Struggle for Meagre Resources Fuels Terror in the Townships

Tensions between South Africans and migrant workers have been brewing for some time in Johannesburg's townships.

Nowhere was this more palpable than in places such as Tembisa, Alexandra and Thembelihle. Five years ago, these townships were far away from the luxuries of South Africa's most famous township, Soweto. Thembelihle, to the south-west of the city, had no paved roads, sanitation or regular electricity. And it wasn't about to get any.

It was a sprawling mass of shacks that housed 5,000 people in homes made from recycled bricks and rusting corrugated iron. Even so, some householders maintained well kept gardens, with fruit trees in blossom.

In 2002, it had been the target of forced evictions, still a sharp reminder of the hard tactics of the apartheid government.

But residents were suspicious of the motivation of the council who claimed the dolomite under the township threatened to swallow whole some of the rickety shacks.

The reason for the paranoia lived next door in the township of Lenasia, an Indian settlement which has been home to Johannesburg's relatively prosperous Asian residents â€" most of them descendants of workers introduced to South Africa by the British in the 19th century.

Most of the councilors were Asian, not black, and recent evictions to make way for a new supermarket only fueled the flames of suspicion that their Asian neighbors did not want a scruffy township on their doorstep.

Such local rivalry extended to a lack of warmth for more recent migrant workers.

Township residents across Johannesburg would point to apartheid-era concrete blocks and explain that these housed people even worse off than themselves: guest workers or illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Even as the Zimbabwean crisis began to escalate at the beginning of the decade, the South African authorities may have thought they were doing their Zimbabwean neighbors a favor by turning a blind eye to this sudden influx of immigrants.

But they were flooding into the poorest places where the little that South African townships had to offer â€" work and access to healthcare or resources â€" was not always shared willingly.