Johannesburg - The hundred or so mostly illegal migrants standing in a semicircle around the Home Affairs official at Cleveland police station could hardly believe their ears.
A police officer walks past a burning vehicle during ongoing xenophobia attacks in Ramaphosa squatter camp east of Johannesburg, South Africa, 20 May 2008. An estimated 23 people have died with hundreds injured and thousands displaced after a week of violent attacks on foreign nationals. EPA/KIM LUDBROOK
They were begging to be deported from South Africa - back to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo or other African countries. But the government was having none of it.
'You came to South Africa not through the border (illegally)?' Emma Ramokhele, of the Counter Xenophobic Unit in the Home Affairs department, submitted.
'Yes,' they chorused.
'You want to go back home because you are frustrated?' she asked rhetorically.
'Yes,' they roared.
'What has happened to you is bad, it's inhuman,' said the official, wearing khakis and a green luminous vest marked 'ensuring human rights for all' for her visit to the trenches. 'But we are not able to send anyone back home now.'
A few months ago, South Africa would have been delighted to hasten the return of some of the millions of African migrants that have poured across its borders in recent years, most of them Zimbabweans fleeing their country's economic disintegration.
But to carry out mass deportations now would be to hand victory to the mobs that have chased nearly 10,000 African migrants from their homes over the past nine days, killing 23 people and injuring hundreds.
In that week, more than one practice has been turned on its head.
Before May 11 the police were the last people illegal migrants would have turned to for protection, given their penchant for harassing illegals and hitting them up for bribes.
Today Cleveland police station, and several others around Johannesburg, are doubling up as refugee camps.
Two big tents have been erected on a piece of lawn behind the station for the around 600 migrants that fled there since Saturday with little more than the clothes on their back.
This depressed suburb of small red-brick houses, a squatter camp and a workers hostel, saw some of the worst violence.
Five people were killed, two burnt and three beaten to death, as men with clubs went door to door, ordering foreigners to 'voetsek' (get lost).
'They said: 'Go home. We are not finding our jobs because of you.' We told them we couldn't because of the situation in Zimbabwe but they had no pity,' said Delight Dengu from Harare, who was being treated by the Red Cross for cuts sustained when she jumped a barbed wire fence to escape attack.
In the scramble she dropped her wallet. With the 2,000 rand inside, the young widow had planned to buy food for the four children she left behind in Zimbabwe when she jumped the border to South Africa last year.
For many South Africans the violence that began in Alexandra township north-east of Johannesburg on May 11 with residents accusing immigrants of taking their jobs, houses and women brought back memories of factional fighting in townships in the early 1990s.
Police and photographers looked on in horror Sunday as a man was gutted by flames in Reiger Park suburb after being beaten and set alight - an act veteran activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu compared to an apartheid-era 'necklacing' (placing a burning tire around the neck of an alleged informer).
'These are our sisters and brothers. Please, please stop,' Tutu implored Monday, recalling the hospitality enjoyed by South African refugees in neighbouring countries during apartheid.
But such appeals for brotherly love have fallen on deaf ears in poor communities, where the influx of migrants has created unwelcome competition for jobs and resources.
A decade of healthy growth has failed to dent unemployment, estimated conservatively at 23 per cent and millions still live in shacks.
Frustration at the slow pace of progress frequently erupts in riots over housing and basic services, but increasingly in anti-foreigner attacks. The last week's attacks are just the tipping point.
Opposition parties have called for the establishment of refugee camps to manage the influx of Zimbabwean migrants. But to give Zimbabweans refugee status would be to admit there was a crisis in Zimbabwe, blushes that South African President Thabo Mbeki wishes to spare his ally Mugabe.
Anxious to limit bad press internationally the government has labelled the violence as mostly the work of criminals while muttering about the work of an unknown 'third force.'
None too reassured, many migrants want out.
'We want to go home to fight Mugabe because that at least is a monster we know,' one Zimbabwean man says in Cleveland.
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