Authorities there have sought to assure foreigners that they were safe, but a local vigilante group, Alex Bona Fides, says the outsiders were given enough notice and it was time for them to vacate.
Foreigners were given yesterday as the deadline for vacating the premises, with South Africans claiming they had been given offer letters but failed to get houses, as these had been allocated to outsiders.
However, the foreigners got a temporary reprieve after leaders of the vigilante group said they would now challenge ownership of the government houses in court and report to the residents next week.
This prompted the restive crowd to demand immediate action, but Alex Bona Fide leaders, probably fearing arrest, called off the planned march.
As early as 10am yesterday, more than 600 people had gathered at a stadium in the township with a view to take an audit of who had been allocated government houses, raising fears that this could ignite xenophobic violence on the scale of the 2008 attacks that gripped the southern African nation.
Authorities said they were monitoring the situation carefully and hoped to avoid a riot, considering that Alexander was one of the epicentres of the 2008 wildcat xenophobic attacks.
Alex Bona Fides yesterday insisted that the evictions were not xenophobic, but rather they were repossessing government houses from undeserving people and handing them out to South Africans, the rightful owners.
Police yesterday morning on the other hand insisted that a planned march to the government houses was illegal, but an expectant crowd was willing to walk to the houses and evict foreigners.
