Southern Africa: Looking for answers to xenophobia's rise

Xenophobic attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa is generating a good deal of soul searching in a region that has shared much history, culture and strong informal economic ties - as well as hardships.

12 Jun 2008

How did it come to this? (Image: Tebogo Letsie/IRIN)

"Migration in southern Africa is a fact of our lives. I can say this is a part of our culture before colonialism, apartheid and after colonialism. We have to live with migration. There's no way we are going to stop the migration," Graca Machel, activist and wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela, said at a regional conference on xenophobia this week in the Mozambican capital of Maputo.

But Machel added a rider to her address at the gathering of civil society organisations that "Without solving the problem in Zimbabwe we won't solve this problem of xenophobia in the region."

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