South African journalist Sakhiseni Nxumalo was
reporting
on an anti-migrant march, which turned into a deadly attack on foreign nationals, when he himself became a target because of his dark skin. He is one of at least 15 journalists targeted in South Africa in recent months, CPJ’s reporting found.
Nxumalo, who works for the digital outlet News 24, told CPJ that he was threatened while filming a Zimbabwean man, whose head was bleeding after being attacked, in the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg on June 19.
“One of the protesters saw me taking the video and said, ‘If you are filming, we are going to kill you,’” Nxumalo said, adding that the protesters wanted to delete the footage from his phone.
“Because I am dark in complexion, others started to say I was a foreigner … They asked me who I was, they asked for my [identity] documents, and they asked these questions in Zulu, and I responded in Zulu. By this time, there were about 20 of them,” he said.
Nxumalo said the protesters pushed him and tried to grab his phone, but he resisted, and the assailants eventually switched their attention to another journalist with a camera, whose memory card they seized.
A 29-year-old Malawian father,
Mishack Banda
, was
killed
in that attack and his brother injured. Two Mozambicans were
killed
a few weeks earlier and dozens of other foreign nationals have been
assaulted
over the past few months. Such violence has raised
fears
of further unrest with the approach of Tuesday’s deadline, set by the
March and March
(M&M) anti-migrant movement, for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa, which at least two opposition parties in Parliament have since backed.
Anti-migrant sentiment is
rising
, with protest groups mobilizing support by blaming undocumented foreigners for high unemployment, strained public services, and crime, ahead of local elections on November 4. Scores of people have been
killed
in earlier waves of xenophobic violence in South Afric
… [more]
