I have always felt like an exile at home. I did not gently enter this world after leaving, without consent, the enchanted kingdom of plenty and pure bliss: my mother’s womb. No. I was unleashed, wailing, into dust, hunger and disappointment, my tiny feet too frail for the stubbornness of a home birth.
My second exile began in 1993, when I left my village of Habeni in Eshowe, northern KwaZulu-Natal, to study in Durban. I was escaping cattle herding, Inkatha leader Gatsha Buthelezi, village labour and the spectacle of bulls mounting cows with the casual arrogance of rural life.
By 1996, I was exiled again, this time to Inanda, KwaDube, north of Durban, then an informal settlement. I had fluffed my chance of higher education at the white Technikon Natal. Apartheid education had not prepared me for the rigour.
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On both occasions, South Africans did not rescue me. Foreign nationals did.
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Throughout these exiles, homelessness visited me more times than I care to count. I remember two moments when I flirted with it, in 1999 and again in 2001. On both occasions, South Africans did not rescue me. Foreign nationals did.
Ziggy, a Namibian student, invited me to share his bed in a Durban block of flats called Corlo Court when I had nowhere to stay. Percy, another Namibian, became like a brother to me. I contributed R100 towards food, while others (Namibians) covered the rest because they acted where my own country had failed. Later, German taxpayers paid part of my journalism tuition through the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung scholarship, an award based on academic performance and financial need. At some point, a white woman who could not pronounce “ubuntu” offered me shelter.
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At some point, a white woman who could not pronounce “ubuntu” offered me shelter.
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This is why the migration debate does not arrive for me as an academic seminar, a policy note or the latest performance by political entrepreneurs hunting vain applause in the Republic of Despair. It arrives as memory.
It arrives as Ziggy moving over to make space for a broke South African. It arrives as Percy sharing food. It arrives as the sharp knowledge that, at important moments in my life, foreigners treated me with more ubuntu than the country of my birth.
And yes, it also arrives as Joe (not real name), another Namibian in the same flat, who unleashed his own wave of xenophobia against me. He ate in his bedroom. He asked no one in particular why the South African government could not take care of its poor citizens. He hated me because I was eating his Namibian lunch.
It stung. For a full year, I lived inside that question: Why could South Africa not take care of its poor? Decades later, that question remains unanswered. Instead, we have found new actors, slogans, marches, cameras and targets. We have not found new ideas. Fred Khumalo has warned in News24 that anti-foreigner protests are a ticking time bomb that can still be defused. I fear the fuse is already burning.
In practice, the immigrants being targeted are overwhelmingly black Africans: Malawians, Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Congolese, Ethiopians, Somalis and, as our history shows, the South Africans mistaken for them. In essence, this is an anti-black agenda on steroids.
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She is not the cause of South Africa’s migration crisis. She is a symptom of our poverty of ideas.
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This is where Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma enters the stage. She is not the cause of South Africa’s migration crisis. She is a symptom of our poverty of ideas: a political vacancy dressed up as civic activism, a staged performance for cameras whose bankruptcy is exceeded only by the confidence with which it presents itself as national salvation. Her March and March movement says it is not xenophobic. It says it wants immigration law enforced. Fine. A serious country must know who enters, who stays, who works, who qualifies for protection and who must be returned through lawful, humane processes.
But there is a difference between migration management and street theatre. There is a difference between a constitutional state enforcing the law and crowds marching through communities, pointing fingers at black African bodies, issuing threats, demanding papers and turning neighbours into suspects. There is a difference between policy and performance.
When Ngobese-Zuma tells supporters that some people call March and March a Zuma stokvel, and that she does not care because, after all, she is a Zuma, she may imagine this as defiance. It is not. It is a confession.
A national crisis becomes family theatre. Public fear becomes branding. Desperation becomes a stage.
She is not alone. Herman Mashaba built much of ActionSA’s political language around “anger” at undocumented foreigners. Gayton McKenzie and the Patriotic Alliance turned “illegal foreigners” into political currency. President Cyril Ramaphosa now speaks the language of tougher border control, crackdowns and enforcement, but the state too often discovers firmness only after the mob has already found its target. There is nothing brave about arriving with a microphone after the fire has been lit.
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Instead of solving those problems, politicians and pseudo-activists have found a cheaper substitute: pointing at the foreigner.
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Let us name the problem properly. South Africa has a migration management problem. But it is also trapped in a wider crisis of failed governance, mass unemployment, violent crime, municipal collapse, a dysfunctional Home Affairs system, exploitative employers and a political class that has run out of imagination. Instead of solving those problems, politicians and pseudo-activists have found a cheaper substitute: pointing at the foreigner.
The foreigner becomes the receipt for every failed promise. Can Home Affairs not perform its duties? Blame the foreigner. Can municipalities not collect rubbish? Blame the foreigner. Are clinics overcrowded? Blame the foreigner. Are jobs scarce? Blame the foreigner. Is crime terrifying communities? Blame the foreigner. This is not courage. It is cowardice with a loudspeaker.
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This is not courage. It is cowardice with a loudspeaker.
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We have seen where this road leads. In 2008, 62 people were killed in xenophobic violence, including 21 South Africans. Even when the mob thinks it is hunting foreigners, South Africans die, too. Xenowatch, which monitors xenophobic discrimination in South Africa, currently records more than 1 300 incidents since 1994, with more than 128 000 people displaced and 698 deaths.
In 2021, 354 people died during the July unrest, ostensibly over the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma. But that violence quickly became something larger and uglier: looting, vigilantism, racial fear, score-settling, opportunistic killing and the collapse of public order. Every outbreak arrives wrapped in an excuse. The dead never get to debate the slogan.
Do not get me started on the pre-1994 killing frenzy in the name of politics. What fucken politics? We killed in the name of liberation. We killed in the name of counter-revolution. We killed in the name of law and order. We killed in the name of the people.
Now we threaten to kill in the name of borders. Why do we always find an excuse to kill? The answer, I fear, is that killing gives failed politics the illusion of purpose. It gives unemployed men the feeling of power. It gives demagogues an audience. It gives cowards a crowd. It gives the state an excuse to look shocked.
This matters because a country that normalises the public humiliation of black African migrants is not only endangering migrants. It is training itself to accept mob power. Today, the mob demands papers from Malawians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Congolese and other black Africans. Tomorrow, it will demand proof of belonging from South Africans with the wrong surname, wrong accent, wrong skin tone, wrong politics or wrong address. Once violence becomes a language of citizenship, nobody is safe.
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If Home Affairs is corrupt, fix Home Affairs. If borders are mismanaged, manage them. If a crime is committed, investigate and prosecute it.
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This is why the argument that “we only want the law enforced” is not enough. Law enforcement belongs to a constitutional state, not to mobs. If a person is undocumented, there is a legal process. If an employer exploits undocumented labour, punish the employer. If Home Affairs is corrupt, fix Home Affairs. If borders are mismanaged, manage them. If a crime is committed, investigate and prosecute it. But do not finger the poor black African foreigner and call it justice. South Africa has a debt it pretends not to remember.
Johannesburg was built on migrant labour. Men came from across the region to dig gold, carry the economy on their backs and sleep in compounds while others built fortunes. During the struggle against apartheid, South African exiles found shelter, training and political protection in African countries that owed us nothing but gave us solidarity. Now, with astonishing historical amnesia, we speak of African migrants as if they arrived yesterday to steal a country built without them.
Yet this is the elephant in the room we refuse to confront: the deeper historical grievance of colonialism and apartheid. Those who built and benefited from that order pillaged, plundered, stole land and minerals, exploited African labour, raped women and killed men in countless wars. Today, many live in peace, while poor black Africans are turned into the face of national failure. I am not advocating revenge. I am asking for nuance.
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Migration did not break South Africa. It helped make it.
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Migration did not break South Africa. It helped make it. What broke it was bad governance, corruption, economic stagnation, municipal decay, a schooling system that still reproduces inequality, and the failure to imagine a state both firm and humane. A serious state does not outsource sovereignty to vigilantes and anti-migrant groups, hashtags, marches and camera-ready demagogues. It governs.
The migration question requires data, not hysteria. It requires constitutional discipline, not political cosplay. It requires lawful enforcement, not street trials. It requires a state that can tell the difference between an asylum seeker, a documented migrant, an undocumented migrant, a refugee, a trader, a student and a criminal suspect. And it requires honesty from South Africans.
If Ziggy arrived today, would we call him brother or burden? If Percy offered a hungry South African student dinner today, would we thank him or demand his papers? If Joe asked again why the South African government cannot take care of its poor citizens, would we answer him honestly or shout “Abahambe”?
The tragedy of South Africa is not that we run out of reasons. It is that we never seem to run out of victims. When the smoke clears, politicians will deny responsibility. Pseudo-activists will say they only wanted law enforcement. Police will say investigations continue. Families will bury the dead. Those who warned against the violence will be called sell-outs, and the rest will move on to the next slogan. Until the next excuse.
That is not patriotism. It is standing on black African shoulders to climb into a higher office, while mistaking a poverty of ideas for activism.