By Gabriel Manyati
When Limpopo Premier Dr Phophi Ramathuba recently issued a chilling warning that anti-immigrant demonstrations were turning inward, she articulated a crisis that many had long feared but few in power had dared to name.
Ramathuba revealed that protesters, ostensibly mobilising against undocumented migrants, have begun targeting individuals based entirely on their skin tone and spoken language. Specifically, she noted that Venda and Pedi-speaking South Africans are increasingly being mistaken for foreign nationals, subjected to aggressive intimidation, and publicly humiliated because of their darker complexions, distinct accents, or an inability to pronounce specific words in dominant local languages.
This is no longer a peripheral malfunction of border politics. South Africa has reached a perilous inflection point where a populist campaign against undocumented immigration is mutating into a sinister regime of ethnic profiling, tribal suspicion, and localised vigilantism against its own citizens.
The central tragedy of this shift is that xenophobia is now devouring its own children. The fragile socio-political line separating the “foreigner” from the “South African” is rapidly collapsing under the weight of crude, arbitrary markers: the shade of a person’s skin, the phonetics of their surname, the cadence of their accent, or the style of their dress.
This transformation represents the ultimate, terrifyingly predictable unintended consequence of mass anti-immigrant mobilisation that EFF leader Julius Malema warned about. What began as a demand for state-led border enforcement has degenerated into a fractured landscape where ordinary citizens have appointed themselves as immigration officers, street-corner police, shadow prosecutors, and executioners.
Once a society normalises the weaponisation of identity against one marginalised group, the machinery of exclusion cannot be neatly contained. It expands naturally and inexorably to consume innocent citizens who merely happen to “look wrong” to a passing mob.
The psychological mechanisms driving this collective descent are rooted in profound structural trauma. Decades of astronomical unemployment, rampant inequality, systemic crime, and the visible decay of public institutions have left millions of South Africans trapped in a state of chronic socio-economic exhaustion. In psychology, the phenomenon of mob behaviour demonstrates that frustrated, desperate societies rarely possess the collective patience to deconstruct complex macroeconomic failures.
Instead, they seek immediate, visible, and easily punishable villains. It is far simpler to blame a migrant or a fellow citizen from a distant province for a shortage of clinic beds or jobs than it is to hold a failing governance structure accountable.
History provides a brutal ledger of what happens when a society exhausts its external enemies and turns its crosshairs inward. In the United States during the Cold War, McCarthyism began as a hunt for foreign communist subversives but quickly expanded into a paranoid domestic purge that ruined the lives of thousands of innocent Americans.
During the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the policing of identity card classifications and subtle physical phenotypes turned neighbours into killers. In Nazi Germany, the obsessive pursuit of racial purity eventually targeted citizens who failed to meet arbitrary, pseudo-scientific criteria. Even within South Africa’s own traumatised past, the apartheid regime’s hated pass laws relied on the crude visual and linguistic profiling of Black bodies to restrict movement.
By resurrecting these methodologies of suspicion, contemporary vigilantes are inadvertently mimics of the very oppressive structures the liberation struggle sought to dismantle.
The absurdity of using language or appearance as a proxy for citizenship is exposed by South Africa’s extraordinary cultural geography. The country boasts 11 official languages alongside a vast tapestry of regional dialects and centuries of organic migration across Southern Africa. South Africa’s internal migration patterns ensure that no single province belongs exclusively to one ethnic group.
Venda speakers reside permanently in Johannesburg, Pedi communities form vital parts of Durban’s fabric, Tswana speakers build lives in Cape Town, and Zulu speakers populate towns in Limpopo. Furthermore, dark-skinned South Africans from northern border regions increasingly report being harassed and mistaken for Zimbabweans simply because of geographical proximity, complexion, or linguistic overlaps.
To subject an individual to a public pronunciation test on a crowded street is not an act of civic duty; it is a display of profound historical ignorance that fails to solve a single immigration challenge.
This amnesia is particularly ironic given the history of the subcontinent. For over a century, South Africans themselves migrated extensively throughout Southern Africa in search of work, refuge, and economic opportunity. More crucially, during the dark decades of apartheid, millions of South Africans depended entirely on neighbouring frontline states for political sanctuary, military training, and human solidarity.
To turn upon the descendants of those who provided shelter during the liberation struggle is an act of historical ingratitude that inflicts profound damage on South Africa’s contemporary interests. The recurring images of identity-based violence carry severe economic costs, severely bruising tourism, deterring foreign direct investment, stalling regional economic integration, and diminishing South Africa’s moral standing as a diplomatic leader on the continent.
From a constitutional perspective, the rise of self-appointed border patrols represents an existential threat to the rule of law. The Constitution of South Africa explicitly mandates that immigration enforcement, policing, and the administration of justice belong solely to the institutions of the state. When civil society organisations or grassroots campaigns transition into active border policing, they usurp the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
While concerns regarding undocumented immigration, border security, and state capacity are entirely legitimate policy debates that require urgent, rigorous state intervention, they can never justify the delegation of policing powers to unstructured groups.
This dangerous trend is further accelerated by the digital ecosystem. Social media networks have become echo chambers for moral panic, where unverified rumours, highly manipulated videos, and xenophobic rhetoric spread at hyper-speed. Long before formal facts can be established by journalists or authorities, digital mobs have already identified, judged, and condemned targets, translating online vitriol into real-world violence on the streets.
Ultimately, the deepest casualty of this unchecked mobilisation is the very concept of South African nationhood. The foundational democratic vision of a non-racial society rooted in the spirit of “ubuntu” is being systematically replaced by a paranoid reality of checkpoint justice. A society that can no longer distinguish between its guests and its own children because it has abandoned its core constitutional values is not achieving safety. It is actively engineering its own fragmentation.
When citizens begin asking not “Are you documented?” but “Why is your skin so dark?”, “Why do you speak Venda?”, or “Pronounce this Zulu word before you pass this street,” the republic has crossed a fatal threshold.
At that profound point of rupture, xenophobia has ceased to be a debate about immigration policy. It has mutated into a fratricidal war against identity itself.
