JOHANNESBURG — Luc, a Congolese hairdresser, says that while he fears the wave of anti-foreigner attacks gripping South Africa, his main concern is fending off harassment from the people who are supposed to protect him: the police.
Luc, a wiry 38-year-old, said that every few weeks the police stop him on the street, ask for proof he's in the country legally, and often demand a 50 rand ($4) bribe if he doesn't have his paperwork with him. He asked that his surname not be published for fear of retaliation.
"If you forget your papers you must bribe the police," Luc said at a salon in Johannesburg's bustling Yeoville district where he works. "If not, they arrest you, and then you spend a night in jail."
Seven people have died in anti-immigrant attacks against foreigners in Johannesburg and the eastern coastal city of Durban this month. While similar violence flares regularly against township shopkeepers from other African countries, the past two weeks have been the worst in the country that bills itself the Rainbow Nation, since about 60 people were killed in 2008.
"There are a lot of people who are arrested with valid documents or who indicate at the time of arrest that they are asylum seekers," Roni Amit, a senior researcher at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand's African Centre for Migration & Society, said by phone. "Starting from when police approach you on the street, to when you're held in jail, at every step of the process, you may be able to buy your way out of it."
While Yeoville police conduct operations to find undocumented immigrants every three months or so, they've never received any complaints about harassment, the district's police spokesman, Thabo Malatji, said in an interview.
"In our area, we haven't experienced those kinds of incidents because the station management has adopted an open- door policy whereby every member of the community is welcome to the station and whenever they have got a complaint against the police, it gets reported and sent to relevant authorities for investigation," Malatji said.
The "excellent relationship" between police and foreigners was highlighted when immigrants sought refuge at police stations when they were under attack, Durban police spokesman Jay Naicker said Monday in an email.
South African police say they have arrested 307 people for public order-related violence in the past two weeks, and the authorities have promised to prosecute perpetrators. The government hasn't given details of any convictions.
Four people appeared in a Johannesburg court on Tuesday on charges of involvement in the murder of a Mozambican man on April 18 that newspapers photographed and published.
Some poor South Africans see immigrants as competitors for jobs and business opportunities in a country with a 24 percent unemployment rate and an economy hit by rolling power blackouts.
Africans have streamed into South Africa, the continent's most industrialized economy, in the search of jobs and safety from oppression in their home countries. South Africa's 2011 census shows there are 1.7 million foreigners in the country out of a population of 54 million.
Standing on a street corner among a group of men chatting and playing checkers in Johannesburg's Berea area, Emmanuel Ude, 29, scrolls through reports of attacks fellow Nigerians send to his phone via WhatsApp.
"At every point you're made to understand you're not South African," said Ude, a soccer player who originally came to South Africa on an exceptional skills visa. "It's just something you have to endure."
Since Luc moved to South Africa in 2007 for fear of persecution in his native Republic of Congo, where he supported the opposition, he's become used to his friends being taken to the Lindela Repatriation Centre. It's a place most migrants have heard of.
Migrants are often detained at Lindela, sometimes for longer than the legal 120-day limit before they should be deported if their stay in South Africa is illegal, according to Amit at the University of the Witwatersrand.
While President Jacob Zuma has condemned the violence as "shocking" and canceled a visit to Indonesia to deal with the crisis, the secretary-general of the ruling African National Congress, Gwede Mantashe, suggested last week the government set up refugee camps as a way of stemming the attacks.
"There is a lot of terrible sentiment," Wayne Ncube, who gives legal advice to refugees and migrants for the Johannesburg-based Lawyers for Human Rights group, said Monday by phone. "If you have multiple state organs that set the tone to the public that foreigners have no rights, it's no surprise that you have these on-going attacks."
— Lutho Mtongana contributed from Johannesburg.