By CELIA W. DUGGER


POLOKWANE, South Africa - Men in Westenburg Township went hunting for Zimbabweans. They prowled its dirt roads by the truckload as night fell recently, brandishing clubs and throwing stones.

At dawn that day, the body of Steven Hamilton, a 24-year-old local man, had been found near a tavern. In a flash, word spread that drunken Zimbabweans had stabbed him in the chest. By the time people returned home from work, the township had erupted. Men shouted for the Zimbabweans to be killed, or for them to go back where they came from.

Mike Mpofu, 34, a former high school art teacher from Zimbabwe who sells vegetables from a shed, saw the mob coming. Charneal Carelse, a South African teenager whose family had befriended Mr. Mpofu, happened to be walking by. “I told her, ‘There is war coming,’ ” he said. Charneal said she told him to hide in her house, and he took off.

In May 2008, South Africa’s image as a home to people of all races and nationalities took a hard knock as xenophobic violence leapt from city to city, victimizing poor Africans who had sought asylum and opportunity in the region’s richest country.

In the year and a half since, such attacks have flared periodically, but recent ones against Zimbabweans here, near South Africa’s northern border, and at its southern tip have brought the problem to the fore again.

Recently, South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, pleaded with his people to “embrace especially our African brothers and sisters, who usually bear the brunt of illtreatment more than foreigners from other continents.” Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and a South African, in December called attacks on foreigners in her homeland “gravely alarming.”

The police here in the capital of Limpopo Province gathered up Zimbabweans that terrifying night and took them to the old Peter Mokaba stadium for safekeeping. About 30 are still there, hanging their laundry in the shadow of a spectacular new stadium built for the 2010 World Cup, where South Africa hopes to showcase itself.

Thousands more Zimbabweans - many of them migrant farm workers and their families - were forcibly displaced from the community of De Doorns in Western Cape Province in a violent outburst in mid-November.

South Africa had hoped the 10- month-old truce between Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and the former opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, now prime minister, would stabilize Zimbabwe and slow an exodus in which millions have fled its poverty and repression in the past decade.

But hundreds of Zimbabweans a day still seek asylum in South Africa at the border town of Musina, about 200 kilometers north of Polokwane, and uncounted others cross into the country illegally, United Nations officials say.

“We don’t want Zimbabweans anymore,” said Roy Buys, as he mourned with his old friends Ronie and Stephaina Hamilton, parents of the young man whose murder set off the violence. “They kill our brothers, rape our sisters, break into our homes and take our jobs.”

Over the past decade, as Zimbabwean migrants have settled in Westenburg, they have picked up odd jobs and rented backyard hovels, working long hours at low pay. But resentments seethe beneath the surface of township life, particularly among idle young men who see the Zimbabweans working.

After the killing of Mr. Hamilton, himself a young man who his parents said had never held a regular job, the anger boiled over in violence.

“It was a release valve for the community’s frustrations,” said Larry Anderson, 64, a local ward committee member.


After a South African man was killed, a mob went on a rampage looking for Zimbabweans. / ROBIN HAMMOND FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES