Siphiwe Sibeko, who was born and raised in Soweto township, is a mostly self-taught photographer who joined Reuters in Johannesburg in 2005 after working for several leading South African newspapers. In the following story, he describes covering the anti-foreigner violence that has swept parts of South Africa.
By Siphiwe Sibeko
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - I only realized how serious theattacks were when I saw a photograph of a man being burnt alivein a township east of Johannesburg.
Having worked as a photographer in South Africa for morethan 10 years, I was no stranger to violence: I had seen angrypeople chanting slogans, blocking roads and destroyingproperty.
But burning a man alive was evil and barbaric, a flashbackto the worst violence under apartheid when opponents of thewhite minority government were shot and tortured by police andinformers were "necklaced" with burning tires.
That photograph of the burnt man was not mine, but in thefollowing days I came face-to-face with this new brutality asattacks on immigrants spread across Johannesburg and to othercities.
In one informal settlement, I found a badly beaten man whohad narrowly escaped being burnt. He was lying a few steps froma pile of partly burnt plastic and paper.
Residents said a mob tried to burn him but ran away whensome of the locals approached.
In the worst violence since the end of apartheid 14 yearsago, angry people stabbed, clubbed and burnt migrants fromother parts of Africa, accusing them of taking jobs andfuelling South Africa's notoriously high levels of crime.
At least 50 African migrants were killed and up to 100,000were forced to flee their homes. Thousands of immigrants fromMozambique and crisis-torn Zimbabwe returned home.
The outbreak started on May 11 in Johannesburg's Alexandratownship -- across the city from Soweto where I was born --before spreading through shantytowns and townships around thefinancial and industrial capital.
Then, the attacks spread down to Cape Town and east to theport city of Durban.
The explosion of deadly anger dealt a blow to theinternational image of a country that calls itself the "RainbowNation", making investors wonder just how stable Africa'sbiggest economy really was.
It surprised and disappointed me.
DANGER
On May 18, I received a call from a colleague who told meforeigners were being chased and beaten in centralJohannesburg.
This was just a day after I had returned from assignment inMalawi, where people are so humble, warm and happy to have avisitor from another country.
I grabbed my cameras and went to town.
When I arrived, I was amazed by the number of police whowere driving around, searching and arresting suspects.
I thought the trouble would pass, but I was wrong.
Later that day, after I had finished filing my pictures, Iwas shocked to see photos taken from other areas, includingthat picture of a man being burnt alive.
I decided to go to Reiger Park, an informal settlement eastof Johannesburg, and the place where the man was burnt.
When I got there, I saw hundreds of young men with sticks,knives, pangas (machetes) and spears, angrily shouting thatthey wanted all the foreigners out of South Africa.
I found the injured man who had nearly been burnt in frontof a shack.
I kept shooting pictures but then some people from the mobtold us they didn't want the media there. This happens most ofthe time when you try to take photographs in tense situationsin South Africa. But this time, it looked serious.
They came up to us, threatening us and wielding theirweapons. We could see the anger in their eyes.
We stopped taking pictures and only returned when wethought it was safe, sometimes going back in with the police.
But it was a difficult situation. The mob threw stones atthe photographers and the police occasionally fired shots todisperse the crowd.
I've covered violence before but this was bad. I wasdisappointed that my countrymen had turned against theirbrothers and sisters from countries that had helped us duringapartheid.
South Africa's government has been criticized for its slowreaction to the violence and for not addressing the povertythat is widely blamed for the bloodshed.
Last Sunday, President Thabo Mbeki called the wave ofattacks a "disgrace", and said the government would act firmlyto curb the bloodshed.
(For a slideshow:http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=1869&galleryName=All%20Collections#a=1
For an audio slideshow:http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2008/05/27/violence-in-south-africa-audio-slideshow/)
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say onthe top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)
