By Tongai Mutindi & Tadiwa Zedhias Dengu
“The Enemies Of Africa Are Africans, But The Worst Enemies Of Africa Are The Financiers Of African Enemies.” —Ndagire K Fredrick
There are moments in history when societies are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth, that a nation can correctly identify that it has a problem, yet catastrophically misidentify its cause. When that happens, the search for solutions becomes a search for scapegoats, and the consequences are rarely confined to those first targeted. South Africa finds itself standing at precisely such a crossroads.
Few would dispute that South Africa faces immense challenges. The country continues to struggle with stubbornly high unemployment, widening inequality, violent crime, slow economic growth and widespread frustration among millions of citizens whose hopes of economic emancipation after apartheid remain unfulfilled. These frustrations are genuine and deserve serious political attention. Yet increasingly, public discourse has narrowed these complex structural problems into a single explanation, “African immigrants”. That narrative deserves careful scrutiny.
Equally troubling is the growing normalisation of hostility towards fellow Africans. Sentiments of hatred directed at African migrants do not become morally acceptable merely because they are organised under the banner of public demonstrations or political movements. Whether clothed as marches, campaigns or civic protests, advocacy that encourages hostility towards fellow Africans ultimately legitimises black-on-black violence. South Africa has wrestled with xenophobic violence since the dawn of democracy, and history reminds us that violence rarely begins with weapons; it begins with language, suspicion and the gradual dehumanisation of another people. A fellow African nation has wandered astray for far too long. It is time to remove the blindfold and recognise the poisonous seeds deliberately planted by imperialism—seeds designed to divide Africans against one another long after colonial rule formally ended.
As Chinua Achebe beautifully observed in Things Fall Apart:
“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes… We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
That philosophy captures the heart of Pan-Africanism. It reminds Africans that unity was never born out of charity, but from a shared history, struggle and destiny. Today, however, that ideal appears increasingly fragile. South Africa’s democratic journey was built upon the moral rejection of racial exclusion and institutional discrimination. The victory over apartheid inspired not only South Africans but an entire continent that sacrificed financially, diplomatically and, in many cases, militarily for South Africa’s liberation. Yet three decades after democracy, a disturbing trend has emerged. Fellow Africans are increasingly viewed not as brothers and sisters, but as economic rivals.
Research suggests the issue is far more complicated than popular slogans imply. Xenophobic violence has been a recurring feature of democratic South Africa since 1994, with major outbreaks occurring repeatedly over the past three decades. This is not an opinion but a fact. The violence peaked in 2008 with approximately 150 recorded incidents and has averaged dozens of incidents annually since then. Importantly, researchers conclude that these attacks are not driven by immigration alone but by a complex interaction of socio-economic deprivation, governance failures, local political mobilisation and entrenched anti-foreigner attitudes. This distinction is key in understanding the present fiasco taking root across South Africa.
Statistics further expose the weakness of the popular narrative. According to South Africa’s 2024 population estimates, South Africa has a population of approximately 63 million people, of whom 51.5 million (81.7%) are Black, 5.3 million (8.5%) are Coloured, 4.5 million (7.2%) are White, and 1.6 million (2.6%) are Indian or Asian. The same data, read together with South African census information, estimates that there are approximately 2.4 million foreign nationals living in South Africa—representing only 3% to 4% of the national population. Put differently, over 96% of those living in South Africa are South Africans themselves. It therefore becomes mathematically difficult to argue that a population comprising barely one-twentieth of the country is the principal cause of unemployment, inequality and sluggish economic growth.
South Africa is also far from unique in hosting immigrants. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ International Migrant Stock 2024 estimates, Côte d’Ivoire hosts approximately 2.88 million international migrants, Uganda over 2 million, Sudan approximately 2.4 million, Nigeria approximately 1.4 million, while several other African states—including Chad, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya and Libya—also host substantial migrant populations. Uganda’s migrant population is overwhelmingly composed of refugees fleeing conflict in neighbouring South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yet immigration has not produced the recurring cycles of organised anti-African violence witnessed in South Africa. Immigration, therefore, is an African phenomenon, not a uniquely South African one. What distinguishes South Africa is not the existence of migration, but the volatility with which migration has increasingly entered political discourse.
Blaming immigrants for every social ill offers an emotionally satisfying explanation, but it rarely survives careful examination. It transforms deeply rooted structural problems into personalised targets. Instead of asking why inequality persists, attention shifts to who can be blamed for it.
Frantz Fanon warned newly independent African nations of precisely this danger when he wrote:
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
Those “germs of rot” are not merely economic systems. They include inherited ways of thinking that encourage division among those who should find common cause. This makes decolonisation of the mind the next logical step towards progress.
The title of this article deliberately speaks of the real enemies of Africans and Africa because they are seldom those standing in plain sight. The real enemies are those who profit from African disunity. Those who finance, manufacture, amplify and exploit narratives that encourage Africans to fear, resent and ultimately turn against one another. They include political opportunists who convert economic frustration into electoral capital, criminal networks that thrive where communities are divided, and every vested interest that benefits when Africans are too busy fighting one another to confront the enduring structures of inequality, concentrated ownership and economic exclusion. An African attacking another African has never been the beginning of the problem; it has always been the desired outcome of those who benefit from Africa remaining fragmented. Divide and rule did not perish with colonial administrations. It merely evolved into new methods, new messengers and new slogans.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. The country has been consistently described as being trapped in a cycle of low economic growth and exceptionally high inequality. Labour market failures, unequal access to education, skills disparities and historical patterns of wealth concentration remain among the principal drivers of inequality. Redistribution alone cannot solve these problems without sustained economic transformation and job creation.
The demographics themselves expose where the conversation ought to be focused. While Black South Africans constitute more than four-fifths of the population and form the overwhelming majority of the country’s workforce, ownership of productive assets, accumulated wealth and capital remains disproportionately concentrated, reflecting the enduring economic legacy of apartheid. The debate, therefore, should not revolve around the removal of a migrant population comprising barely 3% to 4% of society, but around the structural distribution of opportunity, investment, education, land, productive assets and economic ownership. There exists no economic formula by which removing foreign Africans suddenly transfers wealth to the Black majority. Prosperity cannot be legislated into existence by deportation.
This is not to deny that undocumented migration presents legitimate policy challenges. Every sovereign nation possesses both the right and the responsibility to regulate its borders. Illegal immigration should be addressed through functioning institutions, lawful enforcement and accountable governance. That is the purpose of immigration systems in constitutional democracies.
But immigration enforcement is fundamentally different from allowing public anger to evolve into vigilantism or collective hostility towards entire communities. History repeatedly demonstrates that societies become most vulnerable when complex economic problems are reduced to simple human targets.
The relationship between immigration and crime similarly demands honesty rather than emotion. Violent crime remains one of South Africa’s gravest national challenges. Yet empirical research has consistently failed to demonstrate that immigrants commit crime at disproportionately higher rates than South African citizens. Indeed, official crime statistics do not identify foreign nationals as the principal drivers of violent crime. Organised crime, corruption, gang violence, poverty, policing failures and weak criminal justice institutions remain far more significant contributors to the country’s crime crisis than the presence of migrants. To portray immigrants as the primary source of criminality is therefore not supported by the available evidence.
Europe provides perhaps history’s darkest warning. Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, profound economic hardship, humiliation and political instability created fertile ground for dangerous rhetoric. Gradually, Jewish communities became portrayed not merely as minorities but as the explanation for Germany’s national decline. What began as political language evolved into state policy, persecution and ultimately one of history’s greatest atrocities.
Simon Wiesenthal later reflected:
“For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.”
His warning transcends Europe. Africa itself carries similar lessons. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, nearly 800,000 people were murdered within approximately one hundred days after years of systematic propaganda transformed neighbours into enemies. The tragedy did not begin with violence. It began with language. It began by persuading ordinary citizens that another group represented the source of their collective suffering.
The Holocaust survivor Sam Kaltman later observed:
“The Holocaust manifested the veneer of civilization so thin and fragile that repetition was possible.”
Civilisation is often far more fragile than societies imagine. South Africans today face a legitimate choice. They can confront inequality by demanding structural economic reforms, equitable access to opportunity and accountable governance, or they can continue searching for increasingly convenient scapegoats.
Pan-Africanism was never built upon the belief that Africans should compete over crumbs. It was founded upon the conviction that Africa’s liberation would remain incomplete until Africans stood together against systems that perpetuated exploitation. The historical origins of Pan-Africanism were rooted in opposition to slavery, colonialism and racial domination. It sought unity not merely as a political slogan but as an economic, social and moral project connecting Africans across national boundaries. That vision remains unfulfilled. If the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism could witness today’s hostility between Africans, they would be doing far more than turning in their graves—they would be shaking. The echoes of hatred directed at fellow Africans disturb their eternal slumber and betray the ideals upon which they built the dream of a united Africa.
It is within this climate of anxiety and uncertainty that the March and March Movement, led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, has risen to prominence. The movement has tapped into genuine public frustrations over unemployment, crime, poor service delivery and illegal immigration. These concerns are legitimate and deserve serious policy responses. Every sovereign state has the right—and indeed the obligation—to secure its borders and enforce its immigration laws. The danger, however, lies not in demanding lawful immigration enforcement, but in elevating immigration into the defining explanation for South Africa’s economic crisis.
South Africa’s economic problems did not begin with undocumented migrants. They predate them by decades. Long before immigration became the dominant political conversation, the country was already grappling with one of the world’s highest levels of inequality, stubborn unemployment, concentrated ownership of productive assets and the unfinished economic legacy of apartheid. These realities are extensively documented by numerous academic studies, all of which identify structural inequality—not immigration—as the country’s defining economic challenge.
Yet much of the rhetoric surrounding the March and March Movement risks creating the impression that removing foreign Africans would fundamentally transform South Africa’s fortunes. Such a proposition deserves careful examination. If approximately 2.4 million foreign nationals, representing only 3% to 4% of the country’s population, are indeed the principal obstacle to prosperity, where is the empirical evidence demonstrating that they account for the country’s unemployment crisis, persistent inequality or sluggish economic growth? Public policy should be built upon verifiable evidence rather than public sentiment alone.
Research into xenophobic violence in South Africa consistently demonstrates that outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence arise from a complex interaction of socio-economic deprivation, governance failures, political mobilisation and deeply entrenched xenophobic attitudes—not simply the presence of migrants themselves. Simplifying this complexity into a single explanation may be politically attractive, but it risks distracting the nation from addressing the deeper structural reforms required for lasting economic transformation.
Movements that mobilise public frustration around a visible and vulnerable group often gain considerable political momentum because they provide a simple answer to extraordinarily complex problems. History, however, repeatedly reminds us that simple answers are not always correct answers.
This article does not question the necessity of enforcing South Africa’s immigration laws. Those laws should be applied fairly, consistently and without fear or favour. Rather, it questions whether the country’s broader economic frustrations are being channelled toward those with the least influence over the structures that continue to shape wealth, opportunity and ownership.
If South Africans are encouraged to believe that the removal of fellow Africans will usher in widespread prosperity, what happens when the promised transformation does not materialise? History suggests that societies which build political movements around scapegoats rarely stop after identifying a single one. Once one group has been blamed and removed, another is often identified to explain why the underlying problems remain unresolved.
That is why the debate must remain anchored in evidence rather than emotion. South Africa deserves an honest national conversation about immigration, but it deserves an even more honest conversation about inequality, economic inclusion, land, education, investment, ownership and the unfinished business of economic justice. Those are the questions that will ultimately determine whether the Rainbow Nation fulfils its democratic promise or merely substitutes one convenient narrative for another. Until that conversation takes centre stage, the search for scapegoats will continue, and as Achebe warned generations ago, before long, the centre may no longer hold.
For now, however, one question remains unanswered. If fellow Africans are not the architects of South Africa’s economic reality, then who benefits from convincing South Africans that they are? Who profits when public anger is redirected away from entrenched structures of wealth and power and toward those who possess neither political influence nor economic control? Every illusion has a magician standing behind it. Every mask has a face beneath it.
Perhaps the greatest deception was never convincing South Africans that foreigners were the problem. Perhaps it was ensuring that they never looked beyond the mask.
As the self-imposed deadline of 30 June approaches, with the March and March Movement promising to finally lay the question of undocumented migrants and foreign nationals to rest, history whispers an ancient warning, “Beware the Ides of March”. The warning was never about a month. It was about misplaced certainty, political ambition and the tragic consequences of believing that history bends to the will of those who mistake spectacle for destiny. The Ides culminated not in triumph, but in the assassination of Julius Caesar and the collapse of the very order his assassins claimed to save.
What, then, awaits South Africa after 30 June? Will it mark the fulfilment of promises, or the assassination of misplaced hopes? Will the country’s internal divisions deepen while its standing among its African brethren deteriorates beyond recognition? Only time will answer.
For the winds of history are often unforgiving to political movements built upon convenient enemies. The real test comes not when crowds gather, but when promises collide with reality. If the promised prosperity does not follow the vilification of fellow Africans, South Africa will be forced to ask the question it has avoided all along, “Who is really behind the mask?”
