The police in Johannesburg have arrested at least 110 people after rioters set fire to cars and buildings and looted shops, the latest outbreak of violence against African immigrants in South Africa’s largest city. At least one death was being investigated in connection with the chaos.

The violence on Monday night appeared to target shops owned by foreigners, said the mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, and follow a spate of similar riots this year that have been part of a larger trend of hostility toward outsiders.

Video and still images from the riots showed streets covered in debris and burned tires, with people carrying refrigerators and vending machines out of shops. Law enforcement officers have responded with rubber bullets and tear gas.

There are fewer than four million migrants in South Africa, a nation of more than 50 million. But attacks on foreign-owned shops have become regular occurrences that many have attributed to frustration with the country’s high unemployment rate, which sits at about 28 percent.

The most recent surge in violence, which began on Sunday, spurred an outpouring of anger both in and out of South Africa, though some officials sought to portray the violence as the product of criminals rather than a deeper antipathy toward outsiders.

The country’s police minister, Bheki Cele, said the violence was a result of “criminality rather than xenophobia,” adding that criminals were using intolerance as an “excuse” to loot.

The violence comes ahead of an October visit by President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria to South Africa, where he is set to meet with President Cyril Ramaphosa to discuss the rising tensions, including the violence against foreigners, among other issues.

On Monday, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, wrote on Twitter that he had received the “sickening and depressing news of continued burning and looting of Nigerian shops” in South Africa.

He blamed “mindless criminals” for the violence and said that the police in South Africa were failing to provide suitable protection.

Standing in front of charred rubble, Lerato Peete, a South African woman, told the Times, a local newspaper, that she was angry at her fellow citizens for attacking their African “brothers and sisters.”

“I am so ashamed to be South African on this day,” she said. “How is it possible that a black person can be a foreigner in Africa? My mom was an activist, my father was an activist. I was born out of South Africa because we didn’t have a place to call our own.”

One man, a car dealership owner named Abdallah Salajee, said he had lost property worth at least two million rand, about $130,000. Another, Obinna Henry, a Nigerian mechanic, told the Times of South Africa that he had lost “a safety guarantee in this country.”

A recent report by the African Center for Migration & Society, which has monitored attacks on foreigners in South Africa since 1994, using news articles and information from victims and activists, called xenophobic violence a “longstanding feature in post-Apartheid South Africa.”

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