XENOPHOBIA AND SCAPEGOATING: SOUTH AFRICA’S CYCLE OF DISPLACEMENT
More than 25,000 migrants left South Africa in the weeks before Tuesday’s marches, some fleeing in fear while their governments scrambled to evacuate nationals. Mozambique reported five of its citizens killed in anti-foreigner violence in May. Ghana said one of its nationals died on Monday, though South African officials have disputed these accounts. Thousands took to the streets on Tuesday, answering a call from campaign groups to march against migrants. The deadline they had set came and went.
The violence has been systematic. Migrants report being blocked from health and other essential services by groups including Operation Dudula and March & March. For people who have lived in South Africa for decades, who hold documentation, who are married to South African citizens, none of that has offered protection against intimidation and violence.
The scale of the migrant population itself remains contested. Official statistics place migrants at less than 5 percent of South Africa’s population, roughly 3 million people. Campaign groups claim the true number could be ten times higher, framing their focus as targeting illegal immigration. The gap between those figures matters, because it shapes how ordinary South Africans understand who their neighbors actually are.
Three decades ago, Nelson Mandela stood before an African National Congress rally and spoke of his sadness and anger at rising xenophobia. “We had a legacy of unity and solidarity here,” he said. “We are not victims to the influx of foreign people.” Since that moment, waves of anti-migrant violence have periodically torn through the country. The 2008 attacks killed at least 62 people. Now South Africa faces a new surge.
The frustration driving this movement is rooted in real hardship. Unemployment exceeds 40 percent. Inequality persists. Crime remains widespread. Public services strain under demand. Poorer South Africans, especially, have turned their anger toward migrants, blaming them for job losses, crime, and the collapse of health and education systems. Their anger at the state of the country is justified. Their diagnosis is not.
These are problems of South Africa’s own creation: the lingering devastation of apartheid, followed by corruption and mismanagement that have hollowed out institutions and opportunity. Yet xenophobic mobilization, according to researchers Jean Pierre Misago and Loren Landau of the Xenowatch monitoring platform, operates on a different level. It is “a political enterprise co-produced by vigilante groups and the state through acts of commission and omission,” including inadequate condemnation of violence.
By contrast, the political incentives are becoming clearer as municipal elections approach in November. Opposition politicians from ActionSA have argued that citizens must demand action against illegal migration. Associates of former president Jacob Zuma, whose uMkhonto we Sizwe party has attended March & March events, maintain links to the movement.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has attempted to navigate these pressures by launching enforcement actions against illegal migration while publicly opposing “fear, anger, hatred or violence.” The government has largely treated xenophobic harassment as a law-and-order matter rather than a crisis of national conscience. Moral clarity remains absent from the country’s leadership, even as grassroots voices occasionally break through.
The irony cuts deep. The anti-apartheid struggle was an African struggle, sustained by support from other nations and individuals across the continent. Now significant portions of South Africa’s population are pursuing the exclusion and oppression that their own generation fought to dismantle. The anger reverberates across Africa, damaging diplomacy and deterring the tourism, trade, and investment the country desperately needs. Forcing migrants out will not ease unemployment, inequality, or service failures. It will deepen them. The question South Africa has yet to answer is whether its leaders will say so plainly, before the next wave of violence makes the cost impossible to ignore.