The harsh treatment of African immigrants in South Africa that has been making headlines over the past few weeks takes me back to April 2015 when similar xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans were flooding TV screens around the world.
I was travelling to Ghana, the first sub-Saharan nation to gain independence, whose liberation and leadership under pan-African luminary Kwame Nkrumah had inspired South Africa’s own freedom movement. South Africa’s liberation movement, the ANC had offices here and the legendary former leader of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, in exile had walked Ghana’s streets freely.
I have been through the border umpteenth times. This time, as I approached the immigration officer and handed him my South African passport, he paused, looked up and asked:
“Why are you doing this to us after everything we did for your freedom?”
My blood froze. Only shame, and the painful awareness that my country, once celebrated as Africa’s moral beacon, was now associated with Africans attacking fellow Africans coursed through me.
This was not the first time that ordinary South Africans turned on often desperate fellow Africans seeking refuge or employment in the country. The first was probably in 2008, when, according to UNHCR, at least 62 people were killed, more than 670 were injured, and over 100,000 were displaced during the attacks. Many of the victims were migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Somalia.
It happened again in 2015, in 2019, in 2021/22 and now in 2026. At the time of writing, two Nigerian nationals lay dead, and many other migrants were nursing wounds and living in total terror.
Both Nigeria and Ghana had announced that they were sending chartered flights to remove their nationals. The official Nigerian response was that it was a ‘voluntary repatriation programme.
It is being reported that Vincent Magwenya, South Africa’s Presidential spokesperson, has stated that “South Africans are not xenophobic.” He described the situation as “pockets of protest, which is permissible within our constitutional framework.”
Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu, said it plainly in her 7 May 2026 call with her South African counterpart, Ronald Lamola: “We will not stand by and watch the systematic harassment and humiliation of our nationals resident in South Africa.”
I contend that what is happening should more accurately be called Afrophobia, not xenophobia. The distinction matters. This is Africa turning on itself. Tribalism at a continental scale, with passports replacing ethnic markers.
But the pattern is not new and not uniquely South African. Ghana expelled 200,000 Nigerian migrants in 1969 under its Aliens Compliance Order. Facing economic collapse, Nigeria expelled two million undocumented workers, more than half of them Ghanaian, in 1983.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the concept of Ivoirité, a codified definition of citizenship designed to exclude immigrants from political life, culminated in civil war.
In Kenya, following its Somalia incursion against al-Shabaab, Somali migrants and Kenyan citizens of Somali origin alike were rounded up, subjected to mass police raids, and collectively declared as a security threat.
And in 1994, in just three months, approximately one million Tutsis in Rwanda were slaughtered by their own countrymen based on tribalism and manufactured fear.
History is unambiguous – such attacks, often justified by claims that migrants are taking scarce jobs or engaging in criminal activities, never work. Nigeria’s expulsions did not create new jobs. Ghana’s deportations did not generate prosperity. Ditto for South Africa or Kenya.
The real crisis is always deeper: a failure of governance and the failure of leadership to convert political freedom into economic dignity.
Broken promises
There is no doubt that citizens of many African nations that had achieved independence decades before South Africa, watched helplessly as their governments failed to deliver on their promises of jobs and prosperity and looked South.
For millions of them, post-Apartheid South Africa became the last frontier of opportunity, a country whose constitution was among the most progressive on earth and whose economy was the continent’s largest.
Pretoria today hosts over 130 resident embassies and high commissions, more than any other African city, reflecting that standing.
But, perhaps unconsciously, South Africa nurtured the conditions for its own migration crisis. Citizens of Western and Asian nations received generous visa arrangements while African neighbours faced barriers that forced many into alternative, illegal routes into South Africa.
The Ministry of Home Affairs became, in the words of the Special Investigating Unit’s February 2026 findings, ‘a marketplace where permits and visas were sold to the highest bidder.’
With its porous and poorly manned borders and some corrupt officials, the state not only failed to manage migration, but it also actively facilitated the irregularity it was mandated to prevent.
But here is the truth: The rage targeting African migrants does not even touch the underlying commanding heights of the South African economy, which remain, 30 years after liberation, stubbornly untransformed.
White South Africans, 7.3% of the population, still own approximately 72% p of agricultural land and the economy, a direct consequence of the 1913 Natives Land Act. The result is the most unequal society in the world by Gini coefficient.
The Somali shopkeeper does not own the malls. The Mozambican miner does not own the mines. The Zimbabwean waiter does not own the restaurant. The Malawian farmworker does not hold the JSE stock exchange equity. In fact, the African migrant is not the architect of South Africa’s structural inequality — he is, in many respects, its fellow victim. Just like the black South African.
Dangerous inversion
One of the defining slogans of South Africa’s liberation struggle was a promise and a demand: “the people shall govern.” In the absence of a state that actually governs, that manages borders, enforces laws, delivers services, holds officials to account, a dangerous inversion has taken hold.
Those who loot a migrant’s shop or — as was the case in Estcourt in April 2026, when the mayor confiscated the keys of Ghanaian shopkeepers and handed their businesses to locals – often believe they are not violating the promise of liberation. They believe they are fulfilling it.
In July 2025, a one-year-old Malawian boy died after being denied treatment at two Alexandra clinics because his family lacked South African identity documents.
What makes things worse is that often, opportunistic politicians, following the example of openly racist political forces and parties in the UK, Europe and the US, have found in the migrant a convenient scapegoat, a manufactured crisis that keeps citizens looking sideways at each other rather than upward at those responsible.
It has become easier to blame the foreign shopkeeper for unemployment than to account for the billions looted through state capture, the collapsed public health system or ineffective economic policies.
This is Afrophobia at its worst and tribalism in its most cynical form.
Balanced perspective
But an honest account also demands a balanced perspective. Some foreign nationals have committed serious crimes on South African soil: the SABC journalist Vuyo Mvoko was robbed by undocumented Zimbabweans; the Hillbrow drug and prostitution rings linked to foreign, allegedly Nigerian, syndicates; the identity-theft case involving the young Nigerian model Chidimma Adetshina; the Lesotho and Mozambican ‘zama zama’ [illegal] miners; the deaths of children from contaminated Somali and Ethiopians shops selling alleged expired or counterfeit food.
These are real grievances. But the crimes of a few do not define the millions who came in search of a better life. The legitimate grievance is with the state that corrupted its own systems.
But redirecting it at the nearest African face has never, in any country, at any point in history, solved the problem it claims to address.
I have travelled to every country and island surrounding Africa. In each one, I have had to abide by the rules: The laws are the laws, irrespective of how I felt about their triviality. Every visitor or citizen must abide by them, and every official and citizen must apply them without fear or favour and with equal humanity in South Africa and everywhere.
A debt not paid
South Africa entered a specific moral contract at liberation. Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Botswana, and Mozambique hosted ANC camps, absorbed SADF bombs, led divestment campaigns, and sheltered operatives along their borders.
Africa did not merely sympathise with South Africa’s struggle. It paid for it in blood, in disrupted economies, in violated soil. The late Kenneth Kaunda once reminded me that he was constantly challenged in his parliament for the support he gave South Africa at the expense of his own country’s citizens. Yet most South African students or graduates today cannot tell you which country hosted the ANC headquarters in exile.
That is the consequence of a failure to use education as a vehicle for the solidarity consciousness on which liberation was built. Unemployed and young South Africans, shaped by economic despair and a collapsed public service, reach for the nearest explanation of their dire circumstances. But it’s the wrong target. The wrong enemy. The wrong answer.
Afrophobia is not in our culture. It is not African. To be clear, it is not South African. This is a country freed by the continent whose own people were once the refugees, the exiles, the strangers at other nations’ thresholds. When we attack a fellow African, we are not expressing South African identity. We are betraying it.
What we cannot afford is the failure that Kofi Annan, the first African UN Secretary General, observed after the Rwandan genocide: “When Rwanda needed us most, we turned away.” Africa cannot turn away from Africa again.
Thebe Ikalafeng is a Hall of Fame marketer and was named one of the 100 Most Influential Africans by New African Magazine. He is the Founder and Chairman of Brand Africa, Chancellor of Sol Plaatje University, Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg Business School, and the best-selling author of The Traveller: Crossing Borders and Connecting Africa
