Four people are dead. Thousands of African migrants are sleeping on pavements across South Africa, too terrified to return to their homes. Malawian, Ghanaian, Nigerian and Zimbabwean governments have begun arranging mass repatriations as their citizens flee a country many once regarded as a beacon of hope and economic opportunity.
The rallying cry driving this displacement is “Abahambe,” meaning “They must go.” The scale of the crisis, and the speed with which it has unfolded, marks a departure from South Africa’s previous cycles of xenophobic violence, according to Fezokuhle Mthonti, a cultural historian and writer based in Johannesburg.
What distinguishes this moment, Mthonti explains, is that the violence is well-funded, legitimized by mainstream media coverage, and has received acknowledgment from the government itself. President Cyril Ramaphosa met with and shook hands with two leaders of the xenophobic protests last week, while calling for peaceful demonstrations. “This is a new moment,” Mthonti says, one that differs fundamentally from the xenophobic riots dating back to 2008, when 703 people were killed in xenophobic incidents since the end of apartheid.
The roots of this crisis run deep into South Africa’s fractured post-apartheid society. Black South Africans, despite becoming citizens in 1994, have maintained what Mthonti describes as a “tenuous hold” on their sense of belonging. For poor and rural communities, the promised transformation of the post-apartheid era has largely failed to materialize. When global economic crises strike, Mthonti observes, societies often turn toward fascism, conservative values, and scapegoating politics. In South Africa’s case, this tendency is sharpened by the country’s unique historical trauma and its fragile national identity.
The state has effectively abandoned poor and working-class communities, leaving them without economic security or reliable services. Both South African citizens and migrants, Mthonti notes, are “the same folks who are trying to eke out an existence together” in the face of this abandonment. The violence is particularly troubling because it occurs between neighbors, between people who share similar material struggles. “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,’” she says.
The historical irony is stark. South Africa’s wealth, particularly in areas like Sandton in north Johannesburg (Africa’s wealthiest square mile), was built on the labor of people brought from their homelands and forced into capitalist enterprises like mining. Migration and indentured labor form the foundation of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. Yet migrants are now being violently expelled from the very country their labor helped build.
South Africa carries the weight of three overlapping systems of violence: apartheid, colonialism, and slavery. Unlike most African nations that achieved independence in the 1960s and began developing racial self-esteem and post-colonial cohesion, South Africa remained trapped in apartheid until 1994. That delayed liberation left a particular kind of scar. After apartheid ended, Mthonti explains, there was an attempt to move forward “as if nothing had happened, as if we were a country with a new slate,” without addressing the deep ethnic and tribal divisions that apartheid had deliberately constructed.
Those same divisive logics have now reemerged, repackaged as xenophobia. Even the Tsonga people, an ethnic minority that has lived in South Africa for centuries, face violence and exclusion because they are not considered “legitimately part of the South African project.” Mthonti is direct: “This is a function of apartheid.”
Meanwhile, the current moment reflects global anti-migrant sentiment, echoing movements led by figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and Narendra Modi. Yet within South Africa, a particular distance has opened between Black South Africans and other Africans. South Africa remains the continent’s wealthiest nation, with the highest concentration of dollar millionaires and a Black middle class that has quadrupled its numbers since 2012. “Oh my gosh, a profound distance,” Mthonti says when asked about this separation.
Material wealth masks deeper instability. South Africa’s GDP growth rate sits just above 1 percent, and most people experience material insecurity. The gap between the South Africa people imagine and the one they actually inhabit remains vast.
Mthonti pushes back against a common narrative that blames poor and working-class people for xenophobic sentiment. The problem is not inherent reactionary politics among those competing for resources, she argues, but rather state failure and deliberate political scapegoating. “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 responsibility, in her view, lies with those in power who have abandoned their duty to provide security and services, leaving communities vulnerable to manipulation and division.
Whether South Africa’s government will reckon with that duty, or continue to legitimize the forces tearing communities apart, is the question ordinary citizens on both sides of this crisis are now living with.