By Elijah Masubelele

Introduction

South Africa occupies a distinctive and paradoxical position in contemporary African political history. On one hand, its negotiated transition from apartheid to constitutional democracy in 1994 is widely regarded as one of the most significant political achievements of the twentieth century. This serves as a testament to the capacity of deeply divided societies to transcend institutionalised violence and construct inclusive democratic frameworks grounded in universal human dignity. On the other hand, the post-apartheid period has been marked by recurring episodes of xenophobic violence that expose deep fractures within the country’s social fabric and raise fundamental questions about the sustainability and depth of its reconciliation project.[1] That a society which experienced, and ultimately rejected, one of the most systematically dehumanising regimes in modern history should generate among the highest rates of xenophobic violence on the African continent is not merely a social anomaly. It is a moral and political contradiction that demands serious scholarly and civic interrogation.[2]

Xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa represents not simply a manifestation of socioeconomic frustration or inadequate immigration governance, but a fundamental threat to the normative foundations upon which the democratic order was constructed. Beyond its immediate humanitarian consequences, xenophobia carries profound strategic, diplomatic, and economic implications for South Africa’s democratic future and continental standing. Addressing it credibly requires sustained engagement with the unfinished work of reconciliation, historical memory, and the ethical responsibilities embedded within the country’s liberation history.

 

The Architecture of Apartheid Dehumanisation

To understand the moral weight of xenophobia in the South African context, it is necessary to engage seriously with the nature of the apartheid system it implicitly mirrors. Apartheid was not merely a regime of racial segregation or economic exploitation, though it was certainly both. At its ideological core, apartheid was a systematic project of dehumanisation the construction and legal enforcement of a social order premised on the fundamental inequality of persons. Through the Population Registration Act of 1950, the Group Areas Act of 1950, the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the pass law system codified in the Natives Act of 1952, the apartheid state institutionalised the classification of human beings as inherently unequal, assigning differential rights, resources, and degrees of belonging based on racially determined categories.[3]

The effect of this system was not only material deprivation, though its material consequences were severe and enduring. Its deeper effect was the assault on the personhood of the majority of South Africa’s citizens, the systematic denial of dignity, agency, and the right to self-determination. Scholars of transitional justice have emphasised that the primary injury of apartheid extended beyond economic dispossession to encompass what Mahmood Mamdani has described as the political production of the subject[4]: the process by which entire populations were constituted as permanent outsiders within their own homeland, stripped of the civic standing that full membership of a political community requires.[5]

It is against this historical backdrop that violence directed at foreign nationals in contemporary South Africa must be evaluated. The structural logic animating xenophobic attacks, the identification of a nationalised other as an illegitimate occupant of space and a competitor for resources reproduces in a different register, the logic that sustained apartheid. The claim that foreign nationals do not belong here, that they are taking what rightfully belongs to others, and that their presence constitutes a threat to the legitimate community is structurally analogous to the apartheid-era claim that Black South Africans were alien to the spaces from which they were forcibly removed. The moral architecture is identical, even when the language and the perpetrators differ.

 

Socioeconomic Grievance and the Politics of Scapegoating

It would be analytically insufficient to dismiss xenophobic violence as simply the product of moral failure or cultural intolerance without engaging seriously with its socioeconomic conditions. South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, with a Gini coefficient of 0.63 according to the most recent World Bank measurement, placing it consistently among the three most unequal countries globally.[6] Unemployment, measured by the expanded definition that includes discouraged work-seekers, exceeds forty percent of the working-age population.[7] Access to quality public education, healthcare, and basic services remains deeply unequal along spatial and racial lines that closely reproduce the geography of apartheid.[8]

These material conditions create environments in which scapegoating can flourish. When communities are economically marginalised and politically abandoned, the displacement of grievance onto a proximate and relatively powerless other becomes a politically available response to suffering that is, in reality, structurally produced. This dynamic is well documented in scholarship on nationalism and inter-group violence.[9] What is unique to South Africa, however, is the particular moral and historical context in which it occurs, and the specific obligations that context creates.

It must be stated with clarity that foreign nationals residing in South Africa are not the architects of its structural inequalities. The governance failures, institutional weaknesses, and policy shortcomings that have produced persistent unemployment, inadequate service delivery, and growing social frustration are the product of decisions made by South African citizens in positions of political authority. Research by the South African Reconciliation Barometer has consistently demonstrated that declining public trust in state institutions correlates directly with increased inter-group hostility and scapegoating behaviour, a finding that underscores the relationship between governance failure and social violence.[10]

To then redirect legitimate political grievance away from those who hold power and toward those who do not is not merely analytically incorrect. It is, historically and morally, a familiar form of political manipulation that serves the interests of the powerful by ensuring that accountability is never fully demanded of them.

 

The Obligations of Liberation History and Continental Solidarity

South Africa’s particular historical position within the African continent creates obligations that its contemporary democratic practice cannot responsibly ignore. The achievement of liberation from apartheid was not the accomplishment of South Africans alone. It was made possible, in significant measure, by the solidarity of neighbouring African states that bore considerable economic and political costs in support of the liberation struggle. Zambia hosted the African National Congress in exile for decades. Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Lesotho provided training facilities, safe passage, and material support to freedom fighters whom the apartheid government sought to capture, imprison, or kill.[11]

This history constitutes a form of political and moral obligation that shapes the ethical responsibilities of post-apartheid South Africa toward the broader African community. When citizens of the very nations that sheltered South Africa’s liberation movement are subjected to violence, displacement, and dehumanisation on South African soil, the contradiction between the country’s liberation history and its contemporary social practice becomes acute and cannot be diplomatically or morally papered over.

 

Reconciliation as an Ongoing Democratic Obligation

The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation has consistently argued, across more than two decades of research and civic engagement, that reconciliation must be understood not as a discrete historical event but as a continuous social and political process. The formal architecture of South Africa’s transition the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Interim and Final Constitutions, the early institutional reforms of the democratic period  created the conditions for reconciliation but did not complete it.[12]

The persistence of xenophobia represents a significant failure within this ongoing process. It signals that the normative commitments embedded in South Africa’s constitutional order  commitments to human dignity, equality, and the inherent worth of every person  have not been sufficiently translated into the social values and everyday practices of significant portions of the population. Research demonstrates that societies characterised by high levels of social trust and inclusive civic identity are better positioned to achieve sustainable economic development, effective public services, and democratic stability.[13]

The erosion of social trust produced by xenophobic violence is therefore not simply a humanitarian concern. It is a threat to the long-term developmental and democratic viability of the South African state and it demands a response that is simultaneously structural, political, and moral.

 

Why South Africa Cannot Afford to be Perceived as Xenophobic

Beyond the moral and historical arguments, South Africa faces concrete and quantifiable strategic costs from being perceived as a xenophobic state. These costs manifest across diplomatic, economic, and reputational dimensions that directly undermine the country’s national interests and its ambitions as a continental leader.

Economically, South Africa is the most industrialised economy on the continent and has historically positioned itself as the primary gateway for foreign direct investment into sub-Saharan Africa. According to the UNCTAD World Investment Report, South Africa attracted $9 billion in FDI inflows in 2023, a figure that is acutely sensitive to perceptions of political stability, social cohesion, and institutional reliability.[14] Recurring episodes of xenophobic violence generate international media coverage that presents the country as unstable and socially fractured, directly undermining investor confidence and tourism attractiveness. South Africa’s tourism sector, which contributed approximately R425 billion to the economy in 2023, is particularly vulnerable to reputational damage of this nature.[15]

Diplomatically, South Africa’s ability to exercise continental leadership through the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, and in forums such as the African Continental Free Trade Area negotiations depends fundamentally on the goodwill and political trust of its regional partners.[16] Xenophobic attacks on nationals from SADC member states have repeatedly strained bilateral relationships and provoked formal diplomatic protests, travel advisories, and in some instances retaliatory economic responses from affected countries.[17]

 

The AfCFTA, which envisions a single market of 54 countries with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion and a population of 1.3 billion people, represents the single most significant economic opportunity available to South Africa over the coming decades.[18] However, the realisation of this opportunity requires the deep trust, stable cross-border relationships, and political goodwill of regional partners. Xenophobia corrodes precisely the social and diplomatic capital that makes economic integration viable. Countries whose nationals are attacked on South African soil are not inclined to extend preferential market access or collaborative trade frameworks to the aggressor.

South Africa also carries specific obligations under international and domestic law that make a posture of tolerance toward xenophobia legally untenable. Section 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa guarantees the right to dignity for ‘everyone’, a formulation that extends constitutional protection explicitly to non-citizens.[19] The Refugees Act 130 of 1998[20] and South Africa’s obligations under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees[21] and the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Convention further impose non-refoulement and non-discrimination obligations that xenophobic violence systematically violates.[22]

There is, furthermore, a significant human capital dimension to this question. Africa’s most skilled and mobile professionals, the doctors, engineers, academics, and entrepreneurs whose contributions are essential to the continent’s development observe South Africa’s social climate carefully in making decisions about where to live, invest, and build. A country perceived as hostile to foreign Africans will not attract the intra-African talent and investment it requires to sustain its own developmental trajectory.[23]

In short, xenophobia is not merely a moral failure. It is a strategic liability that costs South Africa in investor confidence, tourist arrivals, diplomatic standing, regional trade relationships, and human capital attraction. The perception of xenophobia, once established internationally, is extraordinarily difficult to reverse and imposes costs that accumulate over years and decades. A country that aspires to continental leadership and positions itself as the institutional home of African integration cannot simultaneously be the continent’s most visible site of anti-African violence.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Work of Democratic Belonging

South Africa’s constitutional democracy was founded on a moral claim of universal human dignity the insistence that no person’s humanity is conditional upon their race, their classification, or their national origin. That claim was forged in the experience of a people who knew, with terrible intimacy, what it meant to have their humanity denied by law and by force. It was given institutional expression in a Constitution that guarantees the rights to equality and dignity not to citizens alone, but to ‘everyone’. This was a deliberate and morally significant choice of language.

Xenophobia is an assault on that foundational claim. It reproduces, in new form, the logic of exclusion that generations of South Africans sacrificed to overcome. It does not solve unemployment. It does not repair public services. It does not build a single school, house a single family, or create a single sustainable livelihood. What it does is deepen social fracture, corrode democratic trust, dishonour the solidarity of those who supported South Africa’s liberation, expose the country to strategic and diplomatic costs it cannot afford, and betray the moral authority that its democratic transition gave to the world.

The response to the conditions that produce xenophobic violence must be structural, political, and sustained. It must involve genuine accountability for governance failures, meaningful investment in public services and employment creation, and the political courage to name the actual causes of inequality rather than permitting the convenient displacement of grievance onto the most vulnerable. Alongside this, the work of reconciliation, the patient, difficult, and ongoing work of building a society that affirms the dignity of all who live within it  must be deepened and expanded, not treated as a historical achievement already secured. South Africa has the moral and constitutional foundations for such a society. The question confronting it, urgently and without the luxury of indefinite deferral, is whether it possesses the collective will to build it.

– Elijah Masubelele is the Deputy Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, where he provides strategic leadership in advancing transitional justice, social cohesion, and inclusive governance across Africa.

REFERENCES

1. African Union Commission. (2020). Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area. Addis Ababa: African Union. Available at: https://au.int/en/cfta
2. Ellis, S. (2012). External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990. London: Hurst & Company.
3. Gobodo-Madikizela, P. (2003). A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4. Human Rights Watch. (2009). Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in South Africa. New York: Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/05/21/hate-streets/xenophobic-violence-south-africa
5. Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. (2025). South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey Report. Cape Town: IJR. Available at: https://www.ijr.org.za/reconciliation-barometer
6. Landau, L. B. (ed.). (2011). Exorcising the Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
7. Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
8. Mamdani, M. (2001). Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43(4), 651–664.
9. Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Republic of South Africa. 1950. Group Areas Act 41 of 1950. Pretoria: Government Printer.
11. Republic of South Africa. 1950. Population Registration Act 30 of 1950. Pretoria: Government Printer.
12. Republic of South Africa. 1952. Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act 67 of 1952. Pretoria: Government Printer.
13. Republic of South Africa. 1953. Bantu Education Act 47 of 1953. Pretoria: Government Printer.
14. Seekings, J. & Nattrass, N. (2015). Policy, Politics and Poverty in South Africa. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
15. South Africa (1998) Refugees Act 130 of 1998. Pretoria: Government Printer.
16. South Africa Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) (2026) South Africa’s response to the request by the Republic of Ghana for a debate at the AU on xenophobic attacks. Available at: https://dirco.gov.za/
17. South African Tourism. (2023). Annual Tourism Report 2023. Pretoria: South African Tourism. Available at: https://www.southafrica.net/research-and-insights
18. Statistics South Africa. (2024). Quarterly Labour Force Survey: Quarter 4, 2023. Pretoria: Stats SA. Available at: http://www.statssa.gov.za
19. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1998). Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (Vols. 1–5). Cape Town: Juta & Co.
20. (2024). World Investment Report 2024: Investment Facilitation for Development. Geneva: United Nations. Available at: https://unctad.org/wir
21. United Nations (1951) Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted 28 July 1951, 189 UNTS 137, entered into force 22 April 1954.
22. World Bank. (2023). Gini Index — South Africa. World Bank Development Research Group. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=ZA

 

 

FOOTNOTES

[1] Human Rights Watch. (2009). Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in South Africa. New York: Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/05/21/hate-streets/xenophobic-violence-south-africa

[2] Landau, L. B. (ed.). (2011). Exorcising the Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

[3] Republic of South Africa, Population Registration Act 30 of 1950; Group Areas Act 41 of 1950; Bantu Education Act 47 of 1953; Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act 67 of 1952; see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 1 (Cape Town: Juta, 1998).

[4] Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[5] Mamdani, M. (2001). Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43(4), 651–664.

[6] World Bank. (2023). Gini Index — South Africa. World Bank Development Research Group. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=ZA

[7] Statistics South Africa. (2024). Quarterly Labour Force Survey: Quarter 4, 2023. Pretoria: Stats SA. Available at: http://www.statssa.gov.za

[8] International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2026) Spatial Inequality in South Africa: Causes and Policy Options. IMF Selected Issues Paper No. 2026/018. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Available at: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/selected-issues-papers/2026/english/sipea2026018.pdf

[9] Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[10] Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. (2023). South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey Report. Cape Town: IJR. Available at: https://www.ijr.org.za/reconciliation-barometer.

[11] Ellis, S. (2012). External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990. London: Hurst & Company.

[12] Adonis, C.K. (2025) “The crown without the jewels: South Africa’s flawed transition and its implications for social justice and equity in post-apartheid South Africa”, Critical Discourse Studies, 18(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251368766

[13] OECD (2018) Trust and social capital, in For Good Measure: Advancing Research on Well-being, Metrics Beyond GDP. Paris: OECD Publishing.

[14] UNCTAD. (2024). World Investment Report 2024: Investment Facilitation for Development. Geneva: United Nations. Available at: https://unctad.org/wir

South African Tourism. (2023). Annual Tourism Report 2023. Pretoria: South African Tourism. Available at: https://www.southafrica.net/research-and-insights ^[15]

[16] African Union Commission. (2020). Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area. Addis Ababa: African Union. Available at: https://au.int/en/cfta

[17] South Africa Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) (2026) South Africa’s response to the request by the Republic of Ghana for a debate at the AU on xenophobic attacks. Available at: https://dirco.gov.za/

[18] World Bank (2020) The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects. Washington, DC: World Bank

[19] Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, s 10

[20] South Africa (1998) Refugees Act 130 of 1998. Pretoria: Government Printer.

[21] United Nations (1951) Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted 28 July 1951, 189 UNTS 137, entered into force 22 April 1954.

[22] Organisation of African Unity (1969) OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, adopted 10 September 1969, entered into force 20 June 1974.

[23] UNCTAD (2024)