Lacking any and all background information about South Africa in particular and Africa in general, this is shocking. It also aligns with a script the West seems to follow all over the so-called developed world. In the US, Canada, and many parts of Europe - increasingly the most northern European countries, migrants come in, local whites respond with a range of anti-social behaviors, from white-racist political parties, referenda to throw out nonwhite foreigners, and, yes, bloodletting by "mobs". So these stories from South Africa, framed as they are, digest easily to the Western mind.
But it's all in what the camera frame shows you.
Since the official end of apartheid, Black South Africans have not made any advances despite the country's continued rising wealth. It is this form of State violence - institutional impoverishment and preservation of "order" - that the BBC and the Guardian UK do not cover. The ANC leadership made a deal for the sake of peace and prosperity to end its militant struggle, get apartheid dismantled, open the State to multiparty elections.
The deal allowed whites continued control of the economy and armed forces. This was ostensibly to give South Africa the best of both worlds: open democracy and no white capital flight out of the banks, a Black African electorate with a white establishment.
But this effectively meant that while elections were open to all South Africans, the economy was not. Black South Africans have the vote but continue to be treated as economic refugees in the home of their ancestors. And such is the case in all the most favored African States - favored that is by the UK, France, Spain, and the US, where the economies serve Western interests and the indigenous people of these States continue to be squeezed to death: this is why these Africans - who the BBC stupidly calls "foreigners" - are fleeing across the Mediterranean to the north, or to South Africa to the south.
Why doesn't the BBC, the Guardian, among other Western papers, cover the extent of failed States across the continent, which are fully supported by Western governments? At most, these news organizations will mock the governments, the presidents for life, the nepotism, but they will never, ever say who this corruption serves. You will never see how these Western-armed, African-led failed-states murder democracy and trades-union activists, using weapons supplied by the UK, France, and the US. These disasters are just sort of presented as natural phenomena.
The one exception to this, I think was reported without any context, when the ANC government of South Africa was shown to be massacring striking coal miners. I do not think it was clarified who owned and profited from these mines and lost profits from the strike - that being the white establishment of the apartheid era.
The ANC government of South Africa has become no better, and just as bad, as any failed State on the continent: and this is exactly the success that the West wants. The people are the threat and if their movements cannot be liquidated, then liquidate the people.
This is the model favored by the West, not popular, grassroots, indigenous movements.
The BBC, the Guardian, and others have not done much coverage of the radicalized movements splintering off from the ANC, like the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, formerly of the ANC Youth Brigade, from which he was expelled. Malema and the EFF aren't out hunting "foreigners" for bloodsport so the Western news doesn't cover this next stage of South African democratic progressions. Guaranteed were the EFF out shooting other Africans, you would know who Malema was.
So there is a violence on the screen, and it is horrific. But kept out of the camera's angle are the real weapons of death, systems of plunder, and starvation that target the African peoples. It is like a Roman circus, but all you get to see are the slaves in the arena feeding off each other, but you do not see the armed guards circling the arena and the morsels thrown at them by the Roman citizenry. This has been sanitized for your continued ignorance.
This is why I found the BBC line that the South African government was directing police to protect "foreigners" not very funny. The foreigners it is actually protecting are not the ones from Zimbabwe or Malawi. It is a class of thieves.
The camera won't show you who the real foreigners are. Robert Mugabe got it right when he told white squatters on stolen land to "Go back to England."
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