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South African-born Dolly (9) was forced to flee to a Durban refugee camp when xenophobic attacks targeted her Mozambican single mother, Gloria. Dolly and Gloria speak from the camp. Watch the video above.
About Dolly and Gloria:
One night in April this year, Dolly, her single mother, Gloria Makwakwa, and two siblings, fled to the Chatsworth displacement camp in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal along with hundreds of other foreign nationals, after a spate of xenophobic attacks across the city.
Mozambican-born Gloria, now a hairdresser, came to South Africa as a young woman with no family links ‘back home’ after her parents died. Dolly was born in Durban in 2006.
Dolly has now lost weeks of schooling. She misses her friends and teachers terribly. Dolly like many of the other 300 children in the Chatsworh camp don’t understand xenophobia – but they bear the brunt all the same.
From Doctors Without Borders:
The Chatsworth camp, south of the coastal city of Durban, is currently home to 520 foreign nationals – mostly refugees and asylum seekers from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They were left behind after more than 3,000 Malawians alone, as well as several hundred Mozambicans and Zimbabweans were repatriated to their home countries.
Initially about 7,000 people sought refuge in three different displacement camps in Durban.
The Burundians and Congolese are now stuck in limbo: they cannot be repatriated to conflict zones they fled from but they don’t feel safe to re-integrate into communities that they fled from only weeks before.
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