South Africa Must Choose Solidarity, Not Xenophobia

South Africa is a country built on solidarity. It was solidarity — from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and dozens of other African nations — that helped end apartheid. Today, that debt is being repaid with mob violence, and it must stop.

Over the past several months, waves of xenophobic attacks have swept through Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, and beyond. Groups such as Operation Dudula and March and March have organized demonstrations against undocumented migrants that have, in case after case, spilled into violence against foreign nationals — documented and undocumented alike. Human Rights Watch, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the United Nations Secretary-General have all raised the alarm about attacks, harassment, unlawful evictions, and denial of basic services targeting migrants and refugees.

The human cost is real and growing. Reporting this year has documented the deaths of Ethiopian, Mozambican, and Malawian nationals in separate incidents linked to anti-migrant violence, alongside the burning of homes in informal settlements, the looting of foreign-owned shops, and the mass displacement of families who have lived and worked in South Africa for years. Thousands of Malawians and Zimbabweans have fled to consulates and border crossings, camping in the open in winter, simply to escape the threat of mob violence.

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The Law Is Clear — Even When Mobs Ignore It

South Africa’s Constitution guarantees dignity, equality, and human rights to everyone within its borders, not only to citizens. Ordinary citizens have no legal authority to demand passports or residence permits from another person, to search homes for undocumented migrants, or to appoint themselves enforcers of immigration law. That is the job of the state, operating within the law — not of vigilante groups patrolling streets and township corners.

Yet in many of the areas hit hardest by these attacks, foreign nationals report that police responded slowly, inconsistently, or not at all. That failure of protection is itself a violation of the state’s obligations under the Constitution and under international human rights instruments South Africa has signed. Where police have failed to act, foreign nationals have paid with their homes, their livelihoods, and in the worst cases, their lives.

Scapegoating migrants for unemployment and crime does not solve either problem — it only deepens the violence, while the underlying causes of joblessness and inequality remain untouched.

South Africa’s unemployment rate remains among the highest in the world, and it is real economic pain that fuels much of this anger. But blaming foreign nationals for that pain is scapegoating, not policy. The evidence does not support the claim that migrants are principally responsible for crime or unemployment in South Africa — those problems have far deeper roots in decades of economic stagnation and uneven development.

Not Every South African Is the Enemy

It would be its own injustice to answer these attacks with a blanket condemnation of South Africans as a people. There are many South African citizens — ordinary neighbors, community leaders, and human rights defenders — who have opened their homes to displaced migrants, spoken out publicly against vigilante violence, and worked alongside organizations like the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa to protect the vulnerable. It is worth remembering, too, that South African citizens who are Tsonga or Shangaan have themselves been wrongly targeted and beaten by mobs simply for looking or sounding “foreign” — a reminder that this violence ultimately threatens everyone once it is allowed to take hold.

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Foreigners living in fear across South Africa are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for what the Constitution already promises them: safety, dignity, and due process. And the South Africans standing beside them in that fight — refusing to let hatred define their country — are comrades in the same cause, not the targets of it.

What Must Happen Now

South Africa’s government has a duty to act decisively: to dismantle vigilante enforcement operations, to hold accountable police officers who fail to protect foreign nationals or collude with mobs, and to prosecute those inciting or carrying out violence. Civil society, faith communities, and ordinary citizens have a role too — in refusing to let scapegoating go unanswered, and in standing publicly with the neighbors, shopkeepers, and coworkers now living in fear.

The choice ahead is not between South Africans and foreigners. It is between a country that upholds the constitutional promise of dignity for everyone within its borders, and one that lets mob rule decide who belongs. South Africa has chosen solidarity before. It must choose it again.

By Collen Makumbirofa,
Makumbirofa Farms,
www.makumbirofafarms.co.za
email: [email protected]
Paypal: [email protected]