PHOENIX, South Africa — Thirty-six years separated the infamous race riots of 1949 and 1985 in this area, when people of African and South Asian descent — pitted against one another at the bottom rungs of the apartheid system — killed each other in a bubbling over of resentment.
Last month, another 36 years after the last riots, Phoenix and surrounding towns ignited once again.
Amid a week-long bout of looting, arson and clashes that saw at least 342 killed across two South African provinces, 36 were killed in this patchwork of poor Black townships and more developed “Indian” suburbs that had been coexisting peacefully, though unequally. Most of the dead were Black this time, and most of the suspected killers were Indian, the country’s police chief said this week.
Interviews with nearly two dozen people — including victims, their family members, community leaders, politicians, business owners and others — were laced with disbelief. Decades of work had been put into building a peaceful coexistence. All wondered the same thing: How had it unraveled so suddenly?
The answer, most thought, was rooted in South Africa’s failure to truly heal the divides of apartheid. The country may have christened itself the Rainbow Nation, but high walls of income and opportunity still divide each of its stripes.
The wave of looting that swept across the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, two of South Africa’s biggest cities, had already been raging for days when Thuto Shwuaka, 18, and friends decided to gather for a pickup soccer game on an empty field in Phoenix, whose population of around 200,000 is mostly descended from South Asians brought to South Africa more than 100 years ago by the British colonial government as farm and railroad laborers.
The television news had been broadcasting live shots of mostly Black crowds streaming out of department stores and warehouses with whatever they could grab. Interspersed with such footage were interviews with mostly White and Indian men in relatively affluent neighborhoods who said they had armed themselves in case the looters came for their homes. Shwuaka and his friends were stopped by one of these groups, he said.
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“We came across a group of Indian men who told us that we could not pass there and turned us away,” he recalled on a recent day at home. “Then they accused us of being part of the group of people who had been looting and started beating us.”
[‘I am broken’: South African communities are gutted by a wave of looting, arson and loss]
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