Thousands Flee South Africa as Xenophobic Violence Surges Against African Migrants

Four people are dead. Thousands more have abandoned their homes, sleeping on streets to escape mob attacks. Across South Africa in recent weeks, a campaign targeting African immigrants has torn through communities with a ferocity that has sent tens of thousands of Malawians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, and Zimbabweans fleeing toward repatriation flights home, leaving behind what many once believed was a place of genuine opportunity.

The movement’s slogan is “Abahambe.” It means “They must go.”

Additional reference context is available at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jul/08/how-did-south-africa-produce-an-anti-african-movement.

What makes this moment different from previous waves of xenophobic violence is not only the body count. The campaign is well-funded, has received mainstream media coverage, and has drawn direct engagement from government leadership. President Cyril Ramaphosa met and shook hands with protest leaders last week, while urging demonstrators to act peacefully. That combination, organized, financed, and state-acknowledged, marks something new in the post-apartheid era.

Fezokuhle Mthonti, a cultural historian and writer based in Johannesburg, is unambiguous about the shift. “This is a new moment,” she says. She frames the current violence as fundamentally different from the xenophobic riots dating back to 2008, when 703 people were killed in such incidents since apartheid’s end. The organized nature of the campaign, she argues, represents a rupture in how xenophobia operates in contemporary South Africa.

To understand how this moment emerged requires looking at the fragile foundations of South African national identity itself. Black South Africans became citizens only in 1994, yet that citizenship has never felt fully secure, particularly for poor and rural populations. The promises of post-apartheid transformation have largely failed to materialize for those communities. When global economic crises strike, Mthonti observes, societies turn toward fascism, conservative values, and scapegoating politics. In South Africa, that turn cuts deeper because of the country’s particular history and the resulting precarity of national belonging.

The violence reflects something more intimate than abstract political conflict. Both South African citizens and African migrants occupy the same economic margins, struggling to survive in communities the state has largely abandoned. “These are people who are next door to one another, who are suddenly turning on each other, because now there are these conversations about ‘us v them’,” Mthonti explains. The tragedy is that the poorest are being turned against one another rather than toward the institutions that have failed them both.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s relationship to its own history compounds the crisis. The country was built on migrant labor, particularly in mining operations that created wealth concentrated in places like Sandton, described as Africa’s wealthiest square mile. “The reason we have Joburg is because of indentured labour,” Mthonti notes. Slavery, abduction, and migration form the foundational story of South African cities including Cape Town and Durban. Yet that history has been largely erased from national consciousness.

The country carries the weight of three systems of violence simultaneously: apartheid, colonialism, and slavery. South Africa did not end apartheid until 1994, decades after most African nations achieved independence. During the 1960s, when African countries were building post-colonial identities and developing racial self-esteem, South Africans were excluded from that process entirely. The result is a nation still grappling with unresolved historical trauma.

After apartheid ended, South Africa attempted to fit into the neoliberal order as though nothing had happened, as if the country possessed a clean slate. This historical amnesia allowed old divisions to resurface in new forms. The ethnic and tribal chauvinisms that apartheid used to divide South Africans have been repackaged around xenophobia. Even the Tsonga people, an ethnic minority present in South Africa for centuries, now face violence because they are deemed not legitimately part of the South African project. Mthonti is direct: “This is a function of apartheid.”

The current moment also reflects global political currents. Anti-migrant sentiment has become a worldwide phenomenon, perpetuated by leaders including Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and Narendra Modi. South Africa’s particular vulnerability, though, stems from the distance that has grown between Black South Africans and other Africans. South Africa remains the continent’s wealthiest nation, with the highest concentration of dollar millionaires, and the Black middle class has quadrupled since 2012.

That affluence masks deeper material insecurity. GDP growth sits just above 1 percent. The chasm between the South Africa people imagine and the one they experience remains vast, creating conditions where scapegoating becomes politically potent.

Mthonti resists the framing that poor people are inherently xenophobic, or that poverty naturally breeds bigotry. She points instead to state failure and political scapegoating as the true drivers. “Poor people are not inherently xenophobic,” she insists. “Poverty doesn’t equate to bigotry. More South Africans are open to pan-African unity than are not.”

The open question is whether South Africa’s political leadership will continue lending legitimacy to a movement that is consuming the very communities it claims to speak for, or whether the country can find its way back to the pan-African solidarity that its own founding history demands.