Celso Flores/Flickr I returned home on Monday night with a knot in my stomach. Three weeks on the road for our World Cup coverage was meant to be a kind of escape. I missed my wife and daughter, of course—they are my home—but the land we live on feels increasingly strange and unfamiliar. Usually, being South African abroad is a badge you wear with some pride. People know the shorthand: Mandela, the long fight against apartheid. Lately there has been a second line too: “You’re the country taking Israel to court.” Last year, even the TSA officer who stamped my passport at Newark congratulated me for what “your government is doing for Palestine.” This time, especially with other Africans I met, the conversation went a different way. The question, almost every time, was some version of: “Why are you guys against other Africans?” As Bafana Bafana made it out of the group and into the knockouts, it became harder to revel in “No DNA, just RSA.” I knew those celebrations were happening in a country where patriotism and xenophobia are now tightly braided together. To be honest, part of me is relieved we are no longer in the tournament. My reflex, when confronted with the “you” in “your country,” was to wriggle out of it. The quickest move was: “Well, my parents are Tanzanian, so I’m not only South African.” It’s not untrue, but it’s also a bit of a cop‑out. At home, that same heritage has always felt slightly precarious. In 2008, when I was in primary school, I was called a kwerekwere, punched in the face and kicked. I didn’t go back to school for the rest of the week. I was also called a “champagne head,” and to be fair I did (do) have a big head—maybe my classmates already suspected I was destined to become a champagne socialist. It’s not the worst that could have happened to me, nor was it as bad as what happened to others, but it sits under a lot of this. It means that when I say “we,” I am never entirely sure whether I am talking about the people doing the chanting or the people being chased. As unpopular as South Africa has become outside its borders, there are also people within it who are quietly cheering its decline.There is a way of reading this moment that sees it as proof that Black South Africans are inherently violent and lazy. Some of the same voices who’d spent the past couple of years lobbying Washington for white South African “refugee” status treated 30 June as vindication, proof that the “rainbow nation” had always been a lie. White right‑wingers (and their global allies) have already slotted it into their favorite narrative: “This is what happens under Black rule.” That story is wrong. So is its mirror image: the reflex to protect the country’s name, to insist “this is not us,” that this did not reflect the spirit of Ubuntu, as though the violence on our streets belonged to some other, less exceptional part of the continent (rather than reflecting the violence this country was built on). Both readings end up in the same place—they let everyone off the hook, either by writing the country off entirely or by writing this moment out of it. If South Africa is uniquely fallen and uniquely hypocritical—the one African “miracle” that finally cracked, rather than a country working through a wound plenty of others carry too—then there is nothing to learn here about postcolonial politics more broadly, or about the uses of racism and nationalism in an unequal world. The other shortcut is to flip to the structural explanation. Thirty years of neoliberalism, a national bourgeoisie that never redistributed wealth, a state hollowed out by patronage. Of course, the elite will reach for foreigners as a convenient scapegoat. Of course, the disenfranchised will latch on to whatever gives them a sense that someone, somewhere, is finally listening. Thomas Lesaffre wrote about this for us way back in 2022, in a piece ominously titled “South Africa’s postcolonial winter is coming.” The point was simple: there is nothing exceptional about South Africa in this regard. We are following a pattern that other postcolonial African states have gone through before. That account is right as far as it goes. But, it also doesn’t help the Zimbabwean shopkeeper whose business has been burnt down, or the Malawian families queuing outside consulates and bus stations, trying to get out before an invented deadline. It doesn’t help people who have already been assaulted or killed. The damage for many, is already done. Nor will structural explanations do much for those who are now convinced that turning on their neighbor is their only remaining form of political agency. If you’ve been told for three decades that you live in the “rainbow nation,” that “a better life for all” is coming, that you must be patient because “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”—all official slogans from the first democratic government—and your material life has stayed the same or got worse, it is not surprising that an outfit like March and March, a vigilante movement built around anti‑migrant politics, starts to sound more concrete than the lofty aspirations of the national liberation struggle. Groups like that offer people something to do and someone to blame. It also offers people the sense of being part of something that finally looks like an achievable program. In a country where most people have no meaningful say over the budget, their workplace, or the border, that can feel like the first time politics has noticed you. As I write this on Wednesday morning, the worst fears about 30 June did not materialize in the way many of us imagined. There was no July 2021‑style conflagration (the days of looting, burning, and hundreds of deaths after Jacob Zuma’s arrest), no single, country‑wide pogrom. In places like Durban’s King Dinuzulu Park, marches of thousands were tense and ugly in their slogans but largely orderly, with organizers and ushers physically stopping attempts at looting and keeping crowds moving. In Johannesburg, the main march to Constitution Hill ended with a memorandum and dispersal, and police, backed by R600‑million (about 36 million USD) in reallocated funds, did manage to confiscate axes, saws, and sjamboks and break up some splinter groups. But the day was not “peaceful,” whatever the press conferences claimed. In Yeoville and Ekurhuleni, splinter groups went door to door, breaking windows and dragging people out of flats they suspected housed migrants. A journalist was attacked after protesters decided he “looked foreign.” Over the past months, roughly 25,000 people have already been pushed to leave the country, and at least four have been killed; more than 40,000 undocumented people have been arrested this year, with thousands picked up in the past month alone. For those families, the line between “orderly” march and disaster has already been crossed. And this was not a one‑day event. Jacinta Ngobese‑Zuma, the leader of March and March, told her supporters in Durban that they would march “every Thursday, for the next six months, until they are gone.” In Johannesburg, March and March’s memorandum repeated the same promise. Firoz Cachalia, the acting minister of police, politely noted that this looked a lot like a political project timed for the local government elections in November, when municipalities across the country will elect new councils and mayors, and that Tuesday would not be treated as a magical deadline. At the same time, there has been organized resistance. The civil society collective Siyafana Sonke (literally “We Are All Together”) brought together around 160 organizations to call this a humanitarian crisis and to insist that anger be directed at the state and capital, not at migrants. In neighborhoods like Thembelihle, a shack settlement south of Johannesburg, local committees such as the Thembelihle Crisis Committee have tried to patrol and protect foreign‑owned shops and commuters. Some churches, under the South African Council of Churches umbrella, have again offered sanctuary, even as they risk becoming targets themselves. Traditional leaders, including the Zulu king, publicly urged their followers not to attack migrants. These efforts didn’t erase the fear, but they meant that June 30 was not only a day of intimidation. So where does that leave me, a few days after shuffling off a plane into Cape Town International Airport, still in my Bafana Bafana jersey? It leaves me holding two feelings that don’t sit comfortably together. Pride, still, in the parts of our story that are real: that the same state which fails so many of its residents has, against the odds, stood up repeatedly for Palestine and other causes; that the idea “No DNA, just RSA” contains a good instinct—a civic, non‑ethnic notion of belonging. And dread, because I can see how easily that same idea is being twisted into a test of who really counts: who is “RSA” and who is just “DNA,” a body that can be pushed back toward some imaginary border. As for “what is to be done,” the answer on paper is easy to recite: push back against the lies of the right, and build an idea of shared progress that starts by meeting people’s basic, material needs. If it were as simple as writing that sentence—as a champagne socialist like me is bound to do—we wouldn’t be here. We are here precisely because that work is hard, slow, and has mostly failed. I also don’t find much comfort in saying South Africa is not unique. The same mix of stagnation and broken promises is everywhere. I’ve just spent three weeks in North America where migrants are routinely blamed for everything and where borders are being hardened even as governments talk about “welcoming the world” for the World Cup. The slogans and the targets shift, but the story feels familiar. I don’t have a neat ending. I came back to a house that feels like home, in a country that doesn’t always. For now, that dissonance—the mix of love, shame, fear, stubborn attachment, and the knowledge that people are still organizing anyway, because we must—is the only honest place I can write from. – William Shoki, editor |
