The horrific nature of unprovoked attacks on poor people purely on the basis of their nationality makes dispassionate sociological analysis difficult. Nevertheless, despite the emotion, fear and anger at society's descent into barbarism, we need to step back and ask the sober questions: ‘Why?’ ‘What is happening?’

There is, of course, a range of causal factors at play here. These require detailed investigation to isolate the precise triggers for each flare-up in the different parts of the country. A simple focus on ‘xenophobia’ as an issue of ‘identity’ (‘South Africans hate foreigners’ or ‘South Africans hate African foreigners’) is misleading. A sociological approach immediately subjects the notion of identity to an examination of its complex social determinants. More often than not, inter-related factors of socioeconomic class, power and access to resources come to the fore.

I argue that in these flare-ups, where poor people viciously attacked other poor people, class inequality as a systemic problem of uneven development (abundance/scarcity, wealth/ poverty, stuffed/starved, insider/outsider, power/powerlessness, empowerment/disempowerment) lay at the root of the violence.

In other words, our post-apartheid ‘national democratic revolution’, despite its redistributive discourse (‘the people shall share’), has unleashed a socio-economic system of market violence against the majority of the population, in line with global so-called ‘best practice’. The victims of this violence, unable to recognise or reach the real perpetrators or beneficiaries of this violence, have, as often happens, lashed out at those closest to them. Whereas in other instances this might have taken a gendered form (men beating their wives), or an ethnic form (socalled ‘tribal clashes’), in this instance the convenient scapegoats were easily recognisable foreign nationals – particularly those with houses, jobs or small businesses.

In the midst of this uprising, ‘criminals’, as a recent report suggests, stepped in to loot, and may have been behind copycat flare-ups that spread around the country. Of course the ‘criminals’ themselves are the products of marginality; victims of the systemic violence who have learnt the law of the jungle, where the only morality is survival at all costs.

While researchers quibble over whether the pervasive blight of poverty has marginally decreased or increased since 1994, noone disputes that inequality continues to increase at an alarming rate. Rising inequality breeds perverse cultures of entitlement and experiences of relative deprivation, which lie at the root of social instability.