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JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — Just past midnight, more than a dozen men poured out of the two pickup trucks that pulled up outside of Carlos Mambosassa’s wooden shack in Khayelitsha Township, near Cape Town. Wakened by the loud knock on the door, he says, he faced them on his doorstep.

“They tell me: ‘You’re from Zimbabwe, you have to go back to your place. We don’t want to see you here anymore.’ I said: ‘Okay, let me get my things.’ They said, ‘No, leave everything. You go back like that.’ ”

The danger was clear as they manhandled Mambosassa out of his home into the cold South African winter. He headed to the highway to catch a ride with trucks travelling across the country to Johannesburg, where he now offers to carry bags at the bus station to earn the price of a ticket back to Zimbabwe.

Listen to the Radio Report on NPR, Aug. 14, 2010

Mambosassa is among a wave of foreigners who have been attacked, threatened or chased from their homes and businesses since the World Cup drew to a close two weeks ago.

Attacks on foreigners had been widely predicted, and now they’ve arrived, even if the violence is more muted than in previous such outbreaks.

The army and police moved into the informal settlement of Kya Sand north of Johannesburg this week to restore order after two nights of violence during which at least five foreigners were attacked, one with an axe.

The night before the July 11 World Cup final, Tanzanians Mohammed Pazzi and Abuu Hissa were attacked in their home in central Johannesburg by a knife-wielding neighbour.

Hissa says the attacker — who has been arrested and charged with assault — told them: “Take your things and go any place. Today, I beat you, you see. I hit you with the panga (large knife), but Monday I’m going to kill you.’ ”

African immigrants are fleeing for their lives in the wake of xenophobic violence and intimidation, fearing a resumption of the anti-foreigner attacks that left more than 60 people dead and thousands displaced in 2008.

“Ever since the day after the World Cup, it’s definitely been flaring up,” says Nantes Rykaart of Interactive Security, which set up camps for fleeing foreigners in 2008 and is preparing camps for victims of renewed violence now.

“Foreigners have been streaming out of the country.”

In border towns, the International Organisation for Migration has reported a rise in the number of Zimbabweans returning home with household items, such as beds and appliances, and the Zimbabwean government has stocked tents, blankets, soap and water in the event of a wider exodus.

The South African government has sent mixed messages however, recently re-establishing the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Xenophobia while denying its existence.

“For now there is no xenophobia,” said Nathi Mthethwa, the minister of police who heads the committee. “There are people being arrested (for criminal offences) and police will continue to arrest them.”

Police say the violence and looting are the work of “criminal opportunists” who are preying on fears of a fresh outbreak of violence. “It’s not xenophobic,” said National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele. “There are criminals called ‘xenophobic’ by the media, but they are criminals covered in a xenophobia skin.”

Organizations monitoring the violence say government officials regard the brewing violence with too little urgency. Loren Landau, director of the Forced Migration Studies Program at Witwatersrand University, says attacks on foreigners never stopped after 2008, but merely subsided and fell from the public’s imagination.

Most attacks on foreigners “are labelled as criminal violence and dismissed,” says Landau. “Now we are starting to realize that these are linked to something deeper, a broader pattern of xenophobia and violence that has gone unaddressed.

“Very little has been done to address either the root causes of poverty and inequality or the frustration behind 2008. All those things are still there. There’s no reason to think this violence shouldn’t happen again.”

Admitting the existence of a dark xenophobic underbelly could tarnish the progressive Rainbow Nation image that South Africa has struggled to build since the end of Apartheid.

“South Africa has prided itself globally on transcending differences among races, so the threat of xenophobia undermines that,” says Landau.

South Africans welcomed foreign fans during the World Cup, and after the early exit of the home Bafana Bafana team, rallied behind Ghana as the sole African squad to reach the quarter-finals.

Now that World Cup euphoria has worn off, it seems the patience of the country’s poor is wearing thin. Foreigners are blamed for taking locals’ jobs and accepting low wages that South Africans cannot — or will not — work for.

In the sprawling Johannesburg township of Alexandra — where the wave of xenophobic violence began in 2008 — locals complain they still lack proper housing and sanitation facilities.

Men between 25 and 50 stand idly on street corners or sit playing cards and board games in the middle of the day.

As he lines up bottle caps on the checkered morabaraba board, Victor Mbatha, who is unemployed, complains about foreigners to nodding heads and murmurs of agreement.

“The people from outside of this country, we don’t need them because they’re taking our jobs,” he says.

“We want them to go back to their countries. We hear the government say that if we beat them, they will arrest those people who are fighting. But we are not scared about that, because this is our country.”

Widespread poverty and an unemployment rate of more than 25 per cent persist 16 years into South Africa’s democracy, stoking the public anger that had temporarily cooled during the World Cup.

Says Landau: “The sense that things are not getting better for people, it’s natural — not necessarily forgivable — for people to look for scapegoats, to look for people who are from outside, who you can blame for the failings of government.”

While it’s the poor who carry out the attacks against foreigners and their properties, Landau says they are mobilized by businessmen and local political leaders.

“These leaders play on xenophobic sentiments to mobilize, sometimes adding to that some sort of bribery or payment to gangs, to help lead violence against outsiders,” he says.

Interactive Security’s Rykaart agrees that what is happening now is not random criminality.

“I think there’s a lot more going on,” he says. “It’s very well organized.”

After the 2008 attacks, the Forced Migration Studies program investigated 12 sites of violence in various parts of the country.

“In every one of those sites,” says Landau, “there was local leader, whether elected or unelected, or a local business cartel or set of local businessmen behind the violence.”

This time though, church groups, aid organizations and activists are mobilizing to prevent anti-immigrant violence from spreading.

The Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg has set up a helpdesk that takes calls reporting what Bishop Paul Verryn describes as “any prejudicial or negative behaviour.”

Human rights groups are working to install a hotline that can be linked with emergency services anywhere in the country.

“We’re certainly more organized in terms of trying to act pre-emptively to try to prevent, and to record,” says Verryn.

Authorities were blamed last time for not doing enough to prevent the violence or prosecute the killers: only two convictions followed the more than 60 murders, giving xenophobes the impression, critics say, that they could assail foreigners with impunity.

Rykaart sees the seeds of something bigger in the latest attacks. “This is exactly how 2008 started,” he says. “In various areas, you’d have the criminal elements which spark the same ways as this sparked and got out of control.”