On 11 May 2008 parts of Alexandra, located in the north-eastern suburbs of Johannesburg, exploded into an orgy of xenophobic attacks against foreign Africans. The violence was concentrated in and around the area known as Beirut, the infamous territory around the hostels that witnessed some of the worst civil violence in the early 1990s. During those three or four days in May, two people in Alexandra (including one South African) were killed, at least 60 injured and hundreds were forcibly evicted from their homes by gangs of armed young men. Several women were raped. Two young men who evicted a Shangaan-speaking man painted the following chilling warning on his shack, which they had taken over:

This episode of xenophobic violence involved the poor fighting against the poor, even if only for the right to occupy a dilapidated shack. What brought about such utter desperation, and why in Alexandra?

Xenophobic violence seems completely incongruous with the history of Alexandra. After all, the township has a proud tradition of radical democratic politics dating back to the squatter movements and bus boycotts of the 1940s and the 1950s. Residents of the area struggled for decades against state efforts to remove the township forcibly as part of apartheid's racial restructuring of the urban areas, and won. In the 1980s residents of Alexandra played a leading role in the anti-apartheid movement and, in many respects, defined radical civic politics. It has also been a home to immigrants and migrants for nearly a century.

More recently, the township has been the site of an ambitious urban renewal project aimed at transforming the area through the provision of housing on a mass scale, creating jobs and generating local economic activity. To some extent, therefore, it is understandable that people have expressed surprise at the outbreak of xenophobic violence in Alexandra. But I argue below that there are important reasons to review these assumptions.

As the violence spread from Alexandra to engulf settlements across Gauteng, especially in Ekurhuleni, the authorities sought to blame criminals, a third force and political conspiracies. It is true that criminality is invariably present during political violence, and that criminal elements took advantage of the chaos in Alexandra to loot people's homes.