Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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Every discussion about migrants arriving in South Africa ought to be accompanied by an equally serious discussion about the conditions that pushed them to leave Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or elsewhere. Migration is rarely an act of whim.
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Calls to bar South African artists from performing in Nigeria or Ghana have become an increasingly familiar response whenever diplomatic tensions flare between Africa’s leading cultural powers. More recently, some Nigerians and other Africans have called for boycotts of South African products, musicians and performers as retaliation for recurring Afrophobic violence in South Africa. These campaigns are presented as acts of justice – a defence of African dignity through economic and cultural exclusion.
The anger is understandable. Images of foreign-owned shops looted, African migrants assaulted and communities terrorised have travelled across the globe, leaving many Africans asking how a country whose liberation depended so profoundly on continental solidarity could turn against fellow Africans. South Africa deserves serious criticism. Afrophobic violence is real. It has claimed lives, destroyed livelihoods and diminished the moral authority South Africa earned through its liberation struggle. It cannot be denied, rationalised or excused. Yet, moral outrage should not become selective memory.
The growing tendency to cast South Africa as Africa’s singular offender obscures a more uncomfortable truth. Nearly every African state has, at one point or another, abandoned the Pan-African ideal when confronted with domestic political pressure, economic crisis or electoral expediency. If South Africa must reckon honestly with its failures – and it must – then the rest of the continent must be willing to do the same.
History, after all, has a longer memory than social media.
Long before Nigeria expelled Ghanaians during the economic crisis of the 1980s, Ghana itself had established the precedent. In 1969, Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia’s Aliens Compliance Order compelled hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants – predominantly Nigerians, but also migrants from Togo, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Côte d’Ivoire, Niger and elsewhere – to leave Ghana within two weeks. It remains one of post-independence Africa’s earliest and largest expulsions of African migrants.
That episode matters not because one injustice excuses another, but because it demonstrates that migration has repeatedly exposed the contradictions between Pan-African rhetoric and national politics. The same lesson echoes today. While Ghana has rightly criticised South Africa’s failures, it has also attracted international scrutiny for cooperating with the United States in receiving third-country deportees under Washington’s controversial deportation programme. Human rights organisations have questioned the conditions under which some deportees were detained and later transferred, raising concerns about compliance with international refugee law and the principle of non-refoulement.
Whether one supports or opposes Ghana’s policy is almost beside the point. The larger lesson is that migration governance is rarely morally uncomplicated. Botswana also has on several occasions tried to send Zimbabweans back to their own country under domestic political pressures. Ugandan history is also replete with these incidents against other African and Indian nationals. Governments that invoke Pan-African solidarity frequently discover that domestic politics, vested interests, diplomatic alliances, economic interests and security calculations complicate their ideals. No African government has navigated these tensions flawlessly. The point, therefore, is not to establish a hierarchy of hypocrisy. South Africa’s failures do not absolve other African countries, nor do its internal contradictions excuse them.
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Migrants become convenient symbols onto whom broader social failures are projected.
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South Africa’s recurring Afrophobic violence, meanwhile, is too often explained solely through the language of prejudice. That explanation is necessary, but insufficient. Its deeper roots lie in chronic unemployment, collapsing municipalities, staggering inequality, failing public services, organised crime and widespread political disillusionment. More than three decades after apartheid, millions remain trapped in conditions of insecurity while the promises of democracy appear increasingly distant. When governments fail to provide employment, housing, education, healthcare and public safety, public frustration inevitably seeks visible targets. Migrants become convenient symbols onto whom broader social failures are projected. Politicians often find it easier to redirect public anger toward foreigners than to confront corruption, state incapacity or economic stagnation.
This does not excuse Afrophobia, but explains why it recurs. The tragedy is therefore double, because African migrants become victims of violence, while poor South Africans remain imprisoned within the conditions that generated their frustration in the first place. Neither group benefits. Only failed and failing governance survives and flourishes in Africa, because we refuse to talk about the elephant in the room. Africans are often reluctant to address this, because it unsettles comfortable political narratives. But the elephantine question stands: Why do so many Africans feel compelled to leave home in the first place?
Every discussion about migrants arriving in South Africa ought to be accompanied by an equally serious discussion about the conditions that pushed them to leave Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia or elsewhere. Migration is rarely an act of whim. More often, it is a referendum on the governance that people are leaving behind. People rarely leave functioning societies en masse. They leave collapsing societies, mismanaged economies, shrinking opportunities, political repression, insecurity and institutional failure. Why are so many African states replete with all this? The answer about former and still extant economic colonisation is no longer sufficient, and frankly is fast becoming stale, especially to the youth. African leaders are themselves reprehensible in failing their own people.
To acknowledge this is not to blame migrants for migrating. It is to insist that migration is frequently evidence of deeper governance failures that deserve equal scrutiny. For too long, African political discourse has found it easier to debate where migrants arrive than where they departed from. That imbalance serves corrupt and repressive governments remarkably well. Hence you find them suddenly finding voice to criticise Pretoria from Harare, Abuja, Accra, Kampala, etc. The receiving state is often a scapegoat for opportunistic, corrupt and oppressive African regimes. As long as we refuse to confront the structural failures that produce the crisis of migration, no real solutions will come.
The remarkable demonstrations led by Kenyan youth in recent years illustrate a different political instinct. Rather than searching for external enemies, they directed their anger towards national corruption, taxation, public accountability and the failures of their own political class. Similar impulses have emerged elsewhere around the world, like currently with the Indian youth movement of the so-called Cocroaches. Democracies improve not because neighbouring countries solve their problems, but because citizens insist that their own governments do better. No nation can permanently solve another nation’s governance crisis. Only citizens can compel accountable government at home.
To cancel South African musicians, writers or filmmakers is to misunderstand how African culture is actually produced. The continent’s creative economy no longer functions within rigid national borders. It is an intricate web of collaborations, migrations, shared investments and overlapping identities. No African creative industry demonstrates this more vividly than South Africa’s.
For decades, South Africa has welcomed artists, writers, filmmakers, academics and musicians from across the continent. Nigerians have not merely performed here; many have built enduring careers, established production companies, taught at universities, directed theatre, produced films and become indispensable contributors to South Africa’s cultural imagination.
Consider Akin Omotoso, for instance. Nigerian by birth but South African by artistic formation, Omotoso has become one of the defining filmmakers of democratic South Africa. His film The polygamist, adapted from a novel by a Zimbabwean-born writer who resides in South Africa, Sue Nyathi, perfectly illustrates contemporary African culture: a Nigerian director adapting a Zimbabwean novelist’s work through South African institutions for African and global audiences. It is difficult to imagine a more authentically Pan-African artistic collaboration.
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Men and women who have devoted decades to enriching South African culture would suddenly be judged not by their contribution, but by the first passport they happened to inherit. That would not be justice.
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Imagine, then, the logic of retaliation carried to its conclusion. If South Africans adopted the same nationalist impulse and demanded that Nigerian creatives be cancelled, artists such as Omotoso and Nyathi would become collateral damage. Men and women who have devoted decades to enriching South African culture would suddenly be judged not by their contribution, but by the first passport they happened to inherit. That would not be justice. It would be African cultural self-sabotage.
History repeatedly demonstrates that great art flourishes where ideas travel freely. The Harlem Renaissance drew creative energy from Africa and the Caribbean. Paris became the capital of modernism because it welcomed artists from everywhere. The Latin American Boom emerged because writers transcended national borders. African culture deserves the same freedom. Afrobeats belongs to Lagos, but fills stadiums in Johannesburg. South African novels are read in Accra and Nairobi. Nigerian filmmakers have helped shape South African cinema. These are not contradictions. They are evidence that African artists have already built the continental integration that African politicians still struggle to achieve.
The real question, therefore, is what kind of Africa we wish to build. One where every diplomatic disagreement produces reciprocal boycotts, expulsions and cultural barriers? Or one mature enough to learn from its own failures? South Africa must confront Afrophobia honestly. Ghana must reckon honestly with its own migration history. Nigeria must remember that its own history contains both extraordinary generosity and painful retaliation. Zimbabwe must deal decisively with the corrupt and oppressive regime of the ZANU–PF, which is robbing its youth, in particular, of a future full of economic opportunities. Those, like Guinea, who are trying to politicise soccer by staging unfounded fears of playing CAF matches in South Africa for fear of Afrophobia are also misinformed. Everyone knows that South African Afrophobia, absurd as it is, has not crossed to those ridiculous realms. And the rule of law is paramount in South Africa, which is not something you can claim about some African states that are quick to point at the speck in South Africa’s eye while ignoring the log in their own.
No African nation emerges from history morally immaculate. But every African nation can be wiser because of its history. When Africans begin cancelling one another, Africa becomes the cancelled project. The losers will not be South African musicians or Nigerian filmmakers, but us as audiences deprived of great art, young creators denied collaboration, and a continent whose greatest strength has always been its capacity to absorb, exchange and reinvent. Art and sport have always travelled farther than politics. Perhaps it is time that politics finally learned from them instead of laying on with the flea-ridden political blanket.
See also:
(Illegal) immigrants, migration and immigration: What is next?
Black African migrants are not the reason South Africa is broken
Migrant literature themes in Die wêreld van Charlie Oeng by Etienne van Heerden