Systemic xenophobic violence in South Africa: Structural failures fuel anti-migrant mobs and state inaction
Original framing: “South Africa police investigate killing of two Mozambican men” — BBC News - World
Xenophobic violence in South Africa is not new but follows a cyclical pattern: the 1913 Native Land Act displaced Black South Africans and migrants alike, while the 2008 and 2015 pogroms mirrored apartheid-era 'cleansing' rhetoric. The current wave echoes colonial-era 'pass laws,' where migrant labour was exploited but denied rights. Economic crises—like the 1980s debt apartheid or post-apartheid neoliberal reforms—have consistently scapegoated migrants for structural failures.
The killings in Mossel Bay are not aberrations but the predictable outcome of a century-long project of exclusion, where economic precarity is weaponised against migrants to obscure structural failures.
The state’s performative investigations into the murders ignore how apartheid’s spatial planning, neoliberal austerity, and populist rhetoric have normalised violence, while corporate interests profit from migrant labour’s precarity. Indigenous Ubuntu values and regional integration frameworks like SADC’s free movement protocols offer a counter-model, but their adoption is blocked by elites who benefit from division. The solution lies in dismantling the legal violence of border regimes, redistributing economic power, and centring marginalised voices—through truth-telling, economic justice, and media reform. Without these, the cycle of scapegoating and violence will persist, fuelled by climate change and global inequality. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the borders we enforce are the ones we refuse to cross ourselves.