South Africa’s post-apartheid history has been marked by all manner of events – the miraculous, the outstanding, the bad, and the atrocious. The “flames of hate” (to borrow one media usage) that engulfed many South African urban squatter camps last month stay somewhere on this continuum.

It all began in a moment of ostensible communal self-reflection. A “community group” in one of the more depressed corners of Alexandria, a black township in northern Johannesburg, decides that it’s time to deal with the endemic problem of crime. Most of these people bear all the physical marks of deprivation. They migrated from very poor rural communities, but have yet to find succour in their new urban settings. The vast majority are uneducated, have no trades and are jobless. The dominant form of housing in the vicinity is tin-shacks, which because of the large numbers, form a frightening sprawl. Many residents subsist on grants provided by the state for child support, ill health or disability. Better life for all – that ubiquitous and most powerful ANC slogan – is not yet theirs to claim, even though the evidence of the government’s effort in improving the quality of social existence for the vast majority is visible everywhere.

Deliberations at the meeting veer from the serious to the mundane. Why do we suffer the double affliction of poverty and crime (rape, drugs, robberies, and the like)? Who are behind township crimes? What is the way forward?

Why are we not finding jobs? Could we have been elbowed out of opportunities by the poor from elsewhere? Could it be that our names have been replaced by those of “outsiders” in the job registries? Could it be that the labour market has been compromised by desperate foreigners willing to accept “peanuts” as pay? How did we become “too expensive” to hire, and too easy to fire? In short, who is blocking our access to the “good life?” And what is the way forward?

Then the mundane: Just where have all our girlfriends gone? Who is “taking” them? What do foreign men have under their pants that lure our girls? And what is the way forward?

The meeting decides that the way forward is simply that: forward - everyone, cudgels, stones, bottles and all – to the shacks, shops and resting places belonging to the township’s much despised “other,” namely foreign nationals (residency or acquired citizenship status notwithstanding). Another target: South Africans known to be wives, partners or girlfriends of foreign nationals. As it happens, the first few people to be clubbed to death do not belong to any of these categories: they are participants of the “community meeting” (or perhaps bystanders) who refuse to join the savage parade.

Xenophobia (Greek xenos – “stranger” – and phobos – “fear”). That is the shorthand the press, political commentators, government officials, and ordinary people have employed to describe the meeting’s deliberations, resolutions – and aftermath.

From Alexandra, the violence spread to other informal settlements in the city. Within a week similar incidents were reported in informal settlements in several other cities. By May 23, 42 people had been cudgelled, or burnt to death. Several hundreds were hospitalised for injuries and over 20,000 foreign nationals displaced. Shops belonging to foreign nationals were looted and then burnt down. In many of the affected settlements, the only tuck shops had been those owned and operated by foreign nationals (mainly Somalis). Several menial jobs (shoe repair, tyre vulcanisation and the like) were mostly performed by foreign nationals. Certain crimes – drug peddling, advanced fee fraud and even armed robbery, for example – were widely associated with foreign nationals.

For many, the killings represent everything that could go wrong with collective memory. “Although they were poor,” Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu remembers, they (Africans) welcomed us South Africans as refugees, and allowed our liberation movements to have bases in their territory even if it meant those countries were going to be attacked by the SADF (South African Defence Forces).” In Tanzania, everyone recalls, an entire province was created and handed over to South African exiles.

In the imagination of the perpetrators of the violence, black is perhaps bad. Otherwise, why is it that despite the presence of foreigners of every hue and colour in South Africa, only black Africans are singled out for attacks? It’s an argument that some have put forward, but which somehow ignores the fact that there is social ecology to this sort of xenophobic violence. The xenophobic “hot spots” in South Africa are the poverty-stricken, tin-shack neighbourhoods, which large numbers of black South Africans have had to share with political and economic refugees and other very low-income immigrants from all over the continent. Most foreigners of European, Asian and American extraction do not live in these neighbourhoods, and are thus, in a manner of speaking, “saved” by the ecology.

Beyond the arguments about collective memory and the racialised attacks, fears have been expressed about revenge attacks (in other African countries), and the ramifications that such attacks could have. Studies have shown that South Africa is currently Africa’s largest foreign direct investor, having invested about R70 billion (US$9.3 billion) between 1994 and 2004, in telecommunications, mining electricity, oil and gas, steel, etc. The biggest of these investments are in Mozambique, one of the countries whose nationals have been targeted in the May attacks. About 300 South African companies currently have operations north of the Limpopo River. Flagship South African companies, like MTN, are quite big in Nigeria – another country whose citizens have reportedly been attacked in Durban.

Why do these statistics matter? Well, South Africa’s poor depend on government social assistance at many levels. A substantial proportion of tax revenues needed for social support is sourced as taxes on repatriated profits from the rest of the continent. While the victims of xenophobic attacks in South Africa’s townships number in the thousands, any large-scale revenge attacks on South African investments on the continent could hurt millions of South Africans, especially the poor, besides plunging the entire continent into a very unnecessary socio-economic and diplomatic turmoil.

President Thabo Mbeki (who has been blamed for tardy response to the violence but who on May 21 ordered the deployment of the military to deal with it) stated, in the wake of the attacks, that South Africa’s future was inextricably bound up with that of the rest of the continent. He is right.

South Africa does, of course, have the capacity to extinguish the flames of xenophobia in its poor communities – and certainly will. Yet, the fact that these flames were ignited at all will remain for sometime a source of considerable shame and embarrassment for the country. For one thing, sentiments are bound to be inflamed (even unjustifiably) across the world about, for example, safety issues vis-à-vis the country’s status as host of the 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament – an event South Africa believes it is hosting “on behalf” of Africa. Even so, this is a country respected across the world for its open-heartedness, its abundant opportunities, its stable democracy, its sophistication and its fabulous infrastructure – a country that many regard as Africa’s immediate answer to the “social comforts” of the West.

Perhaps there is wisdom in waging an all-out war on poverty after all.

Akpan, PhD., Ford Foundation-IFP Scholar, Department of Sociology, University of Fort Hare, East London Campus, South Africa, is our South Africa Contributing Editor