THE man they called Mugza had come to Johannesburg in search of a job and dignity. Instead he was burnt alive in broad daylight on Sunday May 18. His only crime was being a foreigner competing for low-paid work in a city swept by hate and xenophobia. One week after lay Mugza in Johannesburg’s Germiston morgue, his hideously charred body unclaimed by friends or family. After 28 days he will be buried in a pauper’s grave. Mugza lived and died in Ramaphosa, a slum of 30,000 people located among ponds of toxic industrial effluent 10 miles east of the city. Patches of blackened sand and smouldering rubbish mark where the foreigners’ tin shacks once stood. They were all burnt out in the same weekend. Some refugees claim the dead man, a thirty-something Mozambican, had worked as a casual labourer on a nearby construction site.

He seemed very poor: he slept on a borrowed mattress and owned little but a duvet, some clothes and a picture book entitled Karoo Blossoms. A neighbour in the shanty town, a Zimbabwean refugee named Joseph Mugashi, said that trouble began a weekend before when a preacher began agitating against foreigners, whom he accused of stealing food from South African mouths. Mugashi’s tiny shop was attacked by a mob that held him at knifepoint while his shelves were ransacked. He fled.

Neighbours advised Mugza and his housemate to follow suit, but they decided to hang on. Over the next 36 hours, small groups of vigilantes roamed the warren of shanties, picking off foreigners one by one. On Sunday May 18, said a witness named Alfredo Tembe, a throng of locals, many “redeyed and reeking of liquor”, and armed with sticks and machetes, gathered at a crossroads where they skirmished with police and set fire to barricades.

Mugza and his housemate chose this moment to make a break for freedom. Witnesses say the two men ran for their lives, but it was too late. The mob hunted them down. The housemate was stabbed and knocked unconscious. Mugza was bludgeoned to his knees, his head dangling. A rioter took a blazing plank from a nearby bonfire and doused Mugza with paraffin. As he burst into flames, someone dumped his precious duvet on top of the pyre. In local parlance, Mugza had been “necklaced”.

Eventually, a hefty Boer policeman appeared with a fire extinguisher, but for Mugza the rescue came too late. Since the attacks began on May 11, at least 45 foreigners have been murdered and another 20,000 driven from their homes; incidents of racial hatred have spread nationwide. The South African Institute of Race Relations estimates there are five million immigrants, many of them forced to flee from Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe’s policies have impoverished the nation.

Observers blame the ineptitude of the African National Congress government for failing to tighten border controls. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Inkatha party leader, said every effort he had made to stop the flow had been blocked. “When the state becomes absent people see fit to take the law into their own hands,” he said.

Five thousand refugees from Ramaphosa, too terrified of their neighbours to stay, huddled in church halls in the nearby mixed-race suburb of Reiger Park. A man from Mozambique sat weeping. “How do I save my daughters?” he asked.

“They’ve no papers so we were turned back at the border and I’ve no money for a bribe.” Nearby stood some Zimbabweans who had heard that Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, was sending buses to take them home. But they dared not board a vehicle associated with Mugabe’s foe. “They will thrash us at the border,” said a young man. “They are vampires.”

At Park Station the refugees waited for trains to carry them to safety. “We give ourselves to God,” said a sadfaced man bound for Zimbabwe. “Here they are killing us. On that side there is just starvation. Only God knows how we will survive.”