Any demographer wishing to chart migration patterns in post-apartheid South Africa faces an acute dilemma: either use fairly precise but misleading official statistics or base deductions on unofficial and therefore imprecise figures.
Official data point to a steady loss of skilled people. Since 1994, the year in which the African National Congress came to power, emigration has been running ahead of immigration, resulting in an annual loss of more than 4,200 South Africans, according to Statistics South Africa.
There is another side to the picture depicted by unofficial statistics. It takes account of the vast number of illegal immigrants or, as Human Rights Watch prefers to call them, undocumented immigrants.
The actual number of unlawful immigrants is impossible to quantify. The Human Science Research Council puts the figure at between 2.4 million and four million, while the South African Police Service reckons the number to be eight million.
These undocumented immigrants are mainly people from African countries to the north, attracted to the new South Africa by tales of its fabulous wealth. These immigrants are mainly people without formal professional or educational qualifications, although many of them are hard-working and disciplined people. But, unfortunately, they have aroused a disturbing level of hostility, both from the police and from many of their racial kinsmen in South Africa.
Police have been accused by South African journalists of conducting raids in search of unlawful immigrants that are reminiscent of the "pass raids" carried out by apartheid police against black South Africans residing in proscribed areas. People vulnerable to arrest by police include those with darker skins than South Africa's indigenous blacks and whose pronunciation of English or local languages is unusual.
But foreign blacks are also resented by a growing number of black South Africans as competitors for social welfare and employment - and from time to time, the hostility towards them spills over into murderous hate. One incident that stands out is the September 1998 episode when members of the "Unemployed Masses of SA", returning from a protest march in Pretoria, attacked and killed three foreign blacks travelling on the train with them.
The comments of Dapo Otewole, a Nigerian national working in Pretoria, on a police video shown on television late last year are apposite. The video shows police laughingly releasing their dogs to hunt down three terrified foreign blacks. The video shocked South Africans, black and white. But Otewole states: "The kind of brutality shown in the video is nothing new to foreign African nationals."
Series concluded
