South Africa's anti-migrant movement costs lives, strains regional economies, government b

South Africa’s anti-migrant campaign, known by its Zulu battle cry “Abahambe!” meaning “They must go!”, has claimed at least four lives, forced thousands of migrants into street encampments, and triggered mass repatriation efforts by the Malawian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Zimbabwean governments. What sets this wave apart from previous outbreaks is money, media reach, and a degree of state legitimacy that earlier episodes never enjoyed.

The financial backing and mainstream amplification distinguish this moment sharply from South Africa’s long history of xenophobic riots, which date to 2008 and have killed 703 people since the end of apartheid. Fezokuhle Mthonti, a cultural historian and writer based in Johannesburg, is direct about the shift: “This is a new moment.” President Cyril Ramaphosa met with protest leaders last week, shaking hands with two of them while calling for peaceful conduct, a gesture that signals state engagement with the movement’s core actors rather than its condemnation.

Additional reference context is available at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jul/08/how-did-south-africa-produce-an-anti-african-movement.

The economic backdrop matters here. GDP growth hovers just above 1 percent, leaving many South Africans materially exposed despite the country’s relative continental wealth. South Africa remains Africa’s wealthiest nation, with the highest concentration of dollar millionaires on the continent, and its Black middle and high-income earners have quadrupled since 2012. Yet that surface affluence sits atop widespread material insecurity, and communities abandoned by government services now compete for survival alongside migrants.

The irony is structural. Johannesburg’s Sandton district, the wealthiest square mile in Africa, was built on migrant labor extracted through indentured servitude and coercion. Mining, the foundation of the national economy, depended on workers “taken from their homelands and thrown into capitalist enterprise,” as Mthonti describes it. Contemporary South Africa has constructed a narrative that distances itself from the rest of the continent, even as the continent’s labor built its wealth.

Mthonti traces the violence to what she calls “three systems of violence”: apartheid, colonialism, and slavery. Few nations carry all three legacies simultaneously. South Africa did not end apartheid until 1994, decades after most African nations achieved independence. In the 1960s, when other African countries were consolidating post-colonial identity, South Africans remained under white minority rule. That historical exclusion left unresolved fractures around belonging and national identity that economic stress now widens.

Meanwhile, the state’s retreat from economic security has intensified those fractures. Migrants and poor South Africans alike find themselves, in Mthonti’s words, “trying to eke out an existence together.” The violence between neighbors is not, she argues, an expression of inherent working-class xenophobia. It reflects the deliberate construction of “us v them” narratives by political actors redirecting frustration away from state failure. The campaign echoes patterns visible in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Donald Trump’s United States, and Narendra Modi’s India, where scapegoating politics have found fertile ground in periods of economic anxiety.

The targeting of the Tsonga people, an ethnic minority present in South Africa for centuries, illustrates how far that logic extends. They now face violence for being deemed insufficiently part of the South African project, a repackaging of apartheid-era ethnic and tribal divisions into xenophobic form.

Mthonti pushes back against the familiar framing that blames suggestible poor populations for anti-migrant sentiment. Poverty does not inherently produce bigotry, she insists. More South Africans support pan-African unity than oppose it. The violence reflects not the inevitable politics of scarcity but the deliberate mobilization of grievance by those with the resources and platforms to amplify division.

The question that remains open is whether the financial infrastructure and political legitimacy now behind “Abahambe!” will outlast the current moment, or whether the governments arranging mass repatriations will eventually face pressure to address the state failures that made the campaign possible in the first place.

For further analysis, see the full piece at theguardian.com/news/2026/jul/08/how-did-south-africa-produce-an-anti-african-movement.