SA’s colonial hangover: Demonising Africans while courting wealthy Westerners

South Africa has cultivated a peculiar hierarchy of foreignness. Among a large segment of society and some political parties, the Zimbabwean gardener, the Malawian labourer, the Mozambican construction worker and the Congolese shopkeeper are denounced as invaders consuming scarce resources. They are blamed for unemployment, overcrowded clinics, strained infrastructure and rising crime. Political opportunists inflame the hysteria with slogans about foreigners “taking our jobs”, while periodic eruptions of violence descend upon vulnerable African migrants whose only crime is attempting to survive. Yet another class of foreigner moves through South Africa with almost complete immunity from scrutiny.

They arrive from Europe, the US and, increasingly, Israel and the Middle East, carrying powerful passports, remote incomes and the confidence of people accustomed to moving through the world without restriction. They settle into Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard, transform neighbourhoods into short-term rental zones while living lives insulated from the economic realities surrounding them. Many could not remotely afford in London, Amsterdam, New York, Dubai or Tel Aviv the lifestyles they casually enjoy in South Africa. The economic arithmetic is simple. Salaries earned in dollars, euros and pounds purchase extraordinary privilege when converted into rands. Domestic labour becomes cheap. Luxury apartments become attainable. Fine dining becomes routine. The ordinary middle-class Westerner suddenly acquires the lifestyle of a colonial elite. The elite in South Africa applaud this as sophistication.

South African xenophobia is not fundamentally about foreigners. It is about which foreigners are deemed worthy.

Entire communities increasingly resemble enclaves for transient Western residency. Long-term rentals vanish into the machinery of Airbnb. Property prices soar beyond the reach of ordinary South Africans. Young professionals born in Cape Town cannot compete against foreign currency earners treating the city as a scenic arbitrage opportunity. Families in places like Bo-Kaap are quietly displaced while estate agents and landlords celebrate “international demand”. The economic distortions are profound, yet remarkably absent from serious public discourse. The reason is uncomfortable. South African xenophobia is not fundamentally about foreigners. It is about which foreigners are deemed worthy.

The poor African migrant encounters suspicion because that migrant competes visibly within spaces of black economic desperation. Such migrants ride the same taxis, work in the same informal markets and queue at the same public hospitals. Their presence is immediate and therefore politically useful as a target of resentment. The European, American, Emirati or Israeli expatriate, by contrast, arrives wrapped in the aura of Western and Middle Eastern prestige, whiteness, wealth and global mobility. That foreignness is romanticised as cosmopolitanism. Such consumption patterns are celebrated as investment. Their presence inflates local prices while simultaneously being marketed as proof that South Africa is “world class”.

There is a deeper irony here. Many of the same voices who denounce impoverished African migrants as threats to sovereignty enthusiastically welcome affluent foreigners whose actual footprint on local housing markets and urban inequality is vastly greater. This critique is not directed at every foreign resident individually, but at a political and economic structure that rewards affluent foreign consumption while targeting African poverty.

Entire sections of Cape Town function less as communities rooted in national life than as lifestyle satellites for transient Western privilege.

This contradiction becomes even more morally uncomfortable when one considers that South Africa, despite its anti-apartheid legacy and its case before the International Court of Justice concerning Gaza, increasingly attracts affluent visitors and temporary residents from countries closely associated with systems of global power and conflict, including Israel and other Middle Eastern countries at war. Yet public anxiety remains overwhelmingly directed not at affluent global mobility and speculative foreign consumption, but at impoverished African migrants struggling for survival. The contrast reveals how selectively South African society interprets foreignness, legitimacy and belonging.

Perhaps the greatest scandal in all of this is the posture of the ANC government itself. A governing party that sermonises endlessly about transformation, equality and anticolonial solidarity has displayed astonishing passivity towards this new architecture of economic displacement. Ministers speak endlessly about xenophobia when poor Africans are attacked, and rightly so, yet remain almost silent about the distortions created by affluent Western migration and speculative foreign consumption. The silence is revealing. The ANC appears terrified of confronting wealthy Western and Middle East interests, property developers, tourism operators and the Airbnb economy that increasingly reshapes urban South Africa for foreign appetites rather than local needs. The result is a form of recolonisation unfolding under the language of investment, tourism and global integration.

Entire sections of Cape Town increasingly feel economically detached from South Africa itself. They function less as communities rooted in national life than as lifestyle satellites for transient Western privilege. The waiter serving cocktails in Camps Bay often cannot dream of living within 30km of the establishment where that waiter works.

Housing is not merely a commodity. Cities are not theme parks for transient foreign consumption.

What makes this posture especially disgraceful is that the ANC government possesses no shortage of regulatory tools. Around the world, governments confronting housing crises and speculative foreign ownership have increasingly recognised that unrestricted global capital can hollow out local housing communities.

Parts of Ontario and British Columbia introduced substantial foreign buyer taxes aimed at cooling speculative purchases and protecting local housing markets. London has imposed aggressive taxes on vacant high-end properties and scrutinised offshore ownership structures that turned sections of the city into safety deposit boxes for global wealth rather than functioning communities. Australia has imposed restrictions and review requirements on foreign residential purchases, particularly involving existing homes, while several municipalities have targeted speculative vacancy practices. Barcelona has aggressively moved against Airbnb saturation and short-term rental conversions that were displacing residents and distorting neighbourhoods into tourist corridors. Even parts of Switzerland have long maintained stringent restrictions on foreign ownership of residential property in order to preserve local access to housing and prevent speculative distortions.

These governments understand something the ANC appears unwilling to confront: housing is not merely a commodity. Cities are not theme parks for transient foreign consumption. A nation cannot sustain social cohesion while sections of its urban centres become investment playgrounds for people whose economic relationship to the country is fundamentally temporary and extractive. South Africa could impose meaningful taxes on short-term speculative property ownership. It could regulate Airbnb saturation. It could introduce visa structures requiring genuine economic contribution beyond consumption. It could prioritise housing protections for local residents. Instead, the government does virtually nothing.

South Africa finds itself trapped in a strange moral contradiction. It condemns vulnerability while accommodating privilege.

It is easier politically to allow anger to descend upon vulnerable African migrants than to confront affluent Westerners armed with purchasing power, international status and proximity to elite economic networks. The powerless become convenient targets. The privileged become protected guests. And still, the public fury remains directed overwhelmingly at the undocumented Zimbabwean fruit seller rather than the affluent foreign speculator reshaping entire neighbourhoods. The contrast exposes the intellectual incoherence of South Africa’s immigration discourse. If the concern were genuinely pressure on resources, housing and employment, then affluent foreign consumption and property speculation would occupy the centre of the national debate. If the concern were sovereignty, then the country would interrogate the long-term implications of becoming a playground economy for transient Western privilege.

But South Africa’s anxieties are filtered through older psychological inheritances. Wealthy Western presence continues to be interpreted as validation. Poor African migration continues to be interpreted as contamination. This is colonial residue masquerading as nationalism. A nation born from resistance to hierarchy now risks reproducing its own hierarchy of human worth. The African foreigner is treated as disposable. The affluent Westerner is treated as aspirational.

South Africa therefore finds itself trapped in a strange moral contradiction. It condemns vulnerability while accommodating privilege. It lashes out at the powerless while flattering the globally mobile. And until that contradiction is confronted honestly, xenophobia in South Africa will remain what it too often already is: not patriotism, but selective resentment shaped by class, race and lingering colonial psychology. DM