By Gabriel Manyati
The first images shocked the world in May 2008. In Ramaphosa informal settlement on the East Rand, a Mozambican man named Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave was beaten by a mob, doused in petrol, and burned alive while onlookers watched. The photograph of his body engulfed in flames became one of the defining images of post-apartheid South Africa.
But the violence did not emerge from nowhere. It had a long history rooted in labour systems, nationalism, urban collapse, economic desperation, and a dangerous belief that South Africa stood apart from the rest of Africa.
Long before democracy arrived in 1994, South Africa’s economy was built on migrant labour. Under apartheid, black workers from Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere were recruited into mines and farms under tightly controlled contracts. The apartheid state wanted African labour, but never African belonging.
Migrants were useful underground in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, but unwanted in the political imagination of white South Africa. This produced a deeply contradictory social order. Migrants were simultaneously necessary and disposable. Township residents themselves lived under pass laws, forced removals, and chronic poverty, yet hostility toward outsiders already existed in some areas where scarce jobs and housing were fiercely contested.
By the late apartheid years, economic decline and urban overcrowding were intensifying tensions.
When democracy arrived in 1994, many expected a flowering of pan African solidarity. After all, frontline states such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, and Mozambique had sheltered exiles from the ANC and other liberation movements during apartheid. Instead, a harsher nationalism slowly emerged.
The derogatory word “makwerekwere” became commonplace in townships and taxis, mocking foreign African languages as incomprehensible noise. As migrants from Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo entered South Africa in greater numbers during the late 1990s and early 2000s, resentment deepened.
The reasons were not imaginary. South Africa had become one of the most unequal societies on earth. Millions remained trapped in unemployment, informal settlements, and collapsing municipal systems despite the promises of liberation. Local clinics were overcrowded. Schools deteriorated. Housing backlogs exploded. Violent crime became endemic. In many townships, the democratic state appeared distant except during elections or police raids.
Foreign migrants often entered spaces abandoned by the formal economy. Somali and Ethiopian traders opened spaza shops in dangerous townships where larger retailers refused to operate. Zimbabweans accepted low wages in construction, domestic work, restaurants, and agriculture. Employers frequently preferred migrants because they could be exploited more easily. This fuelled perceptions that foreigners were “stealing jobs”, even when the deeper problem was structural unemployment and exploitative labour practices.
Jonathan Crush, one of the foremost scholars on South African xenophobia, once observed that xenophobia in South Africa had become “institutionalised” within parts of society and state structures. That institutionalisation became violently visible in May 2008.
The attacks began in Alexandra township north of Johannesburg before spreading nationwide. Mobs hunted migrants in Diepsloot, Cleveland, Tembisa, Durban, Cape Town, and informal settlements across Gauteng. People were beaten with iron bars, hacked with machetes, and driven from their homes. Shops owned by Somalis, Pakistanis, Ethiopians, and Zimbabweans were looted. More than 60 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced.
Police responses were often slow, chaotic, or ineffective. Soldiers were eventually deployed. Temporary refugee camps emerged across Gauteng and the Western Cape. Yet even then, many political leaders hesitated to call the violence xenophobia, preferring terms such as “criminality” or “service delivery frustration”.
The cycle repeated itself in 2015 after comments attributed to Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini were widely interpreted as telling foreigners to “pack their bags and leave”. Violence erupted in Durban before spreading into Johannesburg. Migrant owned shops were looted again. Operation Fiela, launched afterward by the state, officially targeted crime and undocumented migration, but critics argued it blurred the line between law enforcement and collective punishment.
By 2019, anti-migrant violence again exploded in Johannesburg CBD and Pretoria. Nigerian owned businesses were attacked. Trucks driven by foreign nationals were burned on highways. Social media amplified rumours that foreigners controlled drugs, prostitution, and organised crime. Some claims had elements of truth involving criminal syndicates operating across borders, but sweeping generalisations transformed entire communities into suspects.
Then came July 2021. After the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma, riots and mass looting devastated parts of KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng. More than 300 people died. In the aftermath, anti-immigrant narratives intensified dramatically. In many communities, migrants became convenient scapegoats for state failure, unemployment, food insecurity, and urban disorder.
It was in this climate that vigilante formations such as Operation Dudula rose to prominence. Led publicly for a period by Nhlanhla Lux Dlamini, the group organised marches, raids, clinic inspections, and confrontations in Soweto, Alexandra, Hillbrow, and Diepsloot. Members demanded proof of citizenship from traders and residents. Videos circulated online showing groups storming shops and harassing migrants.
Parallel formations such as Put South Africans First emerged online and offline, using populist rhetoric similar to anti-immigrant movements in Europe and the United States. Patriotic Alliance leaders Gayton McKenzie and Kenny Kunene also adopted hardline rhetoric on illegal immigration, particularly during election campaigns, arguing that the state had lost control of the borders.
The murder of Elvis Nyathi, a Zimbabwean national killed by a mob in Diepsloot in April 2022, again exposed how quickly anti-immigrant vigilantism could turn lethal. Residents accused foreigners of criminality after local murders in the area, but the rage soon became collective punishment.
Yet the story is more complicated than simple hatred. Illegal immigration into South Africa is driven by powerful regional realities. Zimbabwe’s economic collapse pushed millions southward. Conflict and instability in parts of Mozambique and the DRC displaced others. South Africa remains the continent’s most industrialised major economy, despite its stagnation. The migrant labour system established more than a century ago never truly disappeared. Borders remain porous. The asylum system is dysfunctional and overwhelmed.
At the same time, South African exceptionalism has played a corrosive role. Some citizens came to believe South Africa was somehow more modern, more developed, or less African than the rest of the continent. This mentality, shaped partly by industrialisation and global visibility after apartheid, created psychological distance between South Africans and other Africans.
The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has argued that post-apartheid South Africa developed forms of “necropolitics” in which vulnerable populations become exposed to abandonment and violence. Migrants increasingly occupy that position. Loren Landau similarly warned that exclusionary politics in South Africa transformed outsiders into symbols onto which social anxieties could be projected.
Not all political voices embraced xenophobia. Julius Malema declared: “I will never join the xenophobic bandwagon.” His defence of African migrants sharply contrasted with politicians who flirted with anti-immigrant sentiment during election cycles.
Still, the state itself remains deeply contradictory. South Africa’s Constitution is among the world’s most progressive, yet migrants continue facing police harassment, corruption at Home Affairs offices, detention abuses, and periodic deportation crackdowns. Courts repeatedly affirm constitutional protections, but implementation on the ground is uneven.
Meanwhile, social media has become an accelerant. Viral videos, misinformation, inflammatory hashtags, and livestreamed raids increasingly shape public perception faster than official facts. Populist entrepreneurs have discovered that immigration outrage mobilises frustrated voters cheaply and effectively.
Xenophobia in South Africa is therefore not simply hatred of foreigners. It is the symptom of a deeper post-apartheid crisis. It reflects wounded nationalism, collapsed governance, mass unemployment, extreme inequality, urban insecurity, and the erosion of pan African solidarity.
The tragedy is historical as much as political. Countries that once sheltered South African exiles during apartheid now watch their citizens hunted in townships and informal settlements. If South Africa continues turning African migrants into scapegoats for structural failures it cannot solve, it risks betraying not only its Constitution, but also the continental solidarity that helped liberate it in the first place.
