The brutal death of Emmanuel Sithole As told by Beauregard Tromp and James Oatway for Timeslive.co.za
Shortly before 7am yesterday April 18th, Sunday Times journalists were in Alexandra township, near Sandton, speaking to shop owners who had their businesses looted overnight. Children played, people walked the streets, some stopped to gawk at the carnage from the night before. Then this happened ...
In a gutter in Alexandra a Mozambican man stopped and lay down. The gash to his chest meant he could go no further.
At the day clinic less than 100m away they could not help him. The doctor scheduled to be on duty did not show up because he was a foreigner and feared being a victim of xenophobia.
It began on Friday night when mobs blockaded Arkwright Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Alexandra, with rubble and burning tyres. Foreign-owned shops' roofs were ripped open and metal gates torn away as looters went on the rampage.
Outside one spaza shop, a man in a black corduroy jacket and red shirt was walking along the road.
Suddenly a young man dressed in a grey tracksuit jacket beat him over the head with a wrench. The red-shirt man tried to fend off the blows, his arms raised. He stumbled back, falling into rubbish strewn by the roadside. The blows with the wrench rained down. Then the bludgeoning stopped and the man with the wrench moved away.
"Are we safe here?" asked a South African woman watching the attack.
The man in the red shirt got up. Now another man with a beige spottie approached, holding an okapi knife high above his head. Again, the man in the red shirt raised his hands, pleading for mercy. But his pleas were in vain. He was stabbed ... again and again.
Credit:lazywrita.com/
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