Johannesburg's Repatriation Crisis: Thousands of African Migrants Flee Xenophobic Campaign

Thousands of African migrants are sleeping on Johannesburg’s pavements, afraid to return to their homes. The xenophobic campaign rallying around the cry “Abahambe” (They must go) has displaced so many people that Malawian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Zimbabwean governments have already arranged repatriation for tens of thousands of their nationals. At least four people have been killed in recent weeks as mobs drove migrants from their communities.

What makes this wave different, says cultural historian and writer Fezokuhle Mthonti, is not the violence itself but its infrastructure. “This is a new moment,” she says. The campaign is well-funded, has received mainstream media legitimacy, and has drawn direct engagement from government leadership. President Cyril Ramaphosa met and shook hands with two leaders of the xenophobic protests last week, while calling for peaceful conduct. For a nation that many African migrants once viewed as a beacon of economic opportunity, the reversal is stark.

South Africa has experienced xenophobic violence before. Riots dating back to 2008 have claimed 703 lives in xenophobic incidents since apartheid’s end. Yet Mthonti emphasises that the current campaign operates at a different level of organisation and political legitimacy than anything witnessed in the post-apartheid period. Previous waves lacked the funding and institutional support this movement has secured.

Understanding the roots requires examining what the post-apartheid state has failed to deliver. Black South Africans became citizens only in 1994, and that citizenship has never felt secure. For poor and rural communities especially, the promised transformation has not materialised. Economic insecurity remains acute. The state has largely withdrawn from its responsibility to provide basic services to its most vulnerable populations. Both South Africans and migrants, Mthonti observes, are “the same folks who are trying to eke out an existence together” in the face of that withdrawal. Proximity, combined with deliberate scapegoating, has turned neighbours into adversaries.

The irony cuts deep. Johannesburg exists because of indentured labour. Sandton, in north Johannesburg, represents the wealthiest square mile in Africa, built on the same migratory labour systems now being violently rejected. “The reason we have Joburg is because of indentured labour,” Mthonti says. Migration, slavery, and abduction are woven into the nation’s foundational story. That history is being erased.

South Africa carries the weight of three overlapping systems of violence: apartheid, colonialism, and slavery. The country did not dismantle apartheid until 1994, decades after most colonised African nations achieved independence. During the 1960s, when other African countries were building post-colonial identities and developing racial self-esteem, South Africans were locked out of that process entirely. The result is a profoundly young nation still working through unresolved historical trauma.

Mthonti points to historical amnesia as a critical problem. After apartheid ended, the country attempted to adopt a neoliberal order as if the past had been wiped clean, ignoring the deep tribal and ethnic divisions apartheid had deliberately constructed. Those same dividing logics have since been repackaged around xenophobia. Even the Tsonga people, an ethnic minority present in South Africa for centuries, are experiencing violence because they are deemed not legitimately part of the South African project. “This is a function of apartheid,” Mthonti says without hesitation.

Meanwhile, this moment reflects global currents. Anti-migrant sentiment is being perpetuated by leaders worldwide, from Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump to Narendra Modi. Within South Africa, a particular distance has emerged between Black South Africans and other Africans. South Africa remains the continent’s wealthiest nation, with the highest concentration of dollar millionaires. The Black middle class has expanded significantly since apartheid, with middle- and high-income earners quadrupling since 2012. This relative affluence has created what Mthonti calls “a profound distance” between South Africans and other Africans.

Wealth tells only part of the story. Despite South Africa’s continental prominence, GDP growth sits just above 1 percent. The material insecurity is real. A vast chasm exists between the South Africa people imagine and the one they actually experience, and that gap fuels the scapegoating. Mthonti resists the common framing that poor people are inherently xenophobic or that poverty naturally breeds bigotry. The blame, she argues, lies with state failure and political leadership that deliberately manufactures division. “Poor people are not inherently xenophobic,” she insists. “More South Africans are open to pan-African unity than are not.”

Whether that openness can survive the current campaign’s organisation, funding, and political legitimacy is the question South Africa has not yet answered.