The tragedy angered local residents who attacked and looted the spaza and hounded out the shopkeeper, reportedly an Ethiopian national. Even the person who was renting out the premises fled in fear. While an autopsy revealed that a pesticide had caused the deaths, a link to the shop has not been officially established.

Six spazas were closed at Olievenhoutbosch outside the capital Pretoria last week for irregularities, municipal council official Sarah Mabotsa said. “They’re selling expired food, they’re selling skin products, they’re selling meat, everything is in one shop,” she charged.

As the continent’s most industrialised economy, South Africa is a prime destination for people seeking work even though its own unemployment rate is around 32 percent. The competition has triggered mistrust and even violence.

If authorities don’t step in, a xenophobic vigilante group known as Operation Dudula – which means “push back” in Zulu – often does.

Even politicians have made outright calls for all spaza shops to be run by South Africans.

The tragic wave of deaths of the young children has gripped South Africa, with speculation running wild in the absence of proven facts about what really caused their deaths. Some people believe that foreigners are deliberately setting out to poison South Africans; others say the outcry is a manufactured ploy to get the spazas and their profits back into the hands of locals.

Loren Landau, who studies migration at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said attacks against foreign-owned shops were "really about eliminating competition for business. “If you try to shut down South African businesses, people would protest,” he said. But “you can go after a foreigner, no one will protest.”