Every society confronted by prolonged economic hardship eventually faces a defining choice. It can confront the structural realities behind its problems, however politically inconvenient, or it can search for someone visible to blame.
South Africa faced that choice again this week.
The country chose protest. More than 900 people were arrested.
Tuesday’s coordinated demonstrations were unprecedented in both scale and symbolism. According to police, approximately 120 marches took place across the country under the banners of groups including Operation Dudula, March and March, and Progressive Forces. The protests coincided with a self-imposed deadline demanding that undocumented migrants leave South Africa. While many of the demonstrations remained peaceful, others descended into violence. In Hillbrow, one person was killed and two others—including a teenager—were shot and wounded.
Before the demonstrations, President Cyril Ramaphosa met protest leaders and publicly rejected the central premise driving the mobilisation—that migrants are responsible for South Africa’s economic and social decline.
He was right to reject it.
More importantly, the evidence does.
The Narrative—and Its Convenient Fragments of Truth
The politics of anti-migrant mobilisation has always rested on a narrative that is persuasive precisely because it contains fragments of truth.
There are criminal syndicates operating within migrant communities.
Nigerian confraternity networks have established a presence in parts of South Africa and have been implicated in violent rivalries. Drug trafficking remains a genuine law-enforcement challenge. These realities should neither be denied nor minimised. Criminal organisations deserve neither diplomatic protection nor public sympathy.
But neither should criminality become a passport to collective condemnation.
A cult-related killing in Johannesburg does not make millions of Nigerians criminals.
A narcotics arrest in Ekurhuleni does not transform African migrants into a criminal class.
Individual responsibility cannot become collective guilt simply because it is politically convenient.
Crime may provide the spark, but it does not explain the fire.
What the Numbers Actually Reveal
The movement’s central claim collapses under the weight of South Africa’s own statistics.
Migrants constitute an estimated 6.5 per cent of South Africa’s population. Yet the country has endured one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, with expanded unemployment remaining above 43 per cent since 2024. It is mathematically implausible that a population of that size could be principally responsible for a structural labour-market crisis affecting tens of millions.
The deeper causes are well documented.
South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies. Around ten per cent of the population controls more than four-fifths of national wealth—a concentration rooted in apartheid’s political economy and reinforced by decades of uneven economic transformation. Millions continue to live below the food-poverty line despite three decades of constitutional democracy.
These are failures of economic structure, governance and social policy.
They are not the product of African migration.
History reinforces the point.
The large-scale anti-migrant violence of 2008, which claimed 62 lives, was followed by renewed attacks in 2015, 2019 and 2021–22. Each wave emerged during periods of deepening socioeconomic strain rather than sudden increases in migration.
The timing tells its own story.
The frustration is genuine.
Its target has repeatedly been misplaced.
When Crime Becomes Identity
The most dangerous transformation occurs after a crime is committed.
The moment a suspect is identified as foreign, public debate frequently shifts from evidence to identity. The individual offender disappears. Nationality assumes centre stage.
An arrest becomes proof of a national problem.
A criminal investigation becomes an immigration debate.
A tragedy becomes political capital.
This is no longer law enforcement.
It is scapegoating.
And scapegoating flourishes where institutions struggle to deliver opportunity, security and trust.
Migrants become convenient symbols because they are visible. They have accents, passports, businesses and neighbourhoods. They are easier to blame than corruption. Easier than state failure. Easier than stagnant economic growth. Easier than confronting the unfinished business of apartheid’s socioeconomic legacy.
Every drug seizure involving a foreign suspect is amplified.
Every criminal allegation becomes a referendum on migration.
Every isolated incident is absorbed into a broader narrative portraying African migrants as the architects of South Africa’s insecurity.
Why Afrophobia Is the More Accurate Description
The language used to describe this phenomenon matters.
If the hostility were directed simply at foreigners, one would expect all migrant communities to experience similar treatment.
They do not.
The overwhelming victims of intimidation, collective suspicion and mob violence have consistently been Black African migrants—Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Congolese and others.
That pattern explains why an increasing number of scholars, diplomats and civil society organisations prefer the term Afrophobia to xenophobia.
The issue is not merely foreignness.
It is African foreignness.
That distinction exposes the political mechanism at work.
Certain crimes become national crises not solely because of what occurred, but because of who is alleged to have committed them.
The Invisible Victims
Lost beneath competing narratives are the people whose suffering rarely fits political slogans.
Families devastated by drug addiction receive inadequate rehabilitation and social support.
Communities terrorised by organised crime continue to demand effective policing.
Young Nigerians killed in confraternity disputes become posthumous evidence in anti-migrant campaigns.
Law-abiding migrants who build businesses, pay taxes and contribute to South Africa’s economy find themselves judged by crimes committed by strangers who merely share their nationality.
Justice becomes blurred by association.
Where Accountability Truly Lies
To its credit, the South African government has repeatedly condemned anti-migrant violence and reaffirmed constitutional commitments to equality, dignity and the rule of law.
President Ramaphosa’s decision to meet protest leaders before this week’s demonstrations and publicly reject their central claim represented important political leadership.
But condemnation has never been enough.
Nearly two decades of recurring attacks expose a troubling gap between constitutional principle and lived reality. Political rhetoric has at times compounded that gap. Proposals to limit the proportion of foreign workers that companies may employ risk reinforcing precisely the narrative that anti-migrant movements seek to promote—that migrants, rather than structural failures, are the country’s principal economic problem.
The state is therefore confronted not with evidence of official complicity, but with a test of institutional credibility.
Its responsibility is not merely to condemn violence after it occurs.
It is to ensure that constitutional protections are experienced equally by everyone living under its jurisdiction.
The Verdict
South Africa’s future will not be secured through mob justice, collective punishment or the politics of exclusion.
Crime must be confronted wherever it exists. Drug trafficking must be prosecuted without fear or favour. Violent confraternity networks must be dismantled without regard to nationality or ethnicity.
But justice cannot survive if nationality becomes evidence.
Nor can constitutional democracy endure if suspicion replaces proof.
The honest version of this story is neither tidy nor politically convenient.
Criminality within sections of migrant communities is real.
So too is the political machinery that converts isolated wrongdoing into collective guilt.
This week’s demonstrations—and the more than 900 arrests that followed—illustrate how efficiently that machinery now operates.
Between the fragments of truth contained in the migrant-crime narrative and the sweeping conclusions drawn from them lies a dangerous political space.
It is there that fear hardens into prejudice.
Prejudice matures into policy.
Policy gives way to exclusion.
And exclusion, left unchecked, eventually returns as violence.
History has seldom been kind to societies that chose scapegoats over solutions.
South Africa still has time to choose differently.