PROTECT SOUTH AFRICA

There is a version of South Africa that the world once admired. A country that looked at its dark past and chose to write a Constitution that guaranteed dignity for everyone. We were not perfect, we have never been but we were a country that African people across the continent looked up to. That version of South Africa is under threat. Not from outside our borders. But from within.

Xenophobia is not only a crime against foreign nationals. It is a crime against humanity.

When we burn the shops of Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Ethiopians, and Congolese people who came here carrying the same hopes and dreams that our own grandparents carried when they left the Bantustans to seek work opportunities in white neighborhoods, we are not protecting South Africa. We are humiliating it. The countries that sheltered our exiles, trained our fighters, buried people who died for this democracy: they are watching. They have been watching for years. What they see is not a neighbour. They see a country that has forgotten what it was saved from, and by whom.

You cannot claim to believe in Pan-Africanism while your citizens are chasing African people through the streets. South Africa cannot lead on the African continent while attacking African people inside its own borders. Our credibility on this continent, in trade, in diplomacy, in every room where the future of Africa gets argued over, depends on whether we treat African lives with the same dignity we demand for our own. We are failing that test badly, and the rest of the continent has noticed.

When a community is taught to blame Zimbabweans for unemployment, or Nigerians for crime, or Somalis for poverty, the people who actually control budgets, tenders, and government contracts are left entirely undisturbed. Scapegoating is not a spontaneous emotion. It is a political strategy. It redirects legitimate, burning anger, anger that should be aimed at corruption, collapsed public services and a governing class that has failed ordinary people and points it at the most vulnerable people nearby. It is the oldest trick in the book for those who hold power and intend to keep it.

Xenophobia, afrophobia, and tribalism are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different faces. They all teach the same lesson: shrink the circle, find someone outside it, make them responsible for everything that went wrong. First it is foreigners. Then it is people from another province. Then another language group. Another religion. Another community. Once hatred is normalised, once the idea that some people are less human becomes acceptable, the circle never stops shrinking. History has shown us this, on this continent and on every other. No one who joins that logic is safe from it forever.

South Africa is better than this. The voices calling for violence against migrants and foreign nationals are loud but they are not the majority. That majority has been too quiet for too long. Silence is how a minority gets to define what our country stands for. If we do not speak, those voices will speak for all of us. They will define us. They will isolate us. And they will cost us more than we can afford to lose.

Reject xenophobia. Reject afrophobia. Reject tribalism. Reject the lie that our neighbours are our enemies.