Benjamin Fogel in New Statesman: The betrayal of the South African dream

A liberal agonizes about ethnic violence in South Africa directed at African migrants. Of course, he ignores the deeper reasons for the collapse of South Africa—the inability of Blacks to run a twenty-first century economy, Black proneness to crime, etc.

With mobs waging xenophobic violence on the streets, the promise of the anti-apartheid struggle has dissolved

Today (18 July), South Africans are urged to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s birthday by performing 67 minutes of charitable acts, each to honour his 67 years of fighting for social justice. Mandela Day, as it has become known, is a somewhat manufactured (and corporate-sponsored) example of a lingering throwback to what is referred to as “rainbow nationalism”, an attempt to forge a new post-apartheid national identity based on non-racialism. As the opening line of the 1996 constitution, as well as the historic 1955 Freedom Charter, goes, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”

Rainbow nationalism is now a faltering project, subsumed by the African National Congress’s failure to redress the wrongs of the past and deliver an egalitarian, growing economy. South Africa is ranked by the World Bank as the most unequal country in the world; it has an unemployment rate of around 35 per cent, basic services have collapsed in much of the country; and most South Africans are poorer than they were in 2010. All of which makes for ripe conditions for mass unrest and political instability.

This year, following national protests held on 30 June demanding that all undocumented migrants leave the country, one of the leaders of a mysterious movement called March and March, which has risen to national prominence over the last year and advocates for stricter border security, declared that they would use their 67 minutes to remove illegal immigrants from the Eastern Cape province. For months, xenophobic sentiment in South Africa has been expressed through violent marches against “illegal foreigners”, while vigilantes drag suspected undocumented migrants out of their homes, make illegal “citizens arrests” and conduct “inspections” of businesses suspected of employing migrants. At least five people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced, leading to Doctors Without Borders describing the events as a growing humanitarian crisis.

Since 2008, xenophobic violence has become a recurrent feature of the country’s politics, leading to at least 703 deaths. This violence is predominantly directed at immigrants from other African countries and, to a lesser extent, recent arrivals from South Asia; white tourists, retirees and Cape Town’s growing population of digital nomads need not worry. For months, with scenes of violence playing out on social media, most political leaders either dithered or endorsed the protests; President Cyril Ramaphosa seemed more focused on avoiding impeachment than providing leadership. In the months leading up to 30 June, the mood on the ground was tense. Rumours circulating on social media (and backed by credible reporting) suggested there was a real chance of a repeat of the mass violence that followed the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court in July 2021. (Zuma had failed to show up to court to face corruption charges dating back to a controversial arms deal in the 1990s.) The mass unrest that followed left at least 354 dead and billions of pounds worth of property damage, while exposing how unprepared the security forces and state were to deal with the threat of political violence.

Despite a slick and seemingly well-funded communications operation, the numbers that took to the streets on 30 June were not particularly large, in the mid-thousands rather than tens of thousands. And a historic police mobilisation with a R600 million budget (around £28m), aided by South Africa’s massive private security industry, managed to keep things largely under control. But these protests were not always peaceful. Some protestors burned cars and dragged people from their homes; more than 900 people were arrested, and the military was deployed in numerous hotspots in central Johannesburg.

In the words of veteran journalist and editor Mondli Makhanya, “The date of 30 June 2026 – and the months that preceded it and the days that will follow it – was a turning point in its own right. It was when the South African state effectively ceded power to a coterie of rabble-rousers with questionable motives.” The slogans are “put South Africans first” and “abahambe” (“they must go”). For the first time, the new South African flag has been transformed from a symbol of liberation and democracy into exclusion and hate. The leaders of the march clad themselves in the flag in the same fashion as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella in Colombia. From an international beacon of liberty to a nationalist nightmare, it appears South Africa, and South Africans, have changed for good.

The political project of March and March came into sharper focus on 30 June, at the rally in Durban. The crowd chanted “voetsek ANC, voetsek [fuck off ANC]” while Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the leader of March and March (no relation of Jacob Zuma), thanked the political parties that had backed the action. And there were several: the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party; the right-wing Action SA; cosplay Marxist-Leninist cum Pan-Africanist Mayibuye Africa Forum; the Christian nationalist African Transformation Movement (closely linked to Zuma); and Jacob Zuma’s Umkhonto WeSizwe (MK) party. The protests also attracted opportunistic African National Congress (ANC) populists such as Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi. But the variety of the groups is the point: this is a political coalition with the potential to appeal to a broader section of South Africa than Zuma’s traditional support base, and includes pro-free market parties such as Action SA as well as parties that claim to be left-wing.

There is a longer history at play here, one that reaches all the way to South Africa’s modern foundation. In 2024, the ANC lost its electoral majority for the first time and was forced to form a coalition government with the country’s largest opposition party, the centre-right Democratic Alliance, as well as an array of mostly ethnonationalist smaller parties. The coalition government was branded as a Government of National Unity (GNU) in a throwback to the first democratic government in 1994, in which Mandela’s ANC initially included the National Party and IFP (this arrangement fell apart by 1996). While the new GNU has made some progress, it has failed to deliver economic growth or to arrest South Africa’s continued political and social fragmentation.

The ANC’s decline in a fragmenting social order has created a void that forces such as March and March are trying to fill. Ngobese-Zuma declared that the group was giving the South African government six months to “rid South Africa” of all undocumented immigrants, a date that matches the timing of November local elections. She then told the crowd of roughly 5,000 supporters: “Every Thursday, for the next six months, we are marching until they [undocumented immigrants] are gone.”

Since 30 June, March and March and its allies have intensified their campaigns. In rural areas, hundreds of foreigners have been forced out of their homes, hiding in the bush, forests, or in refugee encampments, often under the threat of “local leaders” who had organised mobs to round up immigrants to hand over to the police, who have arrested even documented foreigners. South African police claim that more than 50,000 undocumented immigrants have been arrested since the beginning of 2026. In effect, government policy on immigration is trailing a violent protest movement.

Political violence is a feature of local elections in South Africa, as potential candidates take out rivals for the spoils (mostly from their own party). This year, with the ANC in sharp decline, this election cycle will have the threat of mass xenophobic unrest hanging over it and is set to be defined by the rise of a new nationalistic politics looking to profit from the fragmentation of the ANC, rather than debates around corruption or service delivery.

This new right politics draws from the rhetoric of the liberation struggle against apartheid as well as more familiar anti-immigrant tropes, ones that could have come out of the mouth of Tommy Robinson. However, this is a politics led by the victims of apartheid, mostly against other Africans, including from countries that gave support to the liberation struggle. This is a politics in which South Africans are depicted as having been robbed and abused by foreigners who sell drugs, exploit their women, and who destroy public services.

Xenophobic mobilisation is being portrayed as a means to reclaim black national sovereignty. Those who criticise xenophobia or question the numerous false claims regarding crime and immigration statistics stand accused of denying the lived experience of the black majority, making them anti-national, out-of-touch middle-class types. This signals a vision of a nation that is narrowing, an identity that those belonging to the wrong ethnicity might find themselves excluded from. While xenophobic sentiment may be fairly widespread, the largest organisations of the working class, such as the shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and the trade union federations Cosatu and Saftu, came out in opposition to March and March and have mobilised in the past against xenophobic cycles.

South Africa bears some of the burden of the poverty and failures of its neighbours. It offers more economic opportunities and refuge from conflicts, and a stepping stone for those looking to make their way to Europe or the Americas. There are 2.4 million foreigners living in the country, the majority of them documented, according to the 2022 census, which is around 4 per cent of the population. Some posters with false information and chain messages claim there are 27 million illegal foreigners in the country. The presence of migrant labour brought in to work the mines from neighbouring countries has been a feature of our political economy from long before the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. However, the fall of apartheid and the reintegration of South Africa into the global economy have seen new waves of immigration from northern and Western Africa, as well as significant numbers of Zimbabweans fleeing the economic crisis of the late 1990s and 2000s.

South Africa’s economic and social crisis, combined with collapsing basic services like public healthcare and education (a result of systemic underfunding, incompetence and corruption_ predictably produces frustrations and anger for working- (and middle-) class South Africans. It is no coincidence that March and March began by mobilising against the foreigners blamed for undermining public services at schools and hospitals; rather convenient for the elites responsible for undermining public services for their own private gain.

The country also suffers from a public security crisis with one of the highest murder rates in the world, along with high levels of drug addiction and extortion. This is compounded by an impotent police force that is widely and correctly perceived as having been captured by organised crime (the fastest-growing economic sector in the country). Foreigners also make for a convenient scapegoat for South Africa’s public security crisis; while the country has long been a hotbed for transnational organised crime, the majority of its mafias and violent criminals are homegrown.

This is the context in which xenophobia has emerged as a regularised feature of South African politics, in tandem with cycles of xenophobic violence. In the first major cycle of xenophobic violence back in 2008, 62 people were killed, tens of thousands displaced, and countless lives ruined. Similar but smaller-scale xenophobic cycles took place in 2015 (seven killed) and 2019 (at least 12 killed). As Julian Rademeyer, a journalist who covered the violence, notes, these incidents were characterised by denialism and state complicity, with the relative impunity for those responsible demonstrated by how few people are ever arrested.

Credible academic research and journalism have demonstrated that xenophobic violence is not the result of the spontaneous anger of the masses and organic grassroots movements. It is organised by violent entrepreneurs in the name of particular interests, from taking out competition – such as foreign-owned corner stores in working-class neighbourhoods – to gaining political advantage. At the same time, South Africans in the most precarious sections of the labour market, such as farmwork, have to face competition from foreigners over low-paying jobs. As one of South Africa’s leading experts on xenophobic politics, Jean Pierre Misago, describes it, the violence is “a result of deliberate community organising and mobilisation by local leaders”. The 2015 and 2019 cycles were driven by organised social media disinformation campaigns and movements that seemingly emerged from nowhere, claiming to channel the frustrations and anger of the South African majority against foreigners.

As in past cycles of xenophobic violence, many South Africans have been attacked after being “mistaken” as foreigners for the sin of not speaking Zulu or belonging to the wrong ethnic group. In 2008, at least 21 of the 62 people killed were South African nationals. And this is a revival of the tactics and attitudes from South Africa’s darkest history. The apartheid regime sought to divide black South Africans along “tribal” lines, stripping them of citizenship and redefining them as citizens of the artificial “tribal homelands” known as Bantustans. The ANC, while not without its own historic ethnic divisions, always set out to unify black South Africans across tribal lines and later across racial divides, along with the country’s Indian and mixed race minorities.

Xenophobic violence also conjures up memories of the most violent period of the anti-apartheid struggle. The spectacle of angry men led by men in uniforms clutching traditional weapons demanding “they must go” recalls the worst of the so-called “black-on-black” violence in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in the 1980s and 1990s. A low-intensity civil war was fought between Zulu nationalist militias trained and armed by the apartheid security services and supporters of the anti-apartheid movement, leaving between 20,000 and 30,000 dead. The violence began as a response to the re-emergence of the mass movements in the 1980s, and it later served as a negotiating tactic to strengthen the apartheid regime’s hand against the ANC.

During a recent trip to South Africa, what struck me was the fear of mass unrest accompanied by the lack of leadership from both government and a weakened civil society. Much of the country rightly believes that the state did not have the capacity to combat threats to the nation from both international and domestic actors. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing spectacle of the Madlanga Commission into the capture of political leaders and the justice system by organised crime. The commission delivers shocking evidence on a daily basis, from the looting of public hospitals to police-run hit squads to the hundreds of kilos of missing cocaine from police lock-ups.

The commission has shown that the form of state capture – the capture of the country’s decision-making processes by private interests – that defined Zuma’s presidency went beyond the former president and his most notorious backers, the Guptas. A third-rate Indian business clan, the family managed to gain control of the executive, allowing them to appoint ministers and dictate state contracts. As the Zondo Commission into State Capture detailed, this process saw the equivalent of billions of pounds intended for social development and to benefit poor and working-class South Africans channelled into financial hubs such as Dubai. According to some estimates, state capture cost the South African economy close to £70bn.

To protect this arrangement, the country’s intelligence services and security cluster were hollowed out or given the task of serving criminal interests. Adding to these problems is the ease of pushing disinformation narratives in the current digital sphere, itself thanks to the South African-born owner of a certain social media network. The result is that the country finds itself especially vulnerable to sinister influence campaigns, as demonstrated  the infamous British PR firm Bell Pottinger. Influencers can be hired to spout or amplify any sort of nonsense for under £10, and traditional media is dying out. A few thousand pounds, let alone hundreds of thousands of pounds, can go a long way in South Africa.

As the journalist Fred Khumalo points out, March and March “seems to have deep pockets and a louder share of voice than a simple community organisation”. There is no information regarding who is funding the organisation. March and March appeared on the political scene out of nowhere last year; its leader is a former local radio DJ in Durban, led protests outside primary schools and public hospitals.

Ngobese-Zuma had no history of political activity or online bigotry; she was even chosen by the US State Department in 2023 to participate in its prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her lack of a political history is one of her strengths, allowing her to position herself as just an ordinary, frustrated South African. The other two prominent leaders of the protests are Ngizwe Mchunu, a Zulu cultural activist and talk radio host, and Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, another Zulu cultural activist. In Ngobese-Zuma’s words: “I was becoming more and more affected by children being kidnapped, drugs coming into our communities, and it was always a foreign national behind it.”

There has been much speculation on who is funding March and March, with allegations ranging from Israel to the Guptas; Jacob Zuma was photographed the same week as the protests in India meeting with members of the Guptas, some of whom are still wanted fugitives in South Africa. Mchunu and other figures linked to March and March have also been associated with Jacob Zuma. Analysis from the Institute for Security Studies and AmaBhungane indicates that some of the networks peddling xenophobia and promoting March and March overlap with those who used to defend Jacob Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, incited xenophobic violence in 2019 and the insurrection in 2021.

As Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, one of South Africa’s most respected legal minds, asked in reference to the rhetoric deployed during the 2024 elections, “When people say we are witnessing the last days of the ANC, who is going to champion these pillars of non-tribalism, non-racialism, Pan-Africanism and internationalism? What kind of society do we have in mind if we don’t have anyone to defend these values?”

The answer to this was partially revealed on 30 June: this is a South Africa that no longer aspires to be the egalitarian multi-racial democracy envisioned in its constitution, a country that no longer cares about its international reputation. What unites South Africa’s rising xenophobic politics with its equivalents in Europe and elsewhere is that in our age of de-development and declining expectations, it’s easier to imagine getting your foreign neighbour kicked out of the country than for the state to improve your life. The collapse and fragmentation of the ANC may herald the arrival of something worse.