Recent anti-migrant protests and attacks linked to groups such as Operation Dudula and similar anti-foreigner movements in parts of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal have once again left many African migrants living in fear.
While frustration over unemployment, crime, weak border controls, and government failure is real and cannot simply be dismissed, violence and intimidation directed at foreign nationals represent a dangerous and unlawful response to those problems.
SA has experienced repeated waves of xenophobic violence since 2008, resulting in deaths, displacement, destroyed businesses, and long-lasting fear among migrant communities.
The underlying hostility towards migrants remains a serious challenge confronting our society.
Scholars generally define xenophobia as hostility, fear, or prejudice towards outsiders or foreigners, often expressed through discrimination, exclusion, intimidation, or violence.
It frequently creates an artificial divide, where certain people are viewed as less deserving of dignity, protection, or opportunity simply because they are perceived as outsiders.
Some activists and academics use the term “Afrophobia” to describe hostility specifically directed towards black African migrants. They argue that migrants from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere on the continent are often targeted in ways that reveal deeper prejudices against fellow Africans.
The perpetrators of these attacks often claim that migrants are responsible for unemployment, pressure on public services, and rising crime. SA undeniably faces enormous socioeconomic problems, including unemployment, corruption, infrastructure collapse, and failing public institutions.
However, reducing these complex national failures to the presence of migrants is inaccurate and dangerous. It shifts accountability away from political leadership and onto vulnerable communities who themselves are often struggling to survive.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has condemned violence against foreign nationals, describing such acts as criminality and warning that no group has the right to take the law into its own hands.
Government officials have also repeatedly stressed that xenophobic violence does not represent the views of all South Africans. That distinction matters. Millions of South Africans continue to live, work, worship, and build communities peacefully alongside migrants from across Africa and beyond.
“Reducing complex national failures to the presence of migrants is inaccurate and dangerous.” — Nkanyezi Ndlovu
At the same time, the government cannot continue treating each outbreak of xenophobic violence as an isolated incident while failing to address the deeper causes driving social instability. Poor governance, porous borders, corruption, collapsing municipalities, weak policing, and economic stagnation create fertile ground for anger, resentment, and populist scapegoating.
Migration itself is not unique to South Africa. It is a global phenomenon shaped by conflict, economic hardship, political instability, and opportunity. Across the world, societies are grappling with questions of immigration, national identity, integration, and border control. These are legitimate debates. But there is a profound difference between debating immigration policy and targeting people through intimidation or violence because of their nationality or ethnicity.
This is why xenophobia must also be understood within the broader global rise of identity-based hatred and exclusion. Across many parts of the world, societies are witnessing growing hostility toward people based on race, religion, nationality, or identity.
Antisemitism has surged internationally in deeply alarming ways, with Jewish communities increasingly targeted for harassment, intimidation, and exclusion simply because of who they are or what they are perceived to represent. In many spaces, anti-Zionism has also crossed the line from political criticism of Israel into the demonisation of Jewish identity itself, where Jews are collectively judged, excluded, or threatened because of their connection to the world’s only Jewish state.
Migration itself is not unique to SA. It is a global phenomenon shaped by conflict, economic hardship, political instability, and opportunity.
Across many parts of the world, societies are witnessing growing hostility towards people based on their race, religion, nationality, or identity, and the lesson is that once societies begin normalising collective blame, scapegoating, and identity-based hostility, the consequences become deeply dangerous for everyone.
Africa cannot build a future of prosperity, trade, cooperation, and development while Africans are attacked for being African in another African country. The African Continental Free Trade Area was established on principles of integration, mobility, partnership, and shared growth.
South Africans themselves should not be simplistically demonised or collectively branded as xenophobic. Many citizens feel abandoned by political leaders and trapped in worsening economic conditions. The real danger emerges when that anger is redirected towards vulnerable groups instead of towards addressing systemic governance failures.
Violence against migrants is not a solution to SA’s problems. It is a symptom of a society under immense pressure and a warning sign of what happens when frustration, political failure, and identity-based scapegoating are allowed to fester unchecked.
- Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean international rights activist with experience in migration, human rights and climate change matters.
