Lindi opened the page in Vice News. The report was subtitled, with no voiceover from a reporter. What the raw video material lacked in finesse, it made up for with the sheer shock of what appeared on the screen. A mob gathered round a shack in a squatter camp. One of them, a bandana wrapped around his face, smashed the feeble door to the dwelling and threw a bottle of fuel through it before chucking in a burning rag. Worse than the act itself was the manifest glee on the faces of the mob as the camera turned to them.

‘Come out!’ shouted one man. ‘We are waiting for you.’

Another lifted his panga and ran his tongue over the edge of the blade.

‘Today we are going to taste Mozambican blood,’ he said.

In the background you could hear screams from the hut. The camera turned to show smoke billowing out from under the tin roof. After what seemed like an implausibly long time, a woman’s hand could be seen pushing a young girl, no more than ten years old, into the compound. She stood, blinking into the glare, shivering. She was motionless, paralysed with fear. A youth walked over to her, grabbed her hair and, as he pulled her away, said to the crowd, ‘Let her see what will happen when her father and mother come out.’

And they do. The mob surged past the camera, obscuring the view. You could see a flash of a panga blade as it was raised high in the air before it slashed down – again and again. The screaming, both from the victims and perpetrators, was animal, fear and hate unhinged from the conventions of civilised behaviour. A couple of minutes later, the sound of a police siren could be heard, getting louder as it approached the chaotic scene. One by one the mob dispersed. The child approached the corpses of her parents and sat down next to them. No tears. She seemed to be keeping watch. That’s what the police find when they arrive.

Lindi flicked back to Anton’s email.

All this must have been happening while we were sitting in Terminal Five having a coffee, Anton had written, as if the two things were somehow connected. An eyewitness to one attack, interviewed on the BBC World Service, had said the crowd had been screaming, ‘Where are the amakwerekwere, the foreigners, those filthy Mozambicans – where are the Mozambicans?’

This is bad [Anton had written]. There are tens of thousands of Mozambicans in SA, especially on those farms up there in Mpumalanga, and God knows how many other migrant workers from Zimbabwe and the other neighbouring countries. There are plenty of people who’ve been waiting for a chance like this to drive them out. You know as well as I do, xenophobia is not just a European thing.