Roots of xenophobia: Before ‘Abahambe’ there were AmaMpondo and Amankula

When I was growing up, the first “strange” people I inherited from village folklore were the AmaMpondo.

I first met them not in books, politics or lecture halls, but during cattle herding. They entered my childhood world as figures of ridicule. I was told they spoke funny. I was told they were different. Later, when I could walk longer distances, I came face to face with AmaMpondo, who were cane cutters — hard, lowly work in the eyes of those who had the luxury of laughing. In truth, they were dressed up in crazy ways and worked like machines.

The stereotype appeared to confirm itself.

Then came Amankula (a derogatory term) for South Africans of Indian origin.

The story was always told with great comic detail. You would go into a shop to buy trousers. One Indian would hold the trousers from behind. When you turned back, another would pull them from the front. By the time you left, you had bought trousers twice your size. The message was that Indians are cunning. Beware!

We laughed until our lungs surrendered.

There was also onqingile (derogatory term for non-heterosexual people), the strange being said to have both female and male genitalia. Nobody explained anything. Nobody needed to. The point was not understanding. The point was a warning. There were normal people, and then there were those beings. My village had encountered gay, lesbian and queer people, but chose to be ignorant about them, to feed the narrative of othering, strange people.

Then came white boy excellence.

Back in the village, a brilliant move in umlabalaba (traditional Zulu board game) would often earn the highest compliment available: “Udlale njengomlungu”. You played like a white boy. Excellence had been given a race. Skill had been colonised before we even knew the word colonialism.

Enter Amakwerekwere — the derogatory term for foreigners.

Yes, there were already “foreigners” in my village of eHabeni, Eshowe, in northern KwaZulu-Natal, in the 1980s. Except life was more complicated than the label. The family itself was blended: Mokoena, a Mosotho woman, was married to Zungu, a Zulu man. Her crime, apparently, was that she spoke “funnily” — kwerekwere. And so, even before we understood borders, papers or migration policy, we had already learned how to turn an accent into suspicion.

In 1993, at the tertiary level, the world began dismantling the miseducation of my childhood. I admit I was mis-educated — and, with some irony, I blame the correction on the “funny” white education I received at the formerly whites-only Technikon Natal, now Durban University of Technology.

There, I met an iMpondo Comrade. He was well-dressed, sharp, politically conscious, and articulate. His English was exceptional, except for the accent I had been trained to hear as funny. One evening, relaxed among ANC Comrades, I repeated the AmaMpondo stories from my village.

He did not perform outrage.

He explained.

Calmly, he spoke about scapegoating, about divide and rule, about the old habit of turning one oppressed group into entertainment for another. That night, AmaMpondo stopped being a joke and became people.

That same year, I became friends with an Indian woman.

I told her the trousers story.

She laughed, then told me the story had travelled for decades, including inside Indian communities themselves. It was a legend. Folklore. A joke with no original witness, no victim, no evidence, but enormous staying power.

Again, the monster became human.

Then, also at Technikon Natal, a white boy failed in our class.

I was horrified. Totally inconsolable.

How does a white boy fail? I had been raised on the village gospel that excellence belonged to him. Yet there he was, failed like some of us, stripped of mythology by a mark on a page.

In 1994, another inherited certainty collapsed when I was introduced to the concept of non-homophobia. Until then, onqingile had lived in my mind as a strange being, a warning, a joke, a creature of whispered village certainty. Suddenly, there were words, politics, rights, dignity and human beings where there had once been only ridicule.

Only later did I understand that my childhood had been a classroom in scapegoating.

According to French philosopher René Girard’s theory of scapegoating, communities under stress often channel their fears and frustrations on to a chosen victim. The accusation matters less than the social function it performs: the scapegoat comes to embody what the community fears, resents or does not understand.

AmaMpondo carried backwardness.

Amankula carried cunning.

Onqingile carried sexual fear.

The white boy carried stolen excellence.

The Mokoena woman carried the burden of alleged foreignness.

None of these stories required evidence. They required repetition.

South African-born sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” to describe how societies exaggerate threats and turn certain groups into folk devils. A community identifies a target, loads that figure with danger, and then mistakes fear for truth. Once the story settles, every example appears to confirm it.

Then life interrupts.

American psychologist Gordon Allport argued that prejudice weakens through meaningful contact. That is what happened to me: cattle herding, Technikon Natal, friendship, failure and politics introduced me to the people my village had reduced to stories.

This is why I am cautious when I hear today’s grand story: illegal immigrants broke South Africa.

They took the jobs. They brought the drugs. They traffic women and children. They rape. They own spaza shops. They steal futures. They are the reason our country is broken.

I am not persuaded that March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s claim — that illegal immigrants are the alpha and omega of South Africa’s brokenness — is backed by facts. It is hysteria rather than evidence, performance rather than activism.

As we have seen with Herman Mashaba of ActionSA and Gayton McKenzie of the Patriotic Alliance, who invented the phrase “Abahambe,” the end goal is often state power; the real, existing global immigration crisis becomes a convenient political ruse.

Facts are stubborn. According to North-West University, citing World Prison Brief statistics, South Africa had about 166,000 inmates as of July 2025 — 37.3% were pre-trial detainees, and about 15% of all prisoners were foreign nationals — meaning roughly 85% were South African.

The question is not whether wrongdoing exists.

The question is whether a whole people can be turned into an explanation.

I have heard this song before.

It was sung about AmaMpondo.

It was sung about Amankula.

It was whispered about onqingile.

It was disguised as praise when excellence was handed to the white boy.

It can take years to separate fact from folklore. Sometimes it takes a comrade, a friend, a failed white classmate, or a political education to rescue you from the stories that raised you.

I was lucky. So were my victims. They met me before folklore hardened into conviction, and conviction into hatred. The Malawian national stoned to death at Jika Joe in Pietermaritzburg last Friday was not so lucky. He died in the shadow of the March and March protests, where a political story about foreigners had already blurred the line between grievance and vigilantism. DM