In South Africa, the past is not yet done with us. For two weeks in July 2021, South Africa was on fire. KwaZulu-Natal province and certain parts of Gauteng saw untold damage, food shortages in certain areas and a level of disaster that has left most in the country speechless. The fire was ostensibly triggered by corrupt ex-President Jacob Zuma being sentenced to jail time, but there is never only one reason for collective anger. It was also connected to the measures to curb the deadly COVID-19  and how these exacerbated already fraught socio-economic dynamics in the country. On a micro-level, thinly veiled antagonisms  between the rich and the poor, between Black and Indian South Africans have come to the surface, yet again.

My world is in Durban. I live in Johannesburg, but like many KwaZulu-Natal transplants, my family lives in the coastal province, in working class areas that saw gun fights, fires, food shortages and death in mid-July. As family group Whatsapps urgently pinged in—some containing recycled images and footage from previous moments of disaster, others sharing resources about which neighbor or mosque is distributing bread—feelings of precarity have come to the surface for many Indian South Africans in KwaZulu-Natal. The messages have gone from fear and worry over shops, malls and markets looted to fears about petrol bombs being thrown into yards, increased home robberies and strangers with pangas driving through different units shouting “wake up motherfuckers.”

There is video footage of Indian South Africans in working-class towns like Phoenix assaulting and killing Black people.

Sandile Ntuli lives in Phoenix with his aunt and uncle. On July 12, Ntuli and a friend went to find petrol. They knew that with violence and looting would come food and fuel shortages. That evening, they went to the local Total garage (gas station), only to find it closed. A short while later, they met a friend on the road, also in search of fuel. The friends drove in convoy to a Shell garage in the area but the road was barricaded. Ntuli was let through, but his friend in the car behind him was stopped, and the armed Indian vigilantes manning the barricade started assaulting him. Ntuli knew some of the attackers and shouted “Hey, everyone knows us. We all went to school together!” That is when the bullets started flying. Ntuli was shot in the leg as his friend drove them to safety.

On that same evening, another Phoenix resident, 19-year-old aspiring photographer Sanele Mngomezulu, was coming back home after taking part in the widespread looting. The Quantum taxi van he was in was met with a hail of bullets, as an Indian neighborhood watch group opened fire on the vehicle. All the people in the taxi fled but one person was shot and killed in the attack—Mngomezulu. His murderers torched the vehicle and left his body on Trenance Park Road in Phoenix. His mother Thokozani Ntwenhle Mhlongo mourned his death at her birthday in early August, wondering about the exact circumstances of her son’s murder, with justice seeming a far-off prospect. “They keep speaking about property, but my son was looted,” said Mhlongo. “I just want justice for my son.”

Other Black people in Phoenix, Chatsworth and other so-called Indian areas faced similar racial profiling, thuggery and murder at the hands of their Indian neighbors, ex-school friends and employers. Police Commissioner Bheki Cele released an official count of those who were killed in Phoenix. The state noted that 36 people died in and around Phoenix, however, those like Sanele Mngomezulu are not on this official list. In total, the media reports that 342 people across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng died in the unrest.

As the dust settles and the state narrative of “rebuilding” is parroted by ward councillors and residents alike, there are still no coherent narratives about what happened in Phoenix. What we do know is that Black South Africans were killed, many by Indian South Africans. How do we make sense of these acts of violence, motivated by anti-black racism and others whose motivations are still obscured by the event itself?

Indian South Africans occupy a liminal place in South Africa as an early racialized insider-outsider. To understand how they came to attack Black South Africans in 2021, it is important to understand the feelings of physical and existential vulnerability that have shaped Indians’ experiences since their arrival first as slaves in the years after 1652 in the Cape of Good Hope (many from this migration have formed part of creolized communities racialized as Coloured), and then as indentured laborers in the 19th century. While the chaos of July may have felt new to some, the roots of the present-day conflict lie in that history, and most specifically with the events of 1949.