Overnight on Friday, 30 May, anti-immigrant violence engulfed an informal settlement in Mossel Bay, a Western Cape city roughly 380 kilometres east of Cape Town. About 55 shacks burned, and at least two men died from assault injuries.
Mozambique’s government confirmed five of its nationals died as “a direct consequence of xenophobic attacks,” with two more perishing in a road accident while fleeing. About 800 Mozambican nationals found themselves in the unrest, and repatriation efforts began by 1 June.
Mossel Bay’s mayor, Dirk Kotze, voiced “deep concern and dismay at the current xenophobic attacks where people have been murdered, houses burned and families displaced.”
South Africa has seen deadly anti-immigrant violence before. Sixty-two people died in 2008, violence flared again in 2015, and vigilante movements resurged in 2021. The current wave differs in its formal organisation and geographic reach.
Two citizen-led movements, March and March and Operation Dudula, have marched across Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban since April. Both issued a 30 June deadline for all undocumented foreign nationals to leave the country.
March and March, which emerged in 2025 under Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s leadership, wraps nativist demands in civic aesthetics, using branded T-shirts, South African flags, and petition campaigns. Its central claim, that African migrants cause unemployment, crime, and failing public services, has no statistical foundation.
What the Numbers Show
Arguably, the rhetoric driving both movements collapses under scrutiny of South Africa’s own economic data.
South Africa’s official unemployment rate reached 32.7% in the first quarter of 2026, rising from 31.4% at year-end 2025. On the expanded measure, which includes discouraged job-seekers, the figure stands at 43.7%. Youth unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 reaches 60.9%, with over 3.9 million young people also outside employment, education, or training.
These facts predate the current anti-immigrant wave entirely.
Foreign nationals represent roughly 4% of South Africa’s total population, with over 83% originating from the Southern African Development Community region. South Africa’s own labour research shows that removing all foreign nationals would lower the national unemployment rate by less than a percentage point.
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema made it clear at the South African Communist Party’s Conference of the Left in Boksburg last month. “Migrants did not privatise state capacity,” Julius Malema said. “They did not concentrate land ownership. Migrants did not design an economy that fails to absorb labour.”
The actual drivers of South Africa’s labour crisis are structural and longstanding. Apartheid designed an economy around racial exclusion and spatial segregation.
State capture during the Zuma years hollowed out public institutions. Municipal service delivery has collapsed across dozens of townships. Economic growth has averaged well below 2% for over a decade.
A Political Season for Scapegoats
Deepening economic despair predictably attracts political exploitation, and local government elections scheduled for November sharpen the incentive.
The Human Sciences Research Council’s South African Social Attitudes Survey shows a marked decline in openness toward foreign nationals since the late 2010s. About a third of South African adults said they would welcome all foreigners in 2003. By 2025, that share had fallen to just 15%. Parties across the spectrum have identified this shift as electoral capital.
Now, the boundary between street movements and formal party politics has grown increasingly porous. Researchers who traced South Africa’s anti-immigrant digital infrastructure found its origins in the lockdown-era hashtag #PutSouthAfricansFirst, launched in April 2020. Missing-person campaigns, crime incidents, and anti-drug operations have since become catalysts, rapidly redirected toward broader nativist mobilisation before facts are established.
By 2026, the infrastructure had matured into a sophisticated, politically networked operation with links reaching into formal party structures.
Afrophobia, Indigeneity, and Who Gets Targeted
Julius Malema’s use of “Afrophobia” over xenophobia names something specific. The movements have concentrated their force on black African migrants, leaving white immigrants facing no comparable pressure.
The South African Human Rights Commission has raised concerns about growing Afrophobia in the Western Cape. The Mossel Bay killings now mark the crisis’s bloodiest episode in that province.
A secondary strand of nativist identity runs alongside this. Khoisan revivalism, concentrated in Cape Town and the Western Cape, asserts an indigenous prior claim rooted in ancestral land occupancy. The movement appears in recent academic work on South Africa’s constitutional politics.
The movement introduces a framework interrogating the belonging of African migrants alongside that of Nguni-origin communities, adding another dimension to the fragmentation of South African identity.
Together, the anti-immigrant movements and the revivalist identity politics reveal a society searching for a bounded definition of who deserves inclusion. Each definition, however drawn, deflects attention from the structural failure that makes inclusion scarce for all.
Moral Debt That Remains Unpaid
The specific targeting of black African nationals raises an older question of historical obligation.
South Africa’s liberation movement drew directly on the solidarity of its neighbours. Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Zambia sheltered fighters, funded operations, and bore economic costs for hosting the African National Congress. President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged as much in his Freedom Day address: “We did not walk alone into freedom. We were carried by a tide of solidarity from the nations of Africa.”
That solidarity established a moral account that no 30 June deadline can close. The governments of Nigeria, Mozambique, and Ghana have all lodged formal diplomatic protests over their nationals’ treatment. Mozambique’s President Daniel Chapo met President Ramaphosa in Pretoria on 3 June to address the fallout.
Diplomatic repair matters. But the deeper repair requires accountability from a political class that built an economy failing the majority of its citizens, and continues to preside over it.
Anti-immigrant marches leave every structural condition intact. Popular anger directed at the architects of that economy would find a more accurate address than the informal settlements of Mossel Bay.
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