He referred to the events of July 12 as a “massacre.”Īll in all, 30 were shot dead. “We are concerned about the potential outbreak of racial tension going forward,” Sihle Zikalala, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal, the province where Phoenix is located, said at the same news conference. People were “butchered with bush knives,” Cele said. Shots were fired, people spread out and recriminations took place across Phoenix and adjacent settlements. Tensions quickly rose, and people on both sides brought weapons to the checkpoints. “Problems started when people at checkpoints turned to vigilantism and started racially profiling people, preventing them entry into the suburb,” Cele said at a news conference Tuesday, adding that the targets were “mainly African people.” Cele did not explain why so few police were available to intervene, leaving an opening for vigilantism. On July 12, days before President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered the deployment of thousands of reserve soldiers to the area, Phoenix residents began setting up checkpoints, according to Bheki Cele, the country’s top police official. Nearly a month after the violence, South Africa’s police have come forward with a clearer picture of what transpired. Hundreds of people were injured in the days of violence, including the sister of 21-year-old Zinhle Maboja, right. “Then they accused us of being part of the group of people who had been looting and started beating us.” “We came across a group of Indian men who told us that we could not pass there and turned us away,” he recalled on a recent day at home. Shwuaka and his friends were stopped by one of these groups, he said. Interspersed with such footage were interviews with mostly White and Indian men in relatively affluent neighborhoods who said they had armed themselves in case the looters came for their homes. The television news had been broadcasting live shots of mostly Black crowds streaming out of department stores and warehouses with whatever they could grab. The wave of looting that swept across the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, two of South Africa’s biggest cities, had already been raging for days when Thuto Shwuaka, 18, and friends decided to gather for a pickup soccer game on an empty field in Phoenix, whose population of around 200,000 is mostly descended from South Asians brought to South Africa more than 100 years ago by the British colonial government as farm and railroad laborers. The township of Zwelisha can be seen in the distance from a street in the Durban suburb of Phoenix on July 29. The country may have christened itself the Rainbow Nation, but high walls of income and opportunity still divide each of its stripes. The answer, most thought, was rooted in South Africa’s failure to truly heal the divides of apartheid. All wondered the same thing: How had it unraveled so suddenly? Decades of work had been put into building a peaceful coexistence.

Interviews with nearly two dozen people - including victims, their family members, community leaders, politicians, business owners and others - were laced with disbelief. Most of the dead were Black this time, and most of the suspected killers were Indian, the country’s police chief said this week. Last month, another 36 years after the last riots, Phoenix and surrounding towns ignited once again.Īmid a week-long bout of looting, arson and clashes that saw at least 342 killed across two South African provinces, 36 were killed in this patchwork of poor Black townships and more developed “Indian” suburbs that had been coexisting peacefully, though unequally. PHOENIX, South Africa - Thirty-six years separated the infamous race riots of 19 in this area, when people of African and South Asian descent - pitted against one another at the bottom rungs of the apartheid system - killed each other in a bubbling over of resentment.

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