By Gabriel Manyati
Scroll through South African social media spaces on any given afternoon, and you will encounter a deeply unsettling rhetorical trend. In viral videos, passionate comment threads, and highly coordinated digital campaigns, I have watched a growing faction of users attempt to elevate contemporary anti-immigration activists into the pantheon of national heroism.
Most conspicuously, supporters of figures like March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma are now explicitly mentioning her name in the same sentence as the late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. To these digital algorithms and populist echo chambers, this comparison seems natural – a modern black woman leading a grassroots movement against perceived state failure. To those of us tracking the country’s political shifts, however, it is an ahistorical and dangerous conflation that threatens to destroy the foundational memory of the democratic state.
Can Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma be mentioned in the same breath as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela? To answer this question with the intellectual rigour it demands, observers must look past the immediate passions of modern populism. One must evaluate the distinct moral architectures, institutional targets, and historical stakes that separate liberation-era resistance from post-apartheid civic agitation. Once that is done, these hollow notions of a shared legacy completely unravel.
To understand the profound mismatch of this comparison, one must first revisit what Winnie Madikizela-Mandela signified. She was not merely a visible political actor; she was an essential pillar of a global, existential struggle against a system codified as a crime against humanity. Operating under a totalitarian white supremacist state that denied the very humanity of the black majority, Madikizela-Mandela faced banishment to Brandfort, solitary confinement, continuous state surveillance, and brutal physical terror.
Despite this, she kept the flame of resistance burning when the African National Congress leadership was exiled or imprisoned on Robben Island. She became the physical manifestation of defiance when the state sought absolute erasure.
Her political ethos was defined by a foundational sacrifice aimed at total systemic transformation.
As Madikizela-Mandela famously remarked during the height of the townships’ resistance: “The struggle for freedom is a lifetime struggle. It is a struggle that requires total commitment, a struggle that does not end with the unbanning of political organisations or the return of exiles.” This quote illuminates the boundless, transformative nature of the liberation ethos. It was a struggle to birth a nation out of ashes, demanding an absolute moral commitment to human dignity, universal liberation, and the total dismantling of an institutionalised tyranny.
In stark contrast, contemporary anti-immigration activism operates within a radically altered structural reality. South Africa today is a constitutional democracy. The state structure is defined by a progressive bill of rights, a sovereign judiciary, and representative political processes. When activists like Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma organise marches, issue demands, or lobby for stricter border enforcement, their institutional target is not an illegitimate, tyrannical regime, but rather a democratically elected government failing in its administrative and enforcement duties.
This is not to dismiss or caricature the grievances driving contemporary border-control movements. The social pressures animating activists like Ngobese-Zuma are politically real, deeply felt, and rooted in tangible material anxieties. The country battles staggering unemployment rates, severe public service delivery failures, and strained infrastructure in working-class townships. In many communities, the presence of undocumented foreign nationals is perceived as a compounding factor in the competition for scarce resources, healthcare, and jobs.
These are legitimate anxieties concerning state capacity, border management, and socio-economic survival. In a democratic society, citizens have every right to organise, protest, and demand that the state secure its borders and enforce its immigration laws.
However, recognising the legitimacy of an administrative or economic grievance does not mean it should be elevated to the status of a foundational liberation struggle. The moral stakes are fundamentally different. The anti-apartheid movement fought against an institutionalised system of exclusion to expand the circle of human rights and dignity. It sought to tear down borders of racial division to include the marginalised.
Contemporary anti-immigration movements, by definition, seek a narrower application of state resources and legal protections, focusing on national exclusivity rather than universal human emancipation.
One cannot ignore the dark undercurrent of Afrophobia that frequently infects this modern discourse. While outfits like Operation Dudula and the March and March movement claim to champion legal compliance, their street-level campaigns often result in the targeted harassment of fellow Africans. This brand of vigilantism stands in direct opposition to the internationalist solidarity that defined the anti-apartheid struggle. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her contemporaries drew their moral authority from universal human rights, actively partnering with African nations that sheltered South African exiles. Modern vigilante actions turn inward, transforming neighbours into scapegoats for systemic state failures.
The political theorist Eric Hobsbawm wrote extensively about how nations invent traditions and manipulate historical memory to cultivate political legitimacy. Hobsbawm noted that the selective use of history often serves to give a rapid stamp of authority to contemporary movements that lack deep historical roots. This is precisely what occurs when modern civic activists are christened as new “matriarchs of the nation.” By borrowing the vocabulary of the liberation struggle, modern movements attempt to bypass the hard work of democratic persuasion, instead claiming a ready-made moral authority that they have not earned through foundational sacrifice. They use the aesthetics of defiance to mask a project of state-enforced exclusion.
The national shutdown protest scheduled for June 30th represents a critical junction for this movement’s legacy. Organisers have pre-emptively deflected responsibility, arguing that any potential lawlessness is purely a failure of state policing. Yet, history is an unforgiving judge. Should this shutdown trigger a wave of violence, widespread looting, and tragic deaths, the legacy of its leaders will be permanently sealed, not in the halls of heroism, but in the ledger of national tragedies.
A campaign rooted in hostility and exclusionary rhetoric can never propel its proponents to historical greatness. True greatness requires building a grander social fabric, whereas xenophobic panic merely tears it apart.
Collapsing these categories risks flattening historical memory. Canonisation as a “national matriarch” or a hero of a nation cannot be bought cheaply by achieving temporary visibility or riding a wave of populist anger. It requires an alignment with the universal principles of human liberation and a record of resistance against systematic oppression.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s symbolic status as the Mother of the Nation was forged in the crucible of a struggle against a state that sought to permanently subjugate her people. It was an inclusive struggle for national self-determination. Anti-immigration activism, regardless of how justified its proponents believe it to be, is an exercise in boundary enforcement and resource conservation.
Therefore, equating Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is an error of historical classification. It misreads the nature of democratic contestation. In a mature democracy, different forms of political engagement must be categorised accurately. Ngobese-Zuma and her contemporaries belong to the messy, often contentious realm of post-apartheid interest-group politics. They are lobbyists and organisers operating within a constitutional framework, using democratic tools to push for specific policy changes. They are part of the daily friction of a governance crisis, not the architects of national liberation.
South Africa’s pantheon of national matriarchs must remain historically grounded in the foundational struggle that made democracy possible in the first place. To expand that sacred canopy to include figures defined by localised, exclusionary agendas is to degrade the very currency of national memory. As analysts we can acknowledge the reality of the immigration debate without cheapening the legacy of those who gave their lives for fundamental freedom.
Ngobese-Zuma may be a significant voice in contemporary policy debates, but she stands in the shadow of history, not alongside the giants who made it.
