South Africa’s xenophobia crisis

Over the past year, South Africa has experienced a wave of xenophobic attacks on migrants. Mosa Phadi and Rehad Desai spoke with Joseph Choonara about the current situation, its roots in the period of the African National Congress’s (ANC) rule after the fall of apartheid and the left’s response.

Joseph Choonara: Can you tell me how the wave of xenophobia and the pattern of attacks on migrants has developed in South Africa in recent months?
Rehad Desai: In January 2026, we saw an uptick in attacks, accompanied by an increasingly aggressive and sophisticated social media campaign, with a deadline issued of 30 June for migrants to leave. Month after month, we saw an increase in xenophobic mobilisations and attacks on foreign-owned spaza shops, informal premises in converted homes of garages, often in townships and settlements. They’re often run by Somalis, Ethiopians, sometimes Mozambicans. We also have Pakistani or Bangladeshi shopkeepers. The attacks are concentrated in four provinces: Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng.

There has been an influx of migration from nearby countries, such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi from the 2000s, caused by factors such as droughts, the meltdown of the Zimbabwean state or the floods in Mozambique. Migration has increased as the economic situation has deteriorated. Up until around 2016 or 2017, the South African economy could absorb the large numbers coming over the borders; that is no longer the situation.

There have been earlier waves of xenophobia. The first major explosion was in 2008, when 62 were killed, many of whom were South Africans hailing from the Tsonga ethnic group but were targeted because they appeared to many as foreign. Back then, casting immigrants as drug dealers and criminals was a feature among some ANC leading lights, and this is far more prevalent today. The difference between today and 2008, 2016, 2020 and so on is that we now have organised political parties mobilising around this issue alongside the vigilante groups. But even in 2020, there is some substantive evidence this was motivated by former Presidents Jacob Zuma’s faction.1

Mosa Phadi: I live between Johannesburg and the Western Cape, specifically Stellenbosch, which historically was an affluent white enclave, and which hasn’t changed much in racial terms. The affluent places are still white and Afrikaans, the coloured areas have remained coloured.2 There is also an area, Kayamandi, with some houses, but on the main it is an informal settlement. Most of the people have been there for generations or came from the Eastern Cape seeking jobs. It’s an impoverished, black, high unemployment area. There’s been an upsurge of extortions—basically young men extorting hair saloons or spaza shops. By the end of 2025, extortion had become linked to the issue of migrants.

In black townships in Johannesburg or other areas, mainly rural or semi-urban areas, there has also been a lot of drug use happening—there’s no drug rehabilitation in these communities—and people have been arguing that this is fuelled by immigrants. Coupled with failing infrastructure, there is also a lot of cable theft, including from people stealing to feed their drug habit.3 In response, there has been “community policing”, with young men walking around at night, because the government has abandoned these areas. There has been a collapse of rubbish collection, leading to an upsurge in rats, and kids die because some chemicals used by people to clean up gets mixed with food. People attack spaza shops when the kids die, and the Somalis running them are being projected as the problem.

Since December 2025, the messaging has been emboldened. You start seeing it on social media. All of a sudden, in a community meeting, someone will come in and say: “It’s not the government that is failing, the problem is the immigrants.” The hostels in townships are also a breeding ground for some of these ideas.4

JC: The attacks are associated with Operation Dudula, which I think is named after a Zulu term meaning “forcing out”.
RD: Yes, in 2021, we saw the first emergence of Dudula, led by a charismatic young man called Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini and funded by a wealthy local businessman. After Lux stepped back, they went into decline for a while. But in the current wave of attacks, Dudula activists were going around, checking people’s identity documents in hospitals, clinics and schools. That operation now has been superseded a new group called March and March with links to Zuma’s family and, it seems, to his new party.5

JC: Are we talking about fascist formations or something different?
RD: Initially, if you look at their mobilisations, you see “lumpen” elements of the working class, people living in informal settlements and without jobs or any real form of income, except for, maybe, the Social Relief Distress grant, which gives people 370 Rand (£16) a month. And they came across as a bit of a rag-tag operation. They were going around in groups, threatening traders or going into schools and clinics, but it wasn’t sustained or systematic in nature.

However, in the past, we’ve also seen movements such as the Amabutho, “regiments” in Zulu, from the early 1990s, which sought to weaken the mass democratic movement, particularly the ANC. This was spearheaded by the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and given support by the Zulu king.6 In the recent period, the Zulu king has again been making noises about migrants. This politics has also been adopted by a major split from the ANC, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (Spear of the Nation Party, MKP).7 The party that now articulates most clearly the politics of the vigilantes who are attacking migrants is MKP, along with other xenophobic formations such as ActionSA.8 Jacob Zuma, now the MKP leader, had actually been put in place by the ANC as president to placate Zulu-nationalist inclined institutions, including the Royal family, the IFP and so on. The transition to democracy in South Africa involved a backroom deal with those forces in KZN.

There is a thin line between the narrow nationalism of the ANC, extreme nationalism and ethno-nationalism. A fully blown fascist outfit certainly could emerge from the MKP. These same political leaders have appeared across the country on different marches, some of them quite big, pulling in Zulu ethno-nationalists, with around 10,000 people mobilised on numerous occasions. On 30 June 2026, in Gauteng alone there were five marches on the same day. You can see people from the black middle classes supporting these protests with transport, many of whom are in a precarious position themselves, which speaks to the embryonic fascist aspect of this.9

JC: You mention Zulu ethno-nationalism. Is the main identity claimed by the xenophobic protesters a South African one?
RD: South African identity was fragmented by the Bantustans, the policy of separate development, apartheid, and so on, which had a lasting impact.10 The creation of official ethnic identities has its roots in the churches which codified languages. In South Africa, we have 11 official languages, with instruction in those languages in areas where a specific group is dominant. Through this we saw a deepening of these identities. The introduction of neoliberalism proper, in the mid-1990s, shortly after the ANC’s coming to power, meant that wealth in South Africa remained concentrated in white hands, along with and the new black middle classes. Rising inequality has led people to retreat back into the identities constructed under apartheid, undermining working-class unity, undermining the pan-Africanist spirit that created African-wide solidarity and informed the mass democratic movement that had brought the white regime to its knees.

JC: There seems to be big money behind the xenophobic movements, and a pretty sophisticated social media operation. Who is bankrolling all this?
RD: Some of this really begins with the construction mafia, a criminal cartel of black petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs, who have historically been connected to the ANC because of the opportunities it offered when it comes to government tenders. They moved in on the big construction companies and they’re demanding jobs for local residents in KZN through labour-brokering contracts and have rapidly spread into other urban provinces. Basically, they were saying: your sites and shops aren’t secure unless you concede to our demands. That began to extend particularly into Gauteng, the economic powerhouse of the country.

We also know from legislation demanding funding transparency of political parties that the children of Harry Oppenheimer—Nicholas Oppenheimer and Mary Slack, who control most of that empire’s wealth—have been donating money to the Democratic Alliance, the respectable, soft-xenophobic arm of the liberal bourgeois and ActionSA.11 A third of all party-political funding comes from this one family connected with the mining conglomerates. There has also been funding from South African Zionists, unhappy with the case the South African government brought at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).12 The MKP has also been rewarded handsomely by the Moroccan government for not remaining neutral on the question of Western Sahara.13 There are addition links with the global far right, through Elon Musk, himself a white South African, and Peter Thiel, the founder of Pay Pal.

The growth of xenophobia on social media is occurring in a way that uses fear, anger and anxiety to bypass critical thinking and provoke rapid sharing on social media. There are stories that spark moral outrage, that validate existing personal beliefs. They’re turning social media users into active, unknowing amplifiers. A study that looked at a data set of six million posts found 27 percent coming from dedicated accounts and bots promoting this narrative around anti-migrant propaganda. The scapegoating is now extending, including Islamophobic tropes because we have a big Indian population with many Muslims, so it is claimed Muslim Malawians or Muslim Mozambicans are getting preferential treatment. They’re also visually reframing things. I’ve been talking to other filmmakers about the videos and the way they’re shot, which sometimes involves four cameras working together on one mobilisation, and so on.

MP: There’s a radio station called Power FM, catering for the black middle class, where every single caller they can get on the station is saying immigration is a problem. It was set up by Given Mkhari, who is in partnership with Johann Rupert, who owns one of the biggest companies in South Africa, Remgro.

ActionSA, which first contested the local elections five years ago, is Herman Mashaba’s party. He made his millions from owning the hair product company Black Like Me, so he was part of earlier cohort of the black bourgeoisie. But Rob Hersov, from a family that made millions working with the apartheid government in the mining sector, also says he funded ActionSA. Mashaba is also linked to property developers. Why does that matter? In Johannesburg, developers, especially the black bourgeoisie, want to take over properties in the Central Business District (CBD). When the CBD was abandoned,14 people, including migrants, occupied the buildings so they could stay closer to where they worked. It’s hard to remove them under the law.

So, you can see the logic of property developers “cleaning up Johannesburg” and other inner-city areas. That is how Mashaba built his campaign. It was often in middle-class areas where Mashaba made inroads, in Parkhurst, which is a white middle-class area, or Midrand, where the black middle classes are. As much as we think about the working class, there is a huge middle-class layer, both white and black, who are very xenophobic.

JC: Can you say any more about how the black xenophobic leaders are linked to those of the traditional white far right?
MP: We found out recently that the March and March people are in cahoots with AfriForum, a historically right-wing NGO. It’s an organisation that pursues the interests of the Afrikaner minority. AfriForum is liked to Freedom Front Plus.15 It has been engaged for years in lawfare to erode some of the gains made in the past such as affirmative action. It has also challenged black economic empowerment. So, a xenophobic group linked to conservative element formerly in the ANC now agrees with the conservative element among the Afrikaners.

JC: How did the period of ANC rule pave the way for these developments? The ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa remains president, but, after the 2024 elections, the ANC lost its majority. It now rules through a grand coalition involving the Democratic Alliance, the IFP and other parties.
MP: There are now multiple splinters from the ANC. The “Thabo-Mbekiites”, as I’ll call them, for lack of a better term, are anti-xenophobic at one level, but in a moralistic way.16 They point out that other African countries helped us with our liberation, so we need to help them. That is a sentiment that some middle-class black people still have.

Then there are the Zuma types. Zuma’s presidency involved inserting the issue of Zulu nationalism. But when Ramaphosa’s section won out, it meant Zuma’s supporters were pushed out of the state. Unlike the Mbekiites, who got their wealth through capital, from being put on company boards or getting shares in historically white-owned firms, the Zuma-ites got their wealth through the state, through permeating into it. When they were forced out, a lot of them saw their wealth collapse. Zuma has argued, it’s not our fault or our regime’s fault that the state is not functioning as it should; “these immigrants” are the problem.

March and March is also connected with Zuma. Its key figures come from KZN and move in the same circles as the Zuma family.

RD: A third of all the registered political parties, amounting to 614 for the local government elections, are running on one form or the other of an anti-migrant stance. And this speaks to the wider question. What we saw in 2024 was another severe haemorrhaging of support from the ANC. The state, particularly at a local level, where most services are delivered, is crumbling, even in the big metro areas which have a significant revenue base. The policy is that services have to pay for themselves. In the context of rising unemployment, you have a situation where even bigger municipalities struggle to raise the revenue to provide a constant supply of electricity and or water, which has a tremendous impact on small and medium businesses in particular, or on schools staying open.

To maintain their hold on national government, the ANC had to form what it calls a government of national unity. The ANC isn’t able to move without the say-so of the Democratic Alliance, the historic representatives of big capital and the liberal bourgeoisie. There’s also an array of smaller parties that have no real influence on national economic policy but have to be accommodated. This includes the Patriotic Alliance, which is openly xenophobic and has significant support in the Western Cape. Gayton McKenzie, leader of the Patriotic Alliance, first popularised the slogan “Abahambe!” (“Go away!”), now taken up nationally by the xenophobes.

The government therefore has given such views respectability. But it has also presided over rising unemployment, far higher degrees of economic marginalisation, compounded by the massive loss of jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic, when we lost 20 percent of formal employment and serious damage was done to the informal economy. We’ve had an investment strike, really since 2008, by big capital, which is demanding the loosening of labour market regulations. The areas of economic growth are largely in Special Economic Zones, which give capital, local and international, free rein, because the labour laws in those zones are relaxed.

Small and medium-sized businesses are really pressed by the hold of the big players who dominate the economy, and that has meant that the only thing they can vary is wages. That is why there is often a preference for migrant workers who are prepared to work for less than 250 Rand (£11) a day, or even less than 150 Rand (£7). For South Africans, this doesn’t make any sense if you have to include transport and food when you’re working.

JC: What are forces traditionally identified with the left saying? For example, the South African Communist Party (SACP)? The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)?17 The trade union leaders?
MP: Ramaphosa visited the White House in 2025, after Donald Trump claimed South Africa was conducting a genocide against white South Africans. He was accompanied by the golfer Ernie Els; the president of COSATU; John Steenhuisen, the leader of the Democratic Alliance; and Johann Rupert, because he and Trump are friends.18 The COSATU president told Trump the problem in South Africa is immigrants. She said we need the US to help us with this problem—Rupert added that they needed Starlink, which is Elon Musk’s firm, to come and help. COSATU, whose membership has eroded, has become weaker than ever before, and has moved further to the right.

At the Congress of the Left a few months ago, the SACP’s leader made a public statement saying we need the government to come in and control so-called “illegal” immigration.19

In terms of the EFF, Alexandra would become one of its strongholds.20 In 2008, there had been a big xenophobic attack there, but at the time, the left was still quite strong. We organised one of the biggest marches against xenophobia at that time. The EFF has lost a lot of members because it has taken a stand on xenophobia. The EFF can be criticised for lots of other things, most of the allegations seem to be true, but on this question, they’ve been consistent.

JC: It sounds like a very difficult situation. How can the left challenge the explosion of xenophobia?
RD: One thing is that the trade unions are themselves caught up in intense debates over border controls, economic nationalism and so on. The xenophobes are exploiting real grievances. We need to mobilise around the big issues, the genuine economic, social and historical anxieties, rebuild the cohesion amongst the class. I think a new set of values is needed, which embrace some of the historic values, such as ubuntu, the Pan-Africanist spirit and so on, so we can move towards a more sort of internationalist positioning.21 Along with this, we need a fight to ensure that regional integration is not an agenda to further South Africa’s domination of its region. If capital is going to move freely, that must also apply to the people of Southern Africa.

The key is, how do we, in concrete terms, defend migrant communities. The xenophobic movement has set another upcoming deadline, 30 September 2026, for migrants to leave. This requires a response from myriad united fronts. It means building trust with local community organisations, reaching out to civic structures that have remained combative, independent of the ruling party, together with the trade unions. We need a defence of migrant communities through community patrolling. We need to disrupt the racketeering that forces migrants running spaza shops to pay protection money to the organised xenophobes.

A key battleground is Gauteng, the most populous province, the one with the most self-organisation in communities and highest trade union density. That’s where we’re seeing the majority of attacks happening.

The level of political debate is at a far higher level than we’ve seen recently. We really are at an existential moment for the left project, for the socialist project.

MP: The left is too weak at this point, and there has been a decline of the trade unions. There are moments of left organising, pockets of resistance, but not enough to make serious inroads. I think the left in South Africa has not fully understood the splintering of the working class, simultaneously with the splintering of the elite, and how that has affected communities. There’s an element in society that has for the last 15 years been moving to the right.

But there are moments of resistance as well. There are still some students fighting or some communities fighting, there are communities saying we’re not going to take this xenophobic rhetoric. A lot of hard work needs to be done.

Mosa Phadi is a an activist scholar and a member of Keep Left (South Africa). Rehad Desai is a socialist film director and campaigner based in South Africa.

Notes