South African xenophobic violence: when the state retreats, something else governs

One week ago, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights issued a statement on the violence targeting African nationals in this country. It listed the dates — 1998, 2008, 2009, 2015, 2022, 2025. It used the word vigilante. It described what is happening as a “longstanding pattern”. It noted that there has been a “grave violation” of the rights enshrined in the African Charter – a charter that South Africa helped shape and is meant to defend.

I read it twice, because of how little it needed to say.

It is a thin document. It carries no enforcement. The state it is addressed to has not yet responded meaningfully. But it does something almost no senior South African political figure has been willing to do this year: it names the thing for what it is, in language that does not flinch.

Read against that statement, the silence of much of SA’s political class, with few exceptions, becomes louder. We have been here before. Each time, the script has been the same: a flashpoint, a wave of violence, a slow response, a task team, a policy paper and then drift until the next time.

What is new in this cycle is not the violence, which is predictable. It is the openness with which the politics that produces it is being embraced.

In 2008, after at least 62 people were killed and 100,000 displaced, Thabo Mbeki refused to call what had happened xenophobia. He blamed criminals, third forces, anything but the country’s own anti-foreigner sentiment. The denial was clumsy and dishonest, but it still told you something about the politics of the time.

In 2015, when King Goodwill Zwelithini called African foreigners “lice”, there was at least the pretence of distance — expressions of regret, deployments, the language of shame.

In 2026, the distance is gone. We are in the era of the embrace.

When Limpopo Premier Phophi Ramathuba stood beside the bed of a Zimbabwean woman in pain and berated her for the cost of her treatment, she did not lose her job. She did not face censure. The video circulated. Some public figures defended her.

A lesson was learned: there is no political cost to humiliating a foreigner in public. There is political reward. That is a lesson other politicians have learned. What follows is no longer a fringe. It is a market – and it is growing.

A competition across parties for who can speak the most uncompromisingly about deportation, removal and exclusion.

‘Shoot to kill’

The Patriotic Alliance, whose leader Gayton McKenzie sits in the Cabinet of the Government of National Unity, declares in its published manifesto of 2024 that “a person within SA’s borders who did not cross the border legally is a criminal”, and proposes “mass detention camps” for processing and removal. He has also spoken, at public events, of building a wall and instructing security forces to “shoot to kill”.

ActionSA is more careful with the words but no less committed to the policy. Its manifesto calls for mass deportation. Its leader has argued for parallel justice systems for “hardened immigrant prisoners” and the stripping of healthcare and schooling access from the undocumented.

The MK Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party have joined anti-migrant marches in Johannesburg’s CBD. The latest gathered at the Gauteng Provincial Legislature only last week, where Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi received the memorandum. The protesters told him to go away. He did not get to speak.

The Democratic Alliance, for its part, has until recently avoided the overt language of expulsion. But its Johannesburg mayoral candidate, Helen Zille, has now announced that she will deploy a special Metro Police unit to identify undocumented people and hand them to Home Affairs for deportation.

“There is nothing populist about the rule of law,” she said in March. Two years ago, her party’s post-election position favoured regularising Zimbabwe Exemption Permit holders, citing their economic contribution.

There is no longer a penalty for saying these things. There is only a penalty for refusing them.

There is a deeper danger in this politics that we should name. Some of the parties competing in this market are not only practising opportunism within the constitutional order. They are, in their stated proposals, willing to set it aside when it is politically convenient. “Shoot to kill” is not a regulatory proposal. “Mass detention camps” are not an administrative measure. These are early indications of a politics that treats constitutional protection as conditional. What is being practised on migrants is also a rehearsal.

There have been voices in trade unions, civil society and from individual political leaders that have attempted to hold a different line. They have not yet shifted the centre. The harder question is what is happening below it.

The anger is real

Some of what is coming from communities right now is more complicated than hatred. I have heard this anger directly. It is not abstract. There is the experience of clinics without medicines, of schools without sufficient teachers, of waiting for a state that does not arrive. The anger is real. The conditions are real.

And migration, when it is not governed well, does create real pressures – on services, on local economies, on already stretched systems. That is true. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But acknowledging that reality is not the same as accepting the explanation offered for it. The mistake is not the anger. It is believing the people who have told you where to direct it. The clinic queue is not long because of the migrant in front of you. You both arrived there for the same reason.

And we should be honest about who has actually been gaming the system.

The farmer who hires migrants because the law cannot reach them. The restaurant owner who pays half what the law requires because the worker cannot complain. The factory floor where citizen and migrant are kept just suspicious enough of each other to keep both wages low. The household that benefits from a labour-market arbitrage it does not have to name.

Migrants are not exploiting our economy. Our economy is exploiting them – and using their vulnerability to discipline everyone else.

Operation Dudula has been allowed to grow, through silence and tacit accommodation, into something that now performs functions the state has surrendered. It audits clinics. It patrols neighbourhoods. It decides, in practice, who belongs.

This is no longer protest. It is substitution. And it is not happening outside the state, but with its knowledge – and increasingly, with its tacit permission.

In November last year, the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Johannesburg declared Operation Dudula’s conduct unlawful, unconstitutional and xenophobic. It granted a wide-ranging interdict against the harassment of foreign nationals, the demanding of identity documents, the blocking of clinics and schools. The judgment was clear.

“Human dignity has no nationality,” the court said.

Political support

The judgment was met by political support for the very organisation it had just declared unlawful. The MK Party, the Patriotic Alliance, and members of the ANC’s Johannesburg structures publicly aligned themselves with Operation Dudula. Parties of the Government of National Unity, and structures of the governing party itself, stood with an organisation a court had just declared xenophobic, in defiance of a judgment that affirmed the constitutional rights of all people in this country.

That is the architecture of this moment made visible. And let me describe one of the people on whom it is now being practised.

They call her Mama T. She is an older woman, a refugee from Rwanda, and for years she has run a vegetable stall on a Pretoria street. She holds the permit for the trading site. She holds the documents. She is the sole carer for her adult daughter, who is disabled and cannot lift herself. When the marches started, a group of men came to her stall and told her to leave because she was a foreigner. The shock of it knocked her to the ground. She broke her leg in the fall. She has not been back to her stall since 20 April. There is no rent this month. There is no food this month. And there is no answer, yet, to the question of how she is lifting her daughter.

This is not theoretical. This is what the architecture costs, in one body, this month.

The Department of Home Affairs has now released a White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection. It presents itself as balanced – committed to constitutional rights, administrative efficiency and international obligations. And on paper, it is.

But that’s not where the logic of it really sits. It is a framework built around managing flows, borders, eligibility. The First Safe Country Principle, the relocation of asylum processes to ports of entry, the emphasis on enforcement and control. These are not incidental features. They are the organising logic of the framework.

The rights remain intact in law. What is being reorganised is access to them. There is a limit to what that logic can do. It can make systems more efficient. It can reduce backlogs. It can tighten control. But it cannot address the conditions that have made it possible, this past year, for a woman in labour to be dragged from a maternity ward.

A more efficient Home Affairs is not the same as a more humane country. It will not lift Mama T’s daughter. It is also not the only available framework.

The African Union’s migration framework does not treat movement as a problem to be contained, but as a condition of life on this continent. It recognises what history already tells us – that mobility is woven into African economies and survival itself.

It argues for a welfare-centred approach that places dignity at the centre of policy. SA is moving in the opposite direction – towards policing and criminalisation – as though migration were the exception rather than the rule.

There is, of course, another argument that is often made at this point. That it is easy for continental bodies to speak in the idealistic language of rights and mobility, while the pressures are borne unevenly. That SA did not produce the political crises, economic failures and repression that drive people to move – and cannot be expected to resolve them.

Drivers of migration

There is truth in that. The drivers of migration across the continent are real, and they are rooted in governance failures that are not evenly distributed. And it is also true that the African Union has not always held member states to account for the conditions that push people across borders.

But none of that resolves the question SA now faces. It only sharpens it. Because the issue is no longer whether migration should be happening. Migration is happening. The question is how it is governed — and what is allowed to take its place when governance fails.

What is the opposite of stateless? The White Paper defines statelessness carefully. In law, the opposite is the citizen. But that assumes a state that functions.

Ask the young man in Diepsloot what his citizenship buys him. Ask the pensioner whose grant arrives late. Ask the worker whose wages no longer stretch. They are recognised. They are documented. And yet the state has, in the ways that matter, ceased to make life liveable. The law has a name for statelessness. It does not yet have a name for this.

What has changed in this cycle is that the people who hold the line are now being targeted. The Socio-Economic Rights Institute (Seri), the law firm that represented the applicants in the case that produced last November’s interdict, has itself been the subject of protests at its offices since the judgment. Operation Dudula and its allies have organised pickets there. They have characterised Seri as the enemy of South Africans for defending the constitutional rights of migrants.

Lawyers for Human Rights has had to close legal clinics that serve refugees on more than one occasion, for the safety of staff. The UN refugee agency’s offices in this country have themselves been targeted by demonstrations. Individuals who articulate solidarity in public – academics, advocates, ordinary citizens – are dragged online in coordinated ways.

The cost of being publicly on the side of the migrant has gone up. It used to be unfashionable. It is now, in some quarters, dangerous. A migrant-rights advocate I know attended an emergency meeting called by the UN refugee agency. Civil society arrived expecting a plan.

There was none. Testimony was taken. And then silence. She left more uncertain than she arrived.

The harassment of solidarity is not incidental to this moment. It is part of how the moment has been constructed. It is not enough for the architecture to manufacture a politics. It must also make the alternative expensive.

The failure to govern migration properly is real. Its consequences are visible. But what we are living through now is not a response to that failure. It is something else built on top of it. Something more dangerous because it replaces governance with unelected power.

A political solution

What is required now is not primarily technical. No policy paper will resolve this. What is required is political. A state that governs rather than deflects. Enforcement that is lawful and not outsourced. Consequences for those who collude with mob authority.

And something else. A form of leadership we have not yet seen in this moment.

Spaces where the anger in communities, the fear among migrants, and the failures of the state can be confronted together – not performed, not weaponised, but worked through.

We know what this can look like, because we have done it before. In 2008, and again in 2015, when the violence broke, a coalition stood. Civil society organisations, trade unions, churches, neighbourhood committees. Communities mobilised humanitarian support for migrants displaced by the violence. Social cohesion initiatives multiplied. Community leaders and social institutions worked, sometimes at real risk, to bring people back into proximity with one another. The state had to be pushed to act. It was pushed.

That coalition is not as loud now as it was then. Some of its institutions have weakened. Some of its members are tired. The cost of speaking has gone up. But the precedent is real, and it is recent. We are not being asked to invent what holding the line looks like. We are being asked to remember.

Because without that, the only dialogue we are left with is the one already unfolding – in queues, at clinic doors, and in the quiet escalation of who gets to decide.

These moments do not arrive as a single rupture. They accumulate – in language, in policy, in what is tolerated. They settle into the ordinary. They settle in the stall that has not reopened, in the rent that is not paid.

This country knows what it means to be asked for papers to justify your presence. We are not only turning on migrants. We are rehearsing, again, how to deny each other.

We are no longer only debating migration. We are deciding what kind of authority we are willing to accept when the state retreats. What kind of order we are prepared to live under when formal systems fail.

Because when the state stops governing, governance does not disappear. It is taken up by whoever is willing to exercise it.

The state has stepped back. Someone else has stepped in. The danger is not only what we are saying about migrants. It is what we are learning to accept about each other.

And once that line shifts, it does not easily move back. DM