Source: The Conversation – Africa (2)
Anti-immigrant violence began to sweep across South Africa once again in March 2026. Over the following months an estimated 56,000 Malawians and 115,000 Zimbabweans were forced to flee their homes. At least 11 foreign nationals were killed.
It took the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa some months to condemn the violence.
The anti-migrant mass protests have been led by groups including March and March and Operation Dudula. The anti-immigrant groups blamed undocumented African migrants for crime, unemployment and inadequate public services, and set “deadlines” for them to leave the country. The slogan abahambe (“they must leave” in isiZulu) was repeated during burglaries and sexual assaults.
In response, governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi paid for tens of thousands of their citizens to return home, and asked the International Criminal Court to intervene.
The South African government under an African National Congress led coalition deported 19,000 migrants in just a few months. It also effectively condoned the violence, publicly shaking hands with protest leaders.
Commentators such as Nesrine Malik and William Shoki have framed the violence as supplanting the post-1994 “rainbow nation” consensus. This was a phrase coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to invoke a sense of unity in South Africa’s diverse population after nearly five decades under the segregationist policies of apartheid.
For his part, Ramaphosa has insisted that “quite a bit of the violence” was “being propelled from outside South Africa”. He did not provide evidence.
We are historians of southern African migration. Our research shows that today’s anti-immigrant activists, and the politicians who embrace them, have tapped into sentiments more than a century deep. Since the emergence of the African National Congress in 1912, nationalists and pro-democracy advocates have often harboured antipathy towards foreign migrants. They saw them primarily as competitors who undermined Black South Africans’ ability to get decent jobs with decent wages.
Still, the 20th century also presented pivotal moments when Black immigrants and South African activists successfully joined forces to resist racial and economic oppression. Those moments seem long forgotten today.
In this article we look back at that history to show how today’s anti-immigrant violence is not an aberration in South African history. But it’s also not the country’s only possible path.
Roots of the ‘rainbow nation’
South Africa’s population encompasses the descendants of British and Dutch colonisers, Asian workers, and the indigenous African population as well as Africans with origins outside South Africa’s present-day borders.
This diversity reflects the country’s history of slavery, colonialism and white settlement by the British and the Dutch. It also reflects labour recruitment programmes dating back to the mid-19th century:
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Indian indentured labourers brought to work on sugar plantations from the 1860s
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Chinese workers recruited to work on the gold mines during the early 20th century
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migrant workers from across southern Africa, particularly Malawi and Mozambique, recruited by mining companies. Others made their own way to farms and urban jobs from the late 19th century onwards.
Freedom struggles and immigration politics
The African National Congress was formed in 1912 when South Africa was still under British colonial rule to defend the voting rights and land claims of Black South Africans. It advocated for full equality in an increasingly oppressive society.
Mining and farming industries used migrant labour to keep Africans’ wages low. As a result, some of the founders of the African National Congress called for the deportation of Indian, Chinese and African immigrant workers. Anti-immigrant demands came from across the early ANC’s political spectrum – from moderates to communists.
Henry Selby Msimang, a moderate member of the ANC executive, complained in the mid-1920s that South Africa had become a
dumping ground for the unskilled workers of the African continent.
He called for the restriction of Mozambican immigrants, and advocated for a South African “race consciousness” that explicitly excluded Malawians.
In December 1926 a large anti-Malawian riot in Johannesburg killed six and injured 25. A petition promoted by Msimang and the ANC’s pro-communist general secretary, Eddie Khaile, subsequently demanded the deportation of all Malawians and Zimbabweans from South Africa.
But there were also pro-migrant voices in the ANC. They included two former ANC general secretaries, Sol Plaatje and Richard Victor Selope Thema, and a leading ANC lawyer, Richard Msimang. Msimang denounced Khaile for retreating “behind the barbed wires of racialism and provincialism”.
Shop-floor solidarity
For their part, Black labour migrants in South Africa fought for economic justice alongside Black South Africans. The most important example was Clements Kadalie, the Malawian leader of the first major Black trade union in southern Africa, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU).
The ICU won wage increases in Cape Town and Bloemfontein, defeated segregationist plans in Johannesburg and Durban, and enjoyed several legal victories. These included overturning deportation orders against Kadalie, among other measures.
Defending the mobility of all workers, the union recognised that any system of free movement had to be underpinned by minimum wages; pay was undercut by bosses, not immigrants.
Some within the ICU decried immigration from countries outside the British Empire, such as Mozambique. But in defending the free movement of workers throughout British colonial possessions, the union offered an expansive solidarity that challenged narrower ideas of South African nationalism.
This spirit carried into the second world war years. High demand for workers combined with labour leaders’ broader imaginations to bring a string of victories for Black workers. In August 1946 mine workers in the Witwatersrand went on strike under the banner of the African Mine Workers’ Union. As many as 100,000 were involved.
The union had deliberately recruited members originating from Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique and Angola, as well as South Africa. James Jacob Majoro, a clerk and ANC member from Lesotho, served as secretary of the union. He told workers to fight for money, rather than in “tribal” disputes. The union’s president John Beaver Marks, also an ANC leader, criticised Mozambicans for being “cowards”, however.
Things changed after the second world war.
Under high apartheid, which was introduced in 1948 after an all white election in which the National Party took power, the government brutally cracked down on the African Mine Workers’ Union, the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa.
Activists were forced underground and abroad. Exiled leaders worked across the continent. African nationalists widely boycotted South Africa.
One of Julius Nyerere’s first acts as prime minister of newly independent Tanzania in 1964 was to end the recruitment of Tanzanian workers for the Johannesburg mines.
The ANC, in turn, supported global anti-colonial campaigns. It led a local “potato boycott” against the “slave labour” of Malawians and Zimbabweans on South African potato farms.
Yet the ANC – like other African liberation movements – came to define its interests nationally.
In the 1980s collaboration between Black migrants and South Africans once again flourished. This was as the apartheid government’s iron grip weakened and the withdrawal of workers from Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique gave trade unions in South Africa more bargaining power.
The rise of the ANC-allied National Union of Mineworkers – a key force in the anti-apartheid struggle – was underpinned by solidarity between workers from Lesotho and South Africa. Men like Lira Setona, a charismatic winch-driver from Lesotho, were key to the union’s workplace organising. And the union’s general secretary, Ramaphosa, worked closely with worker-leaders from Lesotho to secure the union’s successes. Ramaphosa became South African president in 2018, and has shown little sympathy for immigrants since.
Democracy and xenophobia
The ANC’s electoral victory in 1994 unleashed a little-discussed wave of anti-migrant policies. In its first year in power, the ANC used apartheid-era laws to deport a record 157,084 people. Most were refugees from Mozambique’s bloody civil war.
Visions of the “rainbow nation” have seldom included those branded as “foreign Africans” – the victims of recent violence.
Yet there is also a parallel history: thousands of South African freedom fighters across more than a century have also improved their own lives through solidarity rather than through xenophobia.
Zoe Groves received funding for her research in Malawi and Zimbabwe from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Henry Dee received funding from the British Academy.
Julie Weise received funding for her research in South Africa and Malawi from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the University of Oregon.
Anusa Daimon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/15/have-south-africans-always-been-hostile-to-migrants-historians-map-a-chequered-history/