Indian vs black Vigilante killings upend a South Africa town

PHOENIX: The blows rained down â€" bats, hammers, a hockey stick â€" as Njabulo Dlamini lay on the pavement. He and five friends, all of them black, had been driving in a minibus taxi through the streets of Phoenix, a predominantly Indian suburb created from the forced racial segregation of apartheid South Africa.
A mob dragged them from the car and beat them furiously, according to witnesses and video footage. Other people were chased and beaten by the crowd, which had been whipped up in recent days by WhatsApp warnings and reports of violence and looting by black people. Dlamini later died of his injuries, his family said.
South Africa was convulsed this summer by some of its worst civil unrest since the end of apartheid. The imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma for refusing to appear before a corruption inquiry set off violent protests by his supporters. Soon, riots and looting erupted in parts of the country, fed by poverty, inequality and the government’s failure to provide basic services, like water or electricity.
Officials have called the violence an insurrection â€" an attempt to sabotage Zuma’s rival and successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, in part by stoking some of the nation’s oldest racial tensions. Nationwide, over 340 people died in the mayhem. But officials have been alarmed by what they say undermines the social order: dozens of vigilante killings by ordinary citizens. The vigilantism was pronounced in Phoenix. The country’s police minister said 36 people there â€" 33 of them black â€" were killed. Fifty-six people have been arrested in connection with the Phoenix violence.
Mobs of mostly Indian residents, worried that their community was under siege, erected roadblocks. They stopped black people and sometimes beat or killed them, police said, inflaming the fragile relationship between black and Indian South Africans â€" two marginalised groups under apartheid rule.
Interviews with dozens of black and Indian residents, as well as a review of video footage, show that at least some of the violence and deaths could have been prevented if police had provided basic security.
While the apartheid government deemed black and Indian people inferior to the white population, Indians were placed above black people in the hierarchy.
This afforded them access to better education, freer movement and sturdier homesthan the blacks.
On July 11, after days of watching TV footage of shopping centres in other places being looted, and cops nowhere to be found, many Phoenix locals got an anonymous, unverified message on WhatsApp. “Tomorrow we coming in all your Indian people town to close everything,” it read. “You’ll wake up and see flames.”
Residents began to brace for an attack. Videos and messages left many feeling that their city was being overrun. One video showed hundreds of people charging into Phoenix from a predominantly black settlement. Gunshots rang out as looters made their way toward a shopping plaza, said Marc Chetty, a resident. A bullet tore through the kitchen window of Chandramati Bhagwati, 66, grazing her as she cooked, she said. Two shopping plazas were looted.
Scared, many residents armed themselves and flocked to the streets to erect makeshift roadblocks. People argued they were not accosting black people because of their race, but because they seemed to be doing most of the looting. All around Phoenix, Indians asked how anyone could say this was about race. Indian said that while the government failed to create opportunities for their black neighbours, they employed them as gardeners and housekeepers. But for Linda Khawula, one of Dlamini’s friends who was with him that night, everything has changed. “Now I have hate in my heart,” she said. “I feel hate toward Indian people when I didn’t feel it before.”

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