By Richard DABLAH
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
There is a temptation, when confronted with the spectacle of mobs turning on migrants, to reach for the nearest moral vocabulary and declare the problem solved by naming it. Xenophobia. A word that travels well in headlines, carries the authority of diagnosis, and absolves by abstraction. But it is a misleading comfort. It suggests fear of the foreign, when what is unfolding in South Africa is something more precise, more deliberate, and more revealing. This is not fear. It is a political economy of exclusion.
The foreign African in South Africa is not an unknown figure. He is not an alien presence in any meaningful sense. He speaks a familiar rhythm of language, inhabits recognizable forms of labor, occupies the same precarious margins as millions of citizens. He is visible not because he is radically different, but because he is structurally convenient. He can be named, isolated, and mobilized against. In this sense, the migrant is not discovered; he is produced.
To understand this production requires abandoning the episodic lens through which these eruptions are typically viewed. The viral video, the burned shop, the hurried diplomatic exchange—these are not origins but symptoms. They belong to a longer arc in which South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement has struggled to reconcile its political emancipation with its economic continuities. The formal architecture of equality was erected atop an inherited landscape of inequality so vast that it could not be administratively resolved. It could only be managed, deferred, and, at times, displaced.
Displacement is the key. When a society cannot redistribute sufficiently, it redistributes blame. The figure of the foreign African becomes the ideal vessel for this transfer. He is proximate enough to be held responsible, yet peripheral enough to be denied protection. He occupies what might be called the zone of expendability, where the law hesitates and the crowd accelerates.
This is not merely a failure of governance; it is a mode of governance. The ambiguity of the state is not incidental. It is functional. By oscillating between condemnation and passivity, the state allows a form of delegated enforcement to emerge. Informal movements, neighborhood patrols, and loosely organized campaigns assume the role of regulators of belonging. They do not replace the state; they extend it into spaces where formal authority is either absent or politically inconvenient.
In this configuration, violence is not an aberration. It is a language. It communicates boundaries where policy remains indistinct. It signals to both citizens and non-citizens the terms under which presence is tolerated. The spectacle of punishment—public, performative, and often unrestrained—serves as a deterrent more effective than any bureaucratic procedure. It transforms the question of legality into a question of survival.
There is, however, a deeper historical irony that complicates this arrangement. South Africa’s liberation struggle was not an insular project. It was sustained, materially and symbolically, by a broader African and global solidarity. The moral authority it claimed was rooted in a universalist appeal: that dignity could not be partitioned, that injustice in one place demanded response from another. This was not rhetoric alone; it was strategy, identity, and legitimacy.
The post-apartheid state inherited this moral capital but found itself governing a reality that resisted its translation into material outcomes. The expectations generated by liberation—of inclusion, opportunity, and restitution—collided with the slow violence of structural inequality. In this collision, the universalism of the past became a burden in the present. It expanded the circle of obligation at a moment when the resources to fulfill that obligation were already strained.
The response has not been to openly repudiate this inheritance but to quietly recalibrate it. The language of solidarity remains, but its application has narrowed. The foreign African, once implicitly included in the moral community of struggle, is now positioned at its edge. Not entirely outside, but never securely within. This ambiguity is politically useful. It allows for selective invocation of principle without the full cost of its implementation.
What emerges, then, is a form of internal bordering. Not the conventional border that separates states, but a dispersed, mobile boundary that runs through urban spaces, labor markets, and social interactions. It is enforced not only by officials but by ordinary citizens who have internalized the logic of scarcity and competition. The question “Who belongs?” is no longer settled by documentation alone. It is negotiated through visibility, vulnerability, and the shifting calculus of resentment.
It would be analytically insufficient to attribute this entirely to economic deprivation, though deprivation is central. Many societies endure poverty without producing this specific configuration of hostility. What distinguishes the South African case is the particular conjunction of high expectations, persistent inequality, and a political discourse that has not fully resolved the tension between its universalist origins and its national imperatives.
The migrant becomes the site where this unresolved tension is staged. He is at once a reminder of the past—of solidarities extended and received—and a symbol of the present—of resources contested and futures deferred. To expel him, symbolically or physically, is to attempt a simplification of a far more complex crisis. It is an effort to redraw the boundaries of entitlement in a way that feels immediate, even if it is ultimately ineffective.
For the broader African context, the implications are significant. Intra-continental migration is not a peripheral phenomenon; it is constitutive of the continent’s economic and social life. The viability of regional integration, of shared markets, of collective resilience, depends on the possibility of movement without systematic hostility. When one of the continent’s central economies normalizes the targeting of fellow Africans, it introduces a destabilizing precedent.
Yet moral denunciation from outside will have limited effect if it does not engage with the structural conditions that sustain this dynamic. The issue is not only South Africa’s to resolve. It is embedded in a wider pattern in which postcolonial states navigate the dissonance between inherited economic structures and democratic expectations. The management of that dissonance often takes the form of exclusion, whether directed at migrants, minorities, or other marginal groups.
What is required, then, is not a repetition of familiar appeals to tolerance, but a more rigorous confrontation with the political economy that renders exclusion attractive. This includes the distribution of resources, the organization of labor markets, and the narratives through which states and societies interpret their own crises. Without such a confrontation, the cycle will persist, regardless of how often it is condemned.
The scenes that circulate today—of confrontation, of humiliation, of quiet fear—should not be read as isolated breakdowns. They are expressions of an underlying order that has yet to be adequately addressed. To focus solely on their moral dimensions is to risk obscuring their structural origins.
South Africa, in this sense, is not an outlier but an intensification. It reveals, in a particularly stark form, the tensions that many societies contain in less visible ways. The figure of the foreign African, constructed as a problem, is a mirror held up to a deeper set of contradictions.
The question is not whether that mirror will be shattered. It is whether what it reflects will be acknowledged.
*Quod erat demonstrandum.*
