld. The meaning of life, love and ubuntu is lost.

As a rights activist, a humanitarian worker and a Christian women in South Africa, I am speechless and embarrassed to be called a South African at this moment.

When the news of the first xenophobic attacks started to break two weeks ago, I was in an idyllic setting at an up market conference venue in Pretoria. Every day we were treated to meals that could feed a number of families and were sleeping in luxury suites far exceeding what I am used to and what most South Africans would have in the very best of times.

Being in Gauteng the province affected at that stage – in an environment so different to the South Africa being depicted on the television every morning made the reality of the week of 13 May 2008 strangely surreal to me. The more the situation worsened, the more the conference venue luxury and pampering stayed the same. Our main concerns were around the settings of the air conditioner, while outside our country was starting to burn. Our national fabric was unraveling and I was sleeping under cotton percale linen.The following week had the most horrendous barrage of violent photographs splashed across the media. The reality of the situation could no longer be ignored. People were burning and the media was making sure that every one knew about it. At this point I was back in Cape Town and the warnings and nervous whispering of the violence spreading to the Western Cape were all around us. I optimistically hoped that any plans to fuel the fires in Western Cape would be extinguished at the planning stages.

NGOs in the Mother City put their resources on a shared table and developed an emergency disaster management plan. Photographs were taken of willing volunteers, who were prepared to have their face on an anti-xenophobia poster, and plans for a mass march showing South Africa’s rejection of the recent attacks were underway. The NGO sector was really working together. A real sense of being in control and being busy offered comfort. Colleagues joined TAC and what looked like a crowd of over 1 000 concerned South Africans in a march against xenophobia and for a brief moment, it felt really good to be a South African again. But then the phone calls started coming in. As we were marching in town, so attacks were taking place in Khayelitsha. Concerned friends and acquaintances phoning each other in a spontaneous network. We rushed back to the office and tried to confirm reports, and get the information out to all the relevant parties before too much damage was done. That soothing sense of control was shattered and was replaced by disbelief and an absolute dread of what lay ahead. After an emotionally gruelling afternoon, it was time to wish beloved colleagues a good weekend. My toughest moment was not knowing what horrors would face the people in our city generally, and the people that I have grown to love specifically. A hug goodbye and a “please call me if you need me” seemed totally insufficient. Watching the press all weekend trying to assess the situation from more of a distance was unsettling in its own way. Things look calm from my quiet, removed suburb – but knowing about the threats and the fear in the community made me aware that those targeted by the violence would not have to be physically beaten and attacked in the true sense of the word. No matter what – the damage had been done. The betrayal had taken place and foreigners throughout our country would have sleepless nights, would be terrified to go home and would be devastated by fear. The emotional beating will continue long after the physical violence subsides.

My own process has been softened by me being able to help with sorting of emergency supplies and working with some of the wonderful volunteers who always seem to spring up in the face of crisis. South Africa is a beautiful country and is the home to many beautiful people, and I saw this first hand when members of the public donated time, clothing and other much needed resources and others took these supplies to the various emergency accommodation sites in the city. As I am writing this, so there has been an announcement of unconfirmed reports of violence in Soetwater. The crisis continues, but in this, a large part of South Africa examines her soul, and rises in love, concern and unity.I am South African because I am African!

The recent outbreak of xenophobic attacks got Sonke Gender Justice as an organisation to respond to the situation with the view of lending a helping hand to the many African nationals that we have been working with through our refugees programme . On Tuesday 20 May I visited the Jeppe Police Station with a Sonke colleague Nobesuthu Dikeledi, who manages our refugees project in Pretoria, after learning that most of the victims of the attacks have been flocking there since Saturday 17 May to seek safety and shelter.

Little did I know that the situation would have such an impact on me. For the first time in my life I had to come face to face with the reality that thousands of Africans are faced with because of the unrest that is going on in their countries. Women, children and men all squeezed at the back yard of the police station resembling a scene that you normally see only in the movies or on the news happening far afield, I never thought that it might be happening in my own back yard. I started interviewing some of the refugees there and they related their stories. I found myself feeling numb and unable to listen to the horrific experience that these people went through.

I sat down with lot of questions to myself but no answers. Some of the questions I was asking myself was whether in our work (Sonke and other organisations) we will ever be able to change the belief that society has – and more especially men in this case – that violence is a solution. I came to realise that part of what was going on was that it wasn’t just xenophobic violence but was also about men expressing their manhood by attacking men and women.

I found myself hearing over and again what one woman I interviewed said to me: “my baby is sick because we have been sleeping in the open since Saturday”. Then I thought of an innocent baby of four months whose father is South African has had to go through this because her mother happens to come from another part of Africa. She is not taking anyone’s job but just simply plying her trade as a hair dresser in the streets of the City of Gold and making our own mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, daughters and nieces beautiful.

Still today I can’t believe that men – because of the stereotypes they are acting out and the type of power they seem to be celebrating – are making our hard gained democracy a mockery of the world. I am still shaken about what I saw and experienced at the Jeppe Police Station.

As a South African born and bred in this country, it terrifies me that, we who had been terribly affected by the apartheid regime, turn around and involve ourselves in this barbaric act of physically causing harm to our fellow African brothers; emotionally abusing children and raping women who had done so much to rid this country of the apartheid regime. During our struggle we spoke and advocated for human rights which we continue to violate even in the new dispensation. Such hypocrisy should not be tolerated!

The phenomenon that the politicians in this country have adopted is another cause for concern. The ruling party had been alerted of the looming attacks on the foreign national and as always instead of been pro-active they chose to be reactive. This has sprung out of control that they are struggling to contain, have we forgotten about our pledge to protecting and respecting human rights? Such fickle turn of events. Just like they had done on other issues like the electricity crisis, just like the initial attacks on the Somali nationals in the townships of Cape Town, before they even spread to Gauteng, they resorted to the keeping mum strategy.

That was evident when I watched and listened to radio and television interviews where they had been invited to speak on the xenoprejudice attacks. The lack of political compassion is proving to detrimental to the wellbeing of the foreign nationals.

The most disturbing piece for me was of a man who was burnt alive in some of the newspaper reports as that had a terrible flashback of the time when there was an internal fighting during the 1994 post apartheid era. I had to relive that and having witnessed that as a child of about 9, I had concluded that nobody irrespective of who or where the person comes from, they don’t deserve such ill treatment. Have we leant so little that we continue to rape and turn children to orphans?

Why are we using refugees as a weapon to fight our battles with government who had failed to fulfil the promises they had made? This has nothing to do with foreign nationals taking our jobs as some have claimed is about the government failing to provide appropriate service delivery, creating jobs and elevating poverty; this is a backlash/retaliation against the government for failing the people. Watching 3rd degree last week made realise just how our politicians continue to drag their feet in bringing stability and putting an end to the whole revolt solely because they know that they are the ones that are hugely responsible for this. Has a human life become such so worthless that it’s easy to end a life? One Mozambican national got his head chopped off in the area that I live in, is that what we want to teach our children to treat other human beings?

he least said about the media coverage the better. It concerns me to have such biased reporting and perpetuating such stereotypes about foreign nationals. Some of the reporting was constantly referring to the refugees as aliens, doesn’t that sound a lot like the same segregating names used that led to racism, classism and tribalism, all the names that have been used to degrade other nationals who are not considered to be native to the country in which they live.

The closest I had gotten to the incidences was when I was working in the Lawley, at rank the Lenasia rank where I was using to commute to and from the trainings that I was conducting, a handful of taxi drivers attacked one guy who is a South African who just happened to be dark in skin colour. They physically assaulted him and it was pathetic to witness S.African women ululating to glorify such acts. They later discovered that he was a Xitsonga speaking South African after he was rescued by the police. If these attacks are about the skin colour, do we now treat people differently and condemning them to death? A personal reflection that brings tears to my eyes as I write this, what about the innocent lives of children, it really is a sad state of affairs that every South African should feel ashamed of.

The truth is from the inside out, not from the outside in, let’s interrogate our hearts and think about what our role is to the wellbeing of the African continent and its people.

South Africa is part of Africa and Africa belongs to everyone living in her comfort.

Let’s stop these senseless and baseless attacks and killings and fight these demons who continue to commit such horrendous crimes against humanity…

AFRICA UNITE!!!

I listened with shock to reports of xenophobic violence in Alexandra as I arrived back home in Johannesburg from an eleven day stay in Swaziland. I had been missing home. As strange as it may sound, I call Johannesburg home. After being in the city of gold for a year surely I can call it home? This sentiment however does not seem to be shared by those I consider my brothers and sisters. I am a foreigner; others even call me an alien. I wonder from which planet I fell from seeing I am from just across the river Limpopo.

In my mind I thought it would end with Alexandra, it possibly could not spread to other areas. I was wrong. It spread like a wild fire, shouts came from all ends, newspapers were in business, the selling-story being refugees in crisis.

Don’t they know, not all of us are refugees. Some of us are just migrants, some of us have identity documents others do not but that doesn’t make us less of a person does it? We have blood running through our veins just like you. We have loved ones, brothers, sisters, mothers and friends just like you. We have dreams, aspirations and ambitions just like you.

he phone calls start, emails and sms’s. Everyone wants to know if I am safe. Well I am safe. Never in my life have I felt guilty about being safe like now. How is it that I am safe yet someone sleeps outside? Another is not sure if they will be alive tomorrow. Mobs may attack their area. Nobody knows who, where next the fire will spread to. Yet I remain safe and confident and my life goes on.

Is there anything I can do? How can I help, can I help? No I cannot. I fear helping makes me vulnerable too. Is this how life is to be; that I preserve my life at all cost even though it means another will lose theirs? Is this really about foreigners?

I choose not to believe I am under attack for speaking a different language, having darker skin or being taller. We all are responsible. We have allowed violence to go unpunished. We have allowed them to beat up, rape and kill women, AIDS activists, lesbians. Why should they not kill the foreigner he or she is not like them?

Just wait and see tomorrow you will be the different one because you do not speak their language. Yes, you were born in South Africa but because you do not speak their language it will be your chance to burn. It will be your chance to burn if we do not stop this now! Violence never was the solution. Let’s fights the war, but at all costs let our weapon be peace which awards dignity to all.