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Some survivors were arrested by police, while politicians made newcomers scapegoated for intractable disorders such as crime, unemployment and housing shortages.
By John Eligon
Reporting from Johannesburg
Two days after escaping from a chimney by sliding over a curtain with her 15-month-old daughter tied to her chest, and hours after burying two Malawian compatriots who did not survive, Yasini Kumbasa was arrested in downtown Johannesburg because police could not easily see her passport. .
He had lost almost everything in the fire, but police intervened when he tried to destroy his passport. Accusing him of being in South Africa illegally, they locked him up and demanded at least 1,500 rand, or $78, which he paid each month in rent, for his release, M. Kumbasa.
After spending three nights at a police station in the city centre, Kumbasa, 29, said he was given cash that his wife had lent him from an acquaintance in Malawi.
As South Africans furiously debate decades of failed government policies, overlooked warnings and futile leadership that led to the burning of a deserted building occupied by a slew of squatters last week, migrants are once again in the spotlight and feel more vulnerable, even when they are the heaviest. Trauma from the fire.
Authorities have not released the identities of the 77 dead, but interviews with citizens of construction and aid crews suggest that most of the victims (in fact, most of the citizens) were from other African countries.
Many immigrants who escaped the flames but lost loved ones have avoided government shelters and public hospitals, fearing immigration officials will check their legal standing and deport them if all their documents are not in order.
The immigration checks and extortion attempts that immigrants say are carried out through police in Johannesburg have become even more terrifying, especially for those like M. Kumbasa, who lost their passports in the fire.
Concerns are emerging about anti-immigration rhetoric and violence.
In the run-up to next year’s national elections, some politicians have used the tragedy to target immigrants, accusing them of fueling housing shortages and preventing the government from cleaning up squalid buildings. Some are calling for stricter border controls, a potentially winning message in a country where a portion of the population says foreigners are not allowed to paint because they take jobs away from citizens.
As one of Africa’s economic powerhouses, South Africa has long attracted immigrants from the desperately deficient countries of the continent’s southern region. However, once immigrants, they find themselves living a precarious existence, violently attacked and blamed for intractable disorders such as crime, unemployment and the housing crisis.
After the tragedy, officials from the Interior Department, which enforces immigration laws, temporarily showed up at emergency shelters, as many survivors feared. But Johannesburg city officials said they were there only to get the missing documents, whether for immigrants and citizens, not to deport people.
Colleen Makhubele, president of the Johannesburg City Council, said the city focused on responding to the immediate humanitarian crisis and not on seeking documentation from migrants affected by the fire.
But “we can’t suspend the law forever,” he said in an interview, suggesting that survivors who need the right documents look to the government to get them, even if it means returning to their home countries and applying for a visa there. But for now, the shelter is the safest place for undocumented immigrants, he said.
“On the street we don’t know who’s going to pick them up,” he said. “When the policeman arrives, he only needs his papers. If you don’t have them, they don’t care if you jumped out of a construction or not. “. They will simply welcome you.
Immigration control has become a regular component of policing in South Africa. Although courts have rejected the practice of indiscriminately arresting others suspected of being in the country illegally, immigrants say police ask them for documents on the street.
Violence is another widespread risk for immigrants. In Iepsloot, a township north of Johannesburg, South Africans blamed foreigners for last year’s violent crime spree, and a Zimbabwean man was burned alive before an angry mob.
In response, the law enforcement government introduced extensive immigration operations in the commune. For several weeks, police officers, accompanied by Interior Ministry officials, patrolled the streets, arresting men in open-air markets and public places, whose documents were not easy to see.
If they simply didn’t show up, they threw them into police vans and took them to prison. Media reports said officials asked other people to pronounce words in local languages to check if they were South African.
Sultan, from Tanzania, said he had never experienced such police action in his ten years in South Africa, until this week, after escaping the fatal chimney and smashing his shop on the building’s grounds.
A few days later, he was about to go for a bite to eat when two policemen asked for his passport.
Sultan, 43, who asked that her last call not be published for fear of further trouble, told them she had been destroyed in the fire and was stuffed into the back of her truck. They told him that if he paid them R1, 500 they would release him, he added, otherwise they would take him to a deportation center.
Police circulated for several hours with him and other immigrants they arrested, he said. Sultan was eventually released after a friend brought the cash to pay the officers.
Brigadier Brenda Muridili, spokeswoman for the South African Police Department in Gauteng, the province that includes Johannesburg, said the section took “any allegations of corruption seriously”. Police officials have won court cases over officials extorting foreign nationals, he said, but the challenge is that accusers don’t need to cooperate with police investigations.
Much of the attention to xenophobia in South Africa has focused on occasional outbreaks of violence against foreign-born residents. But in recent years, anti-immigration sentiment has manifested itself in government politics and discourse. Authorities have limited some pathways to legal residency to restrict employment opportunities for immigrants and ordered more competitive measures to arrest those who may be living in the country illegally.
Last year, a provincial fitness official filmed reprimanding a Zimbabwean woman in a hospital, accusing her of helping overwhelm the country’s fitness system.
Several other people injured in the fire hesitated to seek medical attention for fear of touching authorities.
Happiness Mwanyali, 22 months, suffered severe burns to her right thigh when her mother, Mary Sosa, carried her on her back to escape the building. But Ms. Sosa, 36, from Malawi, hesitated to take her daughter to the public clinic where they are being treated because all their immigration documents had been destroyed. Without them, he says, he feared that the clinic would not help him and that the Interior Ministry would come and expel them.
So, the day after the fire, he tried a remedy that his friends advised: apply toothpaste to the wound.
Happiness, who has soft cheeks and curious eyes, got medical attention at a personal clinic when a nonprofit stepped in to help.
“As foreigners, we don’t live freely,” said Sosa, who has lived in South Africa for three years and sells peanuts and bananas on the street. “We live hiding from the police. It’s a painful way of living, but I have no selection because that’s how we rush.
This market, which involves exchanging some freedom to make a living, is a market that some immigrant survivors of the fire say they are reconsidering.
Although Kumbasa said he didn’t make much money from the jobs he did in South Africa, life here was better than in Malawi, where he may not simply make a living. But his arrest, after wasting so much on the fire, shattered his sense of security in South Africa, he claimed.
It’s time, he says, to return to Malawi.
John Eligon is the head of the Johannesburg office, responsible for southern Africa. In the past he worked as a journalist in the National, Sports and Metro offices. His paintings brought him from the streets of Minneapolis after George Floyd’s death to South Africa for the funeral. by Nelson Mandela. Learn more about John Eligon
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