The shop is painted glowing red, making it hard not to notice. Large white curved letters spelling Coca-Cola stretch across its walls, accompanied by giant silhouettes of the soft-drink company's iconic glass bottle. The message ‘All pre-paid airtime’ is written next to one of the Coca-Cola signs in a similar font. ‘That's one of their shops,’ a Kraaifontein police officer points out to me. He slows down his patrol car next to the shop and I take a quick photograph with my camera.

A police sector manager in Philippi East is also eager to point out businesses owned by local ‘big bosses’ in the area. One is a liquor store containing an ATM with large shiny billboards outside advertising Castle Lager, Windhoek Draught and Hunters. He then drives me past a butchery and a neatly painted spaza shop around the corner. These are the businesses belonging to local ringleaders, he informs me.

A few days earlier, while seated in his dimly lit small office at Philippi East police station, he had given me the rundown on crime affecting foreign traders in the area. The informal and densely populated settlements of Pola Park and Never Never had never experienced attacks. ‘They do not have any foreign shops,’ he said. He described the Philippi neighbourhood of Marcus Garvey, originally established as a Rastafarian commune, as ‘mixed race’ with ‘coloureds, blacks, whites and Rastas’, which made the area ‘more accepting’. But in Lower Crossroads crime was ‘worse because there are big bosses’. He went on to explain: ‘There are big shops in Lower Crossroads. Some people own one, two or five shops, such as bottle stores and taverns.’ When conflicts arose ‘they organise the little shops’. This took me by surprise. I had until then assumed that the instigators were small and rudimentary business owners buckling under the competition new foreign entrants posed.

Demands for the removal of foreign-owned spaza shops in Philippi East were primarily being voiced by larger businesses, a police detective told me. ‘The bigger spazas are the ones most angry because it's easier for them to determine if they are losing customers.’ Smaller shopkeepers in the area had for the most part rented out their premises to foreigners because ‘if you rent out you get more’. A Kraaifontein police investigator's narrative was the same.