It is striking how great is the disconnect between popular and elite ‘common sense’ on the matter of ‘foreigners’. This xenophobia really is coming up from below – it is profoundly democratic, albeit in the majoritarian-popular sense rather than the liberal-constitutionalist one. The bottom-up character is confirmed by surveys, focus groups and other gauges. It is anyway obvious from, say, watching the huge and sceptical crowd that greeted Zuma during his firefighting trip to the East Rand town of Ekurhuleni or listening, as one cannot avoid doing in this country, to radio talk shows. ‘They’ – the urban poor – thus occupy a different universe of meaning to ‘us’ – people who subscribe to internationalist ideologies and enjoy some insulation from daily struggles for material survival.

Xenophobic violence is not coming from the elites – from neither the major parties nor major organised civil society actors, neither the Zuma faction nor the Mbeki one. In fact organisations claiming to be tribunes of the masses, like the Congress of South African Trade Unions, have proven out of touch with the popular pulse on this issue, failing to see recent events coming. (The one partial exception, it seems, is the South African National Civic Organisation, whose xenophobic utterances suggest that it is surprisingly ‘grounded’ in the poor despite frequently being written off as a ghost formation.)

The country's leaders may bear indirect responsibility through policy failure and acts of commission, but I see no evidence that the marauding crowds are taking their cue from government immigration policy or from corrupt cops who extort bribes from immigrants. We do not have the active anti-xenophobic leadership that we need, but at least there is no Jean-Marie Le Pen or Joerg Haider or Patrick Buchanan mobilising anti-immigrant grievance, at least not at national level. Or – to take examples closer to home (if we can still say that about Africa) – we do not have leading politicians manipulating anti-foreigner sentiment as they have recently done, with calamitous consequences, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ivory Coast. This matters: the absence of elite encouragement may be all that separates what has happened here from what happened in Rwanda.