Anti-migrant rhetoric does not end at the protest — it enters the home

In the early hours of a Saturday morning earlier this month, a young African migrant woman was attacked in her home in one of several working-class communities where I have been conducting research.

This followed an incident the previous Friday, when a group of men arrived at her home as part of what they described as a door-to-door operation. They broke the lock, demanded money and cellphones, and told her she had to leave.

When they returned a week later and found that the lock had been replaced, they tore away a sheet of corrugated iron from the side of the shack and entered through the opening. They stole her money, covered her face with a duvet and raped her. The rape was subsequently reported to the police, and a criminal case was opened. An activist who accompanied the survivor was present when she provided her account of the events to the authorities.

During the assault the men repeatedly told her, kumele nihambe, you must leave.

The significance of these words cannot be separated from the wider mobilisation taking place in communities across South Africa. The language of abahambe, they must leave, has become part of SA’s contemporary anti-migrant political vocabulary. What makes this case so disturbing is not simply the brutality of the assault, but the way exclusionary political language was invoked during the violence itself.

Exclusionary political language

No one yet knows with certainty who carried out the assault. Whether motivated primarily by xenophobia, criminal opportunism or a combination of both, the effect is the same: exclusionary political language was used to legitimise an act of extraordinary violence against a vulnerable woman. That observation should concern all of us.

Discussions about xenophobia often focus on marches, slogans and public demonstrations. Yet the consequences of anti-migrant mobilisation do not end when crowds disperse. The politics of exclusion travels beyond public spaces. It enters the intimate spaces of the home.

I am not suggesting that everyone who participates in anti-migrant mobilisation supports robbery or sexual violence. Nor am I claiming that every crime committed against a migrant is politically motivated. My argument is about the consequences of normalising exclusion.

Political language matters. When public campaigns repeatedly identify migrants as the source of unemployment, crime, housing shortages or social decline, that language can be appropriated by those seeking to justify violence. It creates a moral environment in which some people feel entitled to decide who belongs and who does not. The slogan becomes a resource for violence. The political message becomes a licence to act.

Gender-based violence

These dynamics unfold against an already devastating backdrop. SA continues to face one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. Although the country has rightly recognised gender-based violence and femicide as a national crisis, far less attention has been paid to how that crisis intersects with xenophobia.

African migrant women often face multiple forms of vulnerability simultaneously. Fear of deportation, insecure documentation, language barriers, economic precarity and distrust of public institutions can all make reporting violence more difficult and seeking justice more uncertain.

In my research, I have also encountered markedly different institutional responses. Some police have acted swiftly, professionally and without discrimination, recognising that every victim of crime deserves protection regardless of nationality or immigration status. Others have reportedly questioned documentation before providing assistance, reinforcing fears among migrant communities that justice depends not only on the law, but on the discretion of the individual officer who receives their complaint.

These inconsistencies matter because they shape whether survivors feel able to come forward at all.

SA’s economic crisis has created fertile ground for simplistic explanations and dangerous scapegoating. It is understandable that people living with unemployment, poverty and failing public services search for answers. But when political mobilisation constructs entire groups of people as outsiders, its consequences rarely remain confined to public protest. The language of exclusion travels into the spaces where people sleep, where families seek safety, and where vulnerable women try to build lives.

It travels into homes made of corrugated iron and timber, where removing a single sheet of metal is enough to transform a place of shelter into a scene of unimaginable violence.

The question confronting us is therefore not simply whether we oppose xenophobia. It is whether we recognise how quickly exclusionary politics can move from public slogans to everyday violence, and how easily the boundaries of belonging can be redrawn. DM