This photo was taken in 2008. I was a young reporter, notebook in hand, in Khayelitsha, trying to make sense of the first wave of xenophobic violence to rip through this country.
I was profoundly affected. I watched Somalian mothers in tents, cradling their babies in disbelief. Spoke to Ethiopian men, almost crying from the shock and pain of it all. I thought: We will never let this happen again.
Yet, here we are.
Eighteen years later and I'm watching the same fires, literal and figurative, and the same dangerous lies spreading faster than ever, turbocharged by social media and amplified by politicians who should know better.
But the numbers do not support the narrative.
Immigrants, documented and undocumented combined, make up roughly 4 million people. That is about 5% of our population. The idea that 5% of the country is responsible for our crime, our unemployment, our collapsing healthcare? It is not just wrong, it is mathematically absurd.
Look at who the Zondo and Madlanga Commissions have implicated. Look at rape statistics: 120 women a day, and a third of South African men have admitted to committing rape. Are we really blaming foreigners for that?
If every undocumented immigrant left tomorrow, your local public hospital would still be broken. Not because of the person standing ahead of you in the queue, but because of corruption, mismanagement and decades of underfunding that have nothing to do with them.
March and March's June 30 deadline is not a peaceful protest. It is a dog whistle. And the media and political figures who treat it as legitimate activism are complicit in what it is actually designed to trigger.
I started https://t.co/z34ZpKPsT3 because I believe that access to accurate, contextual information is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of a functioning democracy. And a democracy that allows dangerous misinformation to go unchallenged, that allows real economic despair to be weaponised against the most vulnerable, is one that is putting itself at serious risk.
We have covered this crisis extensively at https://t.co/z34ZpKPsT3. We will keep doing so. Because owe it to each other to do better.
#SouthAfrica #Xenophobia #MediaLiteracy #Journalism #Democracy #Explain #FactsMatter #SouthAfricanMedia #BuildingInPublic #Immigration
This shit is crazy if you remember that she hates foreigners because her drug addict son died from an overdose and she decided it’s the fault of the Nigerians as if they forced the drugs down his throat and ran away with his money. The boy had been progressively doing all sorts of drugs and buying from all sorts of dealers before he met an overdose
The discourse around Rihanna openly loving Rocky is crazy af. She literally has three kids with that man and they’re in a relationship. Y’all are stupid.