Posts incite anti-foreigner sentiment with old video of unrest in South Africa
- Published on October 31, 2024 at 10:57
- 4 min read
- By Tendai DUBE, AFP South Africa
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“They are testing our security strength, identifying weaknesses and in time they will regroup and fight,” reads an X post published on September 17, 2024.
The accompanying video, which bears the logo of broadcaster Africanews, shows a sequence of scenes where police patrol the street and skies and end up clashing with angry protesters.
The police are then seen dispersing the agitated crowd using teargas and rubber bullets.
“When that day come, police must never hesitate, no need for rubber bullets, they must be eliminated once and for all. No mercy for terrorists (sic),” adds the post, which has been shared and liked hundreds of times.
The X account is affiliated with the Patriotic Alliance, a party that is vocal about the deportation of undocumented foreigners. The anti-foreigner hashtag #Abahambe in its bio means "they must go" in isiZulu.
Circulating mainly on WhatsApp, the footage is also being shared along with an audio clip of a man rallying his fellow immigrants in different parts of the country to prepare and arm themselves against xenophobic South Africans.
"We have got a problem here of these cowards that have failed in life and they want to lay the blame on us," says the man in the three-minute audio clip.
"We are starting strategic groups...we are going to equip every group with at least eight guns," he adds. "In as much as these people ... saying they are going to kill us, we are also going to kill them."
The voice says these guns are untraceable and that the groups of various Africans will call on each other when in trouble to help fight against South Africans with competitive numbers.
However, the video circulating online in recent weeks was recorded more than seven years ago.
Anti-immigrant unrest
A reverse image search of the video's keyframes using the verification tool InVID WeVerify revealed that it has been online for years.
Pan-African news website Africanews published (archived here) the footage on February 27, 2017, captioning it: “South African police fire tear gas to disperse anti-immigrant protesters.”
Filmed on February 24, 2017, the video shows South African police firing tear gas and rubber bullets, and using water cannons to disperse rival marches by hundreds of citizens and foreign nationals in the country’s administrative capital Pretoria (archived here).
This came after a spate of looting of stores believed to belong to foreigners, who were accused of taking jobs from citizens and increasing crime.
Foreigners in South Africa
Anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa remains elevated, fuelled by the country's high unemployment rate and an influx of economic migrants (archived here).
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch said candidates in South Africa’s May 2024 general elections had been scapegoating and demonising foreign nationals, which risked stoking xenophobic violence (archived here).
Between April and August 2024, South Africa's Department of Home Affairs deported (archived here) nearly 20,000 people who had violated immigration laws at the cost of R53 million (approximately $3,000,000).
In September this year, the country's upmarket restaurant industry also saw a massive crackdown against employers who had been hiring undocumented foreigners under exploitative conditions (archived here).
This month, South Africa announced visa reforms intended to attract more skilled workers and tourists (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has debunked several false claims linked to immigrants in recent months, including here, here and here.
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