AIDC Statement on the Rising Tide of Afrophobia and Xenophobia in South Africa

2026-06-11 

by AIDC

The Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) is gravely concerned at the spread of Afrophobic and xenophobic sentiment gripping large parts of South African society.

Opportunistic organisations such as “March and March” and Operation Dudula have mobilised communities across the country in ways that deepen dangerous divisions, not only between South Africans and foreign nationals living among us, but within our communities themselves. These are not spontaneous eruptions of popular anger. They are organised, directed, and deliberately stoked. But they have found a receptive audience: people so worn down by poverty that they needed only a spark to set them alight.

Let us be very clear: AIDC rejects March and March, its leadership, and everything they represent. We will give no quarter to their reactionary politics. No softening of language is appropriate here, no “engaging with their concerns” that is not, in the end, a legitimisation of hatred. They are doing the work of reaction, and we name them as such.

We must ask who is funding, supporting and organising these mobilisations. They are not simply spontaneous expressions of working-class frustration, but carefully built campaigns linked to wider right-wing networks.

In South Africa, as in many other countries, sections of big business and wealthy, politically connected individuals help drive these campaigns. Figures such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the United States, and Nigel Farage in Britain, understand that when people are encouraged to fear and blame migrants, they are less likely to question the economic system that creates inequality and concentrates wealth and power.

Anti-immigrant politics is often promoted not by ordinary people alone, but by politicians, media commentators, influential sections of the press and even academics who give credibility to the idea of the “dangerous migrant”. When a person’s nationality is repeatedly highlighted in stories about crime or social problems, a powerful message is reinforced: migrant equals criminal; foreigner equals threat.

We urge journalists, civil society organisations and the public to look closely at who is promoting these narratives, who benefits from them, and whose interests they ultimately serve.

International experience teaches us that divisions sown today do not simply dissolve once the immediate crisis passes. They become embedded in the social and political fabric, serving as the foundation on which reactionary and right-wing politics are built over the long term. We are already witnessing this trajectory in South Africa. Parties such as Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party, the Patriotic Alliance, and ActionSA increasingly give organised political expression to these sentiments, normalising hostility toward African migrants and positioning xenophobic nationalism as a legitimate electoral platform. The ANC, too, is following suit; many of its officials, including the President, now speak the same language, conveniently blaming foreign nationals for the ills of our society.

We must also confront, directly and without equivocation, a troubling development within our own movement. There are progressive leaders in trade unions and other mass organisations, people who should know better,  who have succumbed to the idea that foreign nationals and undocumented migrants are the main perpetrators of crime, violence, drug trafficking, and the sexual exploitation of young women and girls. This is not merely mistaken. It is false and dangerous.

The facts do not support it. The evidence on those convicted of violent crime, rape, drug trafficking, and the trafficking of young women overwhelmingly shows these crimes to be committed by South African citizens, people themselves brutalised and discarded by this society and this economy. For example, the Institute for Security Studies notes that only 7,5% of people in South African prisons were foreign nationals. To point this out is not to deny anyone’s suffering or to pretend that crime is somehow not real. It is to insist that we follow the evidence rather than the scapegoat.

For scapegoating is precisely what this is. When we blame foreign nationals, and now, increasingly, “undocumented migrants” for crime and for every social ill, we forget the real architecture of our suffering. We forget the crimes of transnational capital and imperialism, which loot our resources in partnership with local elites, such as mining companies that misdeclare their exports to avoid taxes, or tech companies like Uber that replace decent work with casual gig-economy labour. We forget the policies of liberalisation and privatisation pursued by every party that has held power, from the ANC to the DA to the IFP, without exception, that made this looting possible. And we let the scapegoaters train their fire on the small shopkeeper in the township while the big supermarket chains, which exploit workers through casualisation, price fixing and profiteering, escape all scrutiny.

We should be honest, too, about how that “illegality” is manufactured in the first place: many migrants entered the country legally and were rendered undocumented by the dysfunction and hostility of Home Affairs, applications lost, permits delayed, people made “illegal” by bureaucratic exclusion rather than by any act of their own. Progressive leaders who repeat these myths, however unwittingly, provide cover for a reactionary mobilisation that will ultimately be turned against the very communities and movements they claim to serve. We urge them, in the strongest possible terms, to come to their senses.

Let us be clear about where this road leads. The focus on “illegal immigrants” and the “undocumented” is the thin edge of the wedge. It begins with papers and ends with skin: today’s target is the migrant without documents, tomorrow’s is every African and every dark-skinned foreign national in the country, papers or none. We are almost there already.

And we must notice precisely which “foreign national” is being targeted through these orchestrated campaigns. It is not the rich, white foreigner who buys up property along the Atlantic Seaboard, rendering Cape Town a playground for the rich and the elite. No march descends on Clifton or Camps Bay to demand that they “go home”. The targets are the poor and the Black, the Zimbabwean vendor, the Malawian gardener, and the Somali trader. That selectivity tells us everything: this was never about foreignness as such. It is about race and class.

The logic of the purge does not stop at the border of legality, because it was never really about legality. And the same poison does not stop at the national border either. The xenophobia being stoked today is already emboldening a narrower tribalism within South Africa itself, a rising Zulu nationalism that will, if left unchallenged, find its mirror in Xhosa and other ethnic mobilisations. The hatred that begins by dividing South Africans from foreigners will not hesitate to divide South Africans from South Africans. Soon, half of the population will be accused of staying in the wrong place and intimidated by a mob to “go home”. The current campaign against foreigners is the road to communal fracture, and we have seen on this continent and beyond where it ends: civil war.

This is the tragedy of how far we have travelled. There was a time when our movements spoke the language of Pan-African unity, when South Africa’s freedom was understood as bound up with the freedom of the whole continent, and the peoples who sheltered our exiles and bled for our liberation were our comrades, not our competitors. What has become of that vision in the face of neocolonialism? What has become of our solidarity with the peoples of this continent ravaged by global capital, by debt and extraction, and now by a climate emergency they did not cause and cannot escape? The Zimbabwean street vendor, the Ethiopian shopkeeper, the Somali trader fleeing collapse and persecution, these are not the authors of our misery. They are, like us, its victims, displaced by the very forces that impoverish us all.

There is a deeper hypocrisy here that we must name. Across Africa, governments rush to sign the African Continental Free Trade Area, opening the borders wide for the free movement of capital and goods, yet they refuse to ratify the protocols that would guarantee the free movement of African people. Capital may cross every border at will; the worker and the poor are criminalised for doing the same. The struggle against Afrophobia is therefore also a struggle for the free movement of people across Southern Africa and the continent, and against the hardening of the colonial borders that were drawn to divide us in the first place.

AIDC fully recognises the conditions that have made ordinary people susceptible to this politics of division. Mass unemployment, extreme poverty, collapsing public services, and savage inequality have shredded the social fabric of poor and working-class communities across this country. Land and wealth remain concentrated in the hands of a small minority more than three decades after apartheid’s formal end. The suffering is real, the frustration legitimate, the resentment deep. We do not dismiss or minimise these conditions for a single moment. We recognise, too, the emotional wound of a failed national project, the unfulfilled aspiration of a South African nationhood that might have filled our people with pride and dignity. But attacking and scapegoating others is no road to building a united nation.

We must name what is happening: this suffering is being weaponised. The anger that belongs at the door of neoliberal capitalism and the politicians who have failed the people is being deliberately redirected toward foreign nationals, people who themselves are fleeing poverty, persecution, and precarity, and who share the very hardships of the South African poor.

We need to remember that the very people who claim – sometimes apologetically – that “we” cannot afford a living wage and that there is no money for the health, housing, transport and education consistent with the guarantees of our Constitution are amongst the 1% of our population – 647,000 people out of a population of 64.7 million – who own 54.9% of all household wealth. Members of our government belong to this 1%.

Yet, despite the hardship of life in the world’s most unequal society, the daily life of our communities is richer and more hopeful than the headlines admit. Migrant-owned spaza shops survive precisely because they serve needs the big chains ignore: affordable goods close to home, credit extended to families in hard months, relationships of trust built over years. And against every wave of violence, there have been acts of profound solidarity: South Africans who have sheltered and disguised their migrant neighbours, protected them from the mob, organised alongside them for housing and services. This solidarity is not an abstraction. It grows from shared struggle, mutual care, and the ordinary human bonds of people who survive together. It is the ground on which we must build.

AIDC will do everything in its power to support the struggle against Afrophobia and xenophobia. We will help organise and mobilise in communities, in workplaces, and in alliance with progressive formations across the country around the real causes of the suffering working people endure: a capitalist system and a neoliberal policy framework that, since 1994, have entrenched inequality, hollowed out the state, and denied millions the means of a dignified life. We will not do this by lecturing communities abstractly about Pan-Africanism, but by fusing struggles, making the fight against evictions, unemployment, and austerity one that consciously includes migrants rather than setting them apart as a separate humanitarian category.

We urge progressive organisations, trade unions, faith communities, and civil society formations and individuals to:

Actively resist Afrophobic and xenophobic mobilisation in their communities and workplaces;

Reject without compromise the framing that attributes crime and social breakdown to foreign nationals, and reject equally the tribalist mobilisations this politics breeds among South Africans themselves;

Fight the super-exploitation and poverty wages of all workers, documented or undocumented;

Build unity across nationality and ethnic lines among working-class and poor communities, and fuse the struggles of migrants and locals around their shared conditions;

Expose and challenge the political and business interests driving these divisions;

Reclaim the vision of Pan-African solidarity, demanding the free movement of people across the continent, and building cross-border alliances against the capital that already moves freely across every border;

Invest in political education and cultural work, especially among the youth, so that solidarity is taught as deliberately as division is.

Faisal Garba, in a recent Amandla article, argues that the key issue is not whether migrants should be allowed in South Africa, but whether we will allow elites and political opportunists to create divisions among ordinary people while the systems that keep us in poverty remain unaddressed. We agree with him that the solution to Afrophobia does not lie in stricter borders or harsher exclusion. Instead, it lies in fostering solidarity, justice, and a genuinely liberating Pan-African political approach.