Maybe he was just lucky, but Orebo told me he had not faced such prejudice. There was some rioting in Ratanda 2012, when he and other foreign shopkeepers were looted and closed their shops for a few days, but otherwise he felt welcome in the community. He married a local woman, and their three children were South African citizens. His business thrived, and he told me with pride that at one point he had three cars.
Spaza shops, where locals buy small daily household items like food, toiletries and cigarettes, have long been a battleground in the wars between South Africans and outsiders. Migrant groups, especially those from Somalia and Ethiopia, have thrived in this niche, giving rise to resentment from locals. After years of dodging such violence, Orebo ran out of luck in the fall of 2023.
A mob of anti-migrant activists — including, I was told, supporters of a group known as Operation Dudula — swarmed the township, blocking streets with flaming tires. They burned and looted shops owned by foreigners, including Orebo’s. He went to the township later that night to survey the damage and salvage what he could but was confronted by armed men.
“They came with a gun, and they shot at me,” Orebo told me. “But God saved me.”
Orebo is merely the latest in a centuries-long line of migrants who have made the country we now know as South Africa, which has seen wave upon wave of migration, with each shaping its culture, politics and language in profound ways. About 1,700 years ago, Bantu people from West and Central Africa migrated south, bringing farming and other innovations to lands that had been home to the nomadic Khoekhoe and San communities. Explorers from Europe arrived in the 15th century, followed by waves of white settlers, mostly from the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain. Thousands of enslaved people, stolen from East Africa and Asia, were forced to labor there.