Murambatsvina to Mabahambe: Xenophobia and the grammar of removal

The word came back to me in the days after the “deadline” at a temporary refugee processing centre, among bags, lists, children, volunteers, officials and buses idling outside the Home Affairs office in Cape Town.

Families arrived carrying the pieces of life they had already decided must survive whatever came next. Not everything could come. The choosing had already happened before they reached us. By then, the centre was where the consequences of that choosing gathered.

We were there doing the practical work crisis demands when institutions fail: organising, helping with food, trying to meet needs that should never have become so urgent. It was necessary work. It was also an indictment. Care at the point of departure is never the same as protection at the point of danger. Danger, here, arrived in many forms. It gathered through threats, rumours, landlords and employers protecting themselves, marchers approaching, and a state whose language had narrowed to enforcement.

The buses filled quickly and left just as fast.

Somewhere in that blur of noise, diesel and departure, an old word surfaced.

Murambatsvina.

I do not use the word because South Africa has become Zimbabwe. Nor because what is happening here is identical to what happened there. Murambatsvina was a state operation, named and owned by the Zimbabwean government. What we are witnessing in South Africa moves differently: through street politics, township fear, WhatsApp certainty, opportunistic rhetoric and the silence of officials who know what such language can do.

Two vocabularies of removal

The comparison is not between two events. It is between two vocabularies of removal.

In 2005, many of us watched Murambatsvina unfold on our televisions from across the Limpopo. Bulldozers rolling into communities. Homes falling. Traders losing, in a morning, the small economies that had held families together for years. A human rights lawyer friend who advocated for the displaced told me what it looked like from the ground: people running with whatever they could carry, and everything else disappearing into dust.

Murambatsvina. Drive out the rubbish. Clean out the filth.

The word did the violence before the bulldozers arrived. To name human survival as filth is to authorise its removal.

At the time, I understood Murambatsvina as an event. A brutal chapter in Zimbabwe’s deepening crisis. But a nation’s crisis can never be reduced to a single operation. People cross borders because of an accumulation of wounds: political repression, repeated electoral violence, economic collapse, shrinking democratic space, livelihoods destroyed, hope eroded, and a state increasingly preoccupied with entrenching its power rather than caring for its citizens. Murambatsvina did not explain why Zimbabweans left. That story was older, larger and more complicated than any single word could carry.

But Murambatsvina named something: a political imagination in which some people could be made removable before they were made homeless.

Three years after Murambatsvina, in 2008, I travelled to Zimbabwe with a group of South African and Zimbabwean feminists in the aftermath of elections and violence that had torn the country open. We went to listen, to learn, and to understand what solidarity might require across a border that has never, in any honest telling, been a simple line.

In Tsholotsho district, in Matabeleland, we sat with grandmothers raising children whose parents had left for SA, Botswana, or anywhere money had not yet become just paper. We sat with children who told us what they wanted with heartbreaking clarity: their schools back, their teachers back, their parents back. They wanted the boys to stop being oodakaboy — construction site labourers whose futures were foreclosed before they had properly begun. They wanted the ordinary life that the state had stolen from them.

Yet the people were not broken. The institutions had failed, the currency had become paper, but communities had not abandoned one another. Women organised. Neighbours protected one another. People found ways to survive the very conditions designed to divide and destroy them.

In every conversation across those weeks, certain words kept surfacing. Murambatsvina, again and again. The fear was not historical. It was present, carried in the body.

They did not get their ordinary life back. Some of their parents came to SA instead.

Those are the people on the buses.

Not always literally, but historically, regionally, morally. The children who once waited for parents to return from SA are now adults who crossed the same border to survive, only to find themselves being moved again.

And this time, the word is different.

Mabahambe. They must go.

Murambatsvina was a name. Mabahambe is an instruction. One came from the Zimbabwean state; the other grows in the space opened by the South African state’s failures and moves through the street. One was branded; the other is chanted, forwarded, muttered, translated into threat.

Where the violence begins

But both do something before anything visible happens. They decide who “they” are. That pronoun is where the violence begins.

“They” gathers people with names, children, rent due, medication, school shoes, church groups, lovers, wages owed and plans for the weekend, and flattens them into a problem. Once they are a problem, they can be solved. Once they are filth, they can be cleaned. Once they are illegal, they can be removed.

The violence that follows is not the beginning. It is the execution of what that pronoun has already decided.

This is why the distinction between state-sponsored and state-enabled violence matters, but does not rescue us.

Murambatsvina was violence that named itself. The Zimbabwean state did not hide what it was doing. It branded the operation, gave the violence a slogan and claimed to be restoring order. The violence was visible, organised and owned.

SA’s violence is more deniable. There is no official operation called Mabahambe. No minister has stood at a podium and announced expulsion as policy. But a state does not have to invent a language of removal in order to benefit from it. Sometimes it gives that language its administrative form. The street says: they must go. The state says: produce papers, prove belonging, submit to verification, prepare for enforcement. Different registers, perhaps, but in the lives of the people boarding those buses, they can begin to sound like the same instruction.

The South African state has watched xenophobic violence flare and recede, seen communities burn and foreign nationals threatened and displaced, while too often speaking as though this were merely a local dispute, a problem of documentation, or a matter of crime. Anti-migrant formations – from Operation Dudula to March and March to looser networks gathering around slogans like Mabahambe – have been given enough room, ambiguity and silence to look like permission.

This state does not always need to wield the bulldozer itself. Sometimes its absence is enough: when the bulldozer arrives, no one is coming to stop it.

And then, when the rupture has already happened, it arrives with clipboards. The processing centre. The buses. The officials managing the logistics of departure. The state becomes the administrator of the consequences of its own failure, performing care at the point of exit for people it did not protect at the point of crisis.

Look, it can say. We were here. We managed it. We helped them leave.

They were helping them leave. That is what it came to.

We must be careful not to speak of this grammar as if it arrived from elsewhere. SA did not learn expulsion from Zimbabwe. It wrote the curriculum.

The names are familiar: Sophiatown, District Six, forced removals, pass laws, labour compounds, homelands, townships built far from work and power. This country has always organised space by deciding who belongs in the valuable parts and who must be pushed to where they cannot be seen.

Apartheid

But the grammar did not end when apartheid ended.

It lives now in the farm worker told to leave land his family has worked for generations. Not because a lease expired. Not because of any legal mechanism that even pretends at process. Because poor, working-class black people are not treated as lives worth protecting. They can be moved when moving them is convenient. They always could be.

It lives in the shack settlement flattened because it interrupts a developer’s view. In the community relocated to the margins so the centre can be made presentable. And in the poor being moved just far enough away for inequality to become visually manageable again.

This is how the country has so often mistaken distance for resolution. What is happening to Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians and others in our streets and processing centres is not an aberration from the national character. It is one of its oldest sentences spoken in a new accent.

The cruellest irony is that the people doing the pushing are themselves inheritors of the pushed. They know what it means to be moved on, to be dispossessed, to be told they do not belong. And still.

Perhaps that is what makes Mabahambe so devastating. It does not emerge from a place of simple privilege. It often grows in the soil of real township deprivation: communities abandoned, under-served, overcrowded and politically betrayed. But deprivation does not become justice because it finds someone weaker to punish.

A politics that cannot confront power will eventually confront proximity.

The minister is unreachable, but the migrant is next door. The economy is locked shut, but the spaza shop is open. Housing has failed, clinics have failed, schools have failed, policing is absent, but the woman renting the backyard room can still be found, named, blamed, threatened. This is the cruel efficiency of xenophobia: it gives abandoned people someone close enough to punish.

Mabahambe turns institutional collapse into a neighbour’s body.

Protection did not require grand imagination. It required time. Warning. Safe passage. A chance to collect documents, medication, wages, school shoes, savings, the small things that become enormous when you have been forced to leave without them. It required the state to pause long enough to register that these were human beings with furniture, family photographs, school uniforms, rent arrangements and the accumulated dignity of lives built somewhere.

Instead, people fled without their belongings, without the small things you only realise you needed when you can no longer go back for them.

Vulnerability was not the context in which the crisis occurred. Vulnerability was what the state’s response produced.

Women and children terrorised

And when the media glare moved elsewhere, as it always does, the darkness became operational. Under cover of night, in the spaces the state had abandoned, opportunists moved in. Women and children, already displaced and frightened, were terrorised in the very places they had fled to or were waiting to leave from. No cameras. No real consequence.

This is what a humanitarian crisis looks like from the inside – not the neat images of buses and processing centres that appear on our timelines, but the hours before and after those images, in places where no one is watching.

What unsettled me most was not only what was happening in front of me, but what it made present again.

I thought about Tsholotsho. The pastor we met in 2008, surviving on mahewu, whose vocabulary for devastation had become almost liturgical because language was the only shelter he had left. The grandmothers raising other people’s children. The children asking for schools, teachers and parents. The boys becoming oodakaboy before they had been allowed to become anything else.

And then the processing centre in Cape Town: bags, lists, buses, children waiting again inside decisions made elsewhere.

The geography had changed. The grammar had not.

SA had once lived in those children’s imaginations as the place where a parent had gone so that, for now, everyone might be alright. Years later, it had become the place from which others were being told to go.

People from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and elsewhere did what people do when the places meant to hold them fail: they made lives where survival was possible. SA may now insist it never asked them to come. But once they were here, it relied on them. It took their rent, employed them, underpaid them, bought from them, worshipped with them, was nursed by them, cleaned by them, built by them, fed by them. Their labour entered our homes, farms, shops, hospitals, churches and streets. Their presence was ordinary when it was useful, and unbearable when it became politically convenient to disown that reliance.

Then they were told to leave. Quickly. Without their belongings. Without adequate notice. Without the basic dignity of being treated as people to whom something was owed.

Solidarity

Because something was owed. That is the part that does not make it onto the timelines, into ministerial statements or into the processing centre logistics. But SA’s relationship to its neighbours was never a ledger to be settled and closed. It was solidarity – unyawo alunampumlo: the foot has no nose, it cannot smell out the road ahead, or whose door it will need tomorrow.

Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana, among others, sheltered a liberation movement that could not exist openly at home. The apartheid state answered that solidarity with raids across those same borders, killing local residents and South African refugees alike. It also helped sustain wars of destabilisation in Mozambique and Angola that left hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, with homes, families and lives destroyed. They took that risk as neighbours who understood that today’s shelter can become tomorrow’s exile. The foot still has no nose.

We have repaid it with buses that fill quickly and leave as fast.

Murambatsvina. Drive out the rubbish. Clean out the filth.

Mabahambe. They must go.

Different histories. Different states. Different machinery. But the same terrible lesson: before people are removed from a place, they are first removed from the circle of obligation.

South Africa did not need to say Murambatsvina. We did not need to brand a bulldozer. By then, another word had already done the work.

The buses said it for us. DM