In April, South Africa was a hotbed of xenophobic attacks, where locals targeted African immigrants in the country’s major cities of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. At the end of the chaos at least seven people were dead and thousands others displaced from their homes.

This was not the first time Africa’s second largest economy was witnessing such attacks. In 2008, a similar wave of violence killed over 60 people and left a shocked world in its wake.

Nearly 500 people were arrested in both cases, but as fate would have it not a single person was convicted for the attacks, even those caught on camera stabbing Emmanuel Sithole, a Mozambique  citizen.

For many African immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and other nations, the end of the violence gave them an opportunity to return to their countries, but some still remained, but are now living in fear that they could be attacked again.

“I’m really worried about what happened, but we have been told by the government that the police ill protect us,” Irene Karizza, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo who decided to stay told PBS News Hour. She says she was attacked recently when she went to the market.

“What’s going to guarantee me that if I go there it’s not going to happen again? If they saved my life two times, what about the third one? Maybe I would die,” Kabanga Kaji, another immigrant who has not yet left the temporary shelter set up by the South African government, told PBS News Hour.