What do the xenophobic attacks reveal about the health of South African society?

摘要

If we judge South African society by this measure, the brutal beatings, burnings and displacements of our emigrant communities over the past few weeks must suggest that we are still a sick society. Responsibility for the wave of xenophobia sweeping across South Africa has been laid at the feet of various factors and actors: criminal groups, our present and past governments for lack of service delivery, and institutions responsible for law and order.While there is certainly considerable truth in many of these perspectives, it is important that our response as health professionals to all epidemics (be they of violence or plague) should be determined by appraising all the aetiological evidence available from both upstream (root causes) and downstream factors. A useful starting point in elucidating the causes of this xenophobic pandemic is to map out the pattern of the violence. This could be broadly characterised as South Africans in poor communities attacking persons they defined as foreigners in a wave of violence that rapidly engulfed every province in the land.