South Africans who are physically attacking so-called undocumented immigrants are not getting arrested. Let that sink in. The very people committing crimes — harassment, threats, beatings, theft, and looting from the shacks and houses that poor foreigners call home in South Africa’s informal settlements and townships — are walking free. Meanwhile, the victims of these crimes are the ones being rounded up and locked away. South Africa has turned justice on its head, and God is watching.

The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

— Psalm 146:9

These are not faceless statistics. These are poor immigrants — human beings — who came to South Africa to work, to survive, to build something. Many of them fled catastrophe: the ongoing horror of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the wreckage of Sudan, the collapsed state of Libya. They crossed borders not out of ambition but out of desperation. They worked hard. They built modest lives in modest shacks. And then South African mobs descended upon them — looting their belongings, chasing them out overnight, destroying in hours what took years to build.

Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.

— Zechariah 7:10

A Nation Under Judgment

God does not speak softly on this matter. The Scripture is unambiguous: those who deprive foreigners of justice are not merely breaking human laws — they are provoking divine judgment. God warns that He will act as a swift witness against those who “deprive the foreigners among you of justice” — Malachi 3:5. South Africa is not exempt from this reckoning simply because it has a constitution. A constitution that is not enforced is merely paper. And right now, that paper is being burnt in the same fires that are consuming the belongings of innocent people.

South African mobs operate with impunity. That is precisely why they have the courage to loot and kill foreign nationals — because nobody stops them. Nobody arrests them. Nobody holds them to account.

The anti-immigrant movement in South Africa is not a patriotic movement — it is a criminal movement. It is breaking the very laws and constitution it claims to be defending. These are sadists, and they are supported by a host of criminals whose actual goal is looting wherever there is an opportunity. The politics of xenophobia has become a convenient cover for organised theft and violence. South Africa is fast becoming what Alan Paton warned it would become: Cry the Beloved Country.

⚠ Documented Violence — Recent Incidents

• Five Mozambican nationals killed in Mossel Bay — their lives taken with near total impunity
• Zimbabwean community members attacked in Springs, Johannesburg amid coordinated mob violence
• Mass violence spreading across KwaZulu-Natal — targeting foreign nationals and South Africans who do not speak Zulu
• Somali- and Pakistani-owned tuck shops and small businesses threatened, looted, and destroyed
• USA, Australia, UK, France and Canada have issued formal travel warnings to their citizens against visiting South Africa

The Historical Truth

There is another dimension to this crisis that South Africa’s anti-immigrant voices prefer not to confront: the question of original ownership. The issue of documents or no documents is irrelevant. All human life is sacred. But beyond that — who exactly are the original owners of South Africa? The Zulus, the Xhosa, the Sotho and other groups all migrated from somewhere. They are not the original inhabitants of the land they now claim as exclusively theirs. Every major ethnic group in southern Africa has a migration history. So on what moral authority do South Africans — whose own ancestors crossed rivers and mountains to settle where they now live — turn around and persecute Malawians, Mozambicans, Ghanaians, and Zimbabweans who arrived more recently?

The Fundamental Question

Why should Africans be persecuted in Africa? This continent belongs to all its people. The borders drawn by colonisers were never meant to imprison Africans within artificial lines. To use those same colonial borders as instruments of hatred and exclusion is to carry forward the work of the oppressor — not to resist it.

Defend human life. Support the sanctity of human life. Foreign nationals do not deserve the harassment, the beatings, the theft, and the terror they are receiving in South Africa. The matter of documentation is secondary to the matter of humanity. No legal technicality justifies mob violence. No policy debate justifies murder. No political movement has the right to loot a family’s home in the middle of the night and call it justice.

Why should people be attacked in their shacks, their shelters, their houses in the townships? South Africa must stop this perversion and injustice. This is Africa. These are Africans. There is no justification — none.

South Africa is going to be punished by God like never before if it does not turn from this path. That is not a political threat — it is a biblical reality. The same God who heard the cry of the oppressed in Egypt, who sustained the widow and the fatherless and the stranger, is hearing the cries rising from the townships of Springs, Mossel Bay, and KwaZulu-Natal right now. South Africa must arrest the criminals committing these acts of violence — not their victims. It must enforce its own constitution. It must remember what it means to be a nation that once knew what it was to be persecuted, and refused to become the very thing it once fought against.