Structural violence: South Africa’s anti-immigrant protests expose apartheid-era legacies and economic precarity in Mozambique
Original framing: “Mozambique says five citizens killed in ‘xenophobic attacks’ in South Africa” — The Guardian - World
The violence is rooted in the 1891 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty, which carved Mozambique and South Africa into artificial states, and apartheid’s 'homelands' policy, which created Bantustans to justify labor migration. Post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to address economic justice, leaving racial capitalism intact. Mozambique’s civil war (1977–1992) and SAPs (IMF/World Bank) dismantled its industries, forcing labor migration to South Africa’s mines and farms—now framed as 'illegal.'
The violence in Mossel Bay is not an aberration but a symptom of Southern Africa’s unresolved colonial and apartheid legacies, compounded by neoliberal extraction and climate change.
Mozambican migrants are caught in a vise between South Africa’s racial capitalism—where their labor is exploited but their rights denied—and Mozambique’s economic collapse, fueled by debt, SAPs, and corporate plunder (e.g., TotalEnergies’ gas projects). The *trickster* in this narrative is the system itself: a hypocritical order that criminalizes survival while benefiting from the very flows it condemns. Solutions must therefore be regional and structural, addressing the root causes of migration (climate, debt, corporate power) rather than its symptoms. A SADC Free Movement Protocol, coupled with truth commissions and corporate accountability, could begin to dismantle the apartheid-era frameworks that still govern labor and migration in Southern Africa. Without this, the cycle of violence and scapegoating will persist, with migrants as the perpetual scapegoats.