Inside South Africa's Operation Dudula vigilantes: 'Why we hate foreigners'
Inside South Africa's Operation Dudula vigilantes: 'Why we hate foreigners'
BBC Africa Eye gains rare access to Operation Dudula, South Africa's prominent anti-migrant movement.
South African vigilante group Operation Dudula has become notorious for raiding businesses belonging to foreign nationals and forcing shops to close. BBC Africa Eye has gained rare access to members of the country's most-prominent anti-migrant street movement.
It seems people everywhere have a strong tendency to deal with hardship by blaming some more or less arbitrary group and attacking them. It's fuelling the rightward political lurch all around the world.
It's an age old tradition, but it's not and arbitrary group it's always a minority group. Maybe it's the Jews, maybe it's a certain ethnicity, maybe it's just a political ideology.
The easiest thing to rally people around is the excuse that it's the outside group that's ruining your country.
What kind of violence would you expect to happen on the left? Or are all negative actions come from the right for you?
How many societies are stringing up the owners of corporations and distributing their wealth? None, so left wing violence can't be all that common. How many societies are mistreating immigrants, destroying social safety nets, and trying to overturn democratic elections in favor of authoritarians? Plenty, so you know the right wing is alive and well.
You're replying to something in your own mind, not in my comment.
ngl i haven't actually heard of someone blaming foreigners for their kid's drug problem before
"You see drugs everywhere and most of the drug addicts are South African rather than foreign nationals. So, what's happening? Are they feeding our own brothers and sisters so that it can be easy for them to take over?" she says.
That rhetoric sounds familiar but not in a good way
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Operation Dudula was set-up in Soweto two years ago, the first group to formalise what had been sporadic waves of xenophobia-fuelled vigilante attacks in South Africa that date back to shortly after white-minority rule ended in 1994.
According to a 2022 report by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an independent research organisation based in the capital, Pretoria, there are about 3.95 million migrants in South Africa, making up 6.5% of the population, a figure in line with international norms.
Operation Dudula has ambitions to fill that vacuum and has now transformed itself from a local anti-migrant group into a national political party, stating its aims to contest next year's general election.
Zandile Dabula, who was voted in as president of Operation Dudula in June 2023, is calm, charismatic and emphatic about the group's message: "foreigners" are the root cause of South Africa's economic hardship.
A Nigerian market trader, who was the target of a raid by Operation Dudula members in Johannesburg earlier in the year, tells the BBC that the two women who tasered him and destroyed his clothes by throwing them in the gutter did not stop to ask questions.
Mr Lenkosi, also from Soweto and out of work, takes part in raids on migrant homes and workplaces, people who are suspected of anything from drug dealing to remaining in the country past their visa date.
The original article contains 1,583 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Lived in southern Africa for 6 months. Primarily Mozambique but I was in SA a little as well as Malawi. They're very racist, the Africans. My brother who was there as well was driving somewhere one day with a Mozambican, a good dude, and it came up that he wanted all the white people out of Mozambique. My brother is a red-headed white American. He questioned this Mozambican asking what about himself? "Oh, not you, we like you." Its just how they think about things, probably going back to all the colonization that happened and all the ills or perceived ills that came from that. And so it's easy to just keep going back to that idea as a society.
And for the record, they didn't just want all the white people out. They wanted the Chinese out as well. And there's tensions between the various tribes. Combine all that with low levels of education and extensive poverty and it's easy for charismatic leaders to come along and pump up these ideas and get movements going as people see hope in the promises even when the results are obviously going to be bad.
Then they should keep their own as well.
This sounds like a turbo retarded move