In the introduction to our five-part series on the rise of xenophobia in South Africa, we highlighted how anti-immigrant sentiment has evolved from rhetoric to organised action and state complicity. We argued that xenophobia is being used as a tool by the political elite to distract from systemic failures to divide the working class and conceal the exploitation and plundering of resources in southern Africa and beyond. Part 1 also criticised the government’s response, the role of mining companies, and called for trade unions and the working class to unite against xenophobia and related forms of discrimination.
In part 2 of the series, we examine how apartheid-era strategies of discrimination in South Africa have inspired contemporary xenophobic, racist, and far-right movements globally, highlighting the role of economic inequality, political complicity, and organised campaigns in perpetuating anti-immigrant sentiment and undermining human rights.
The methods of SA’s system of apartheid, the most developed forms of systemic discrimination, oppression and exploitation, serves as an historical point of reference for today’s xenophobes and racists across the world. The modern point of reference is the US administration, led by an unapologetic xenophobe, racist and misogynist who ascended to the presidency despite being a convicted sexual offender and facing multiple corruption charges. Trump’s mouth is an open sewer from which pours an unrestrained torrent of xenophobia and incitement of racial hatred and misogyny.
Africa is a “s..t hole”, Haitians eat pets, Mexicans are rapists and criminals, Latin American immigrants are drug smugglers, escapees or released from mental institutes, SA is committing genocide against white people and Somalia is not even a country, just people walking around killing each other. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American in the US Congress, the first woman of colour to represent Minnesota and also one of the first two Muslim women to serve at that level of government was denounced as a piece of garbage. These despicable utterances passing for presidential public statements are repeatedly made by the occupant of the White House that postures as the world’s “greatest democracy” is the model for the far right, xenophobes and racist worldwide.
The global capitalist crisis is exhibiting all the symptoms of the 2008 global financial crisis from which it never really recovered, but in greater magnitude. As another crash approaches, the ruling elites are desperate to forestall a united uprising against them by the working class, the poor and the victims of oppression in all its forms within every country and across the boundaries created by colonialism and imperialism. This is the material basis for the rise of the far right, ultra nationalist, racist and fascist formations of varying levels of strength across the world. This includes Trump, who has committed himself to carrying out the biggest number of “illegal” immigrant deportations in US history.
Capitalist governments worldwide have in common that they demonise immigrants for the collapse of social services, deepening poverty, rising unemployment and the increase in crime. All these movements the capitalist classes have called into existence serve as their more than useful idiots, providing a cover for their crimes and shielding them from culpability for the crisis.
The MWP salutes all formations that continued their battle against human rights violations of SA citizens and foreign nationals alike. We congratulate especially the Socio Economic Rights Institute (SERI) which represented social movement formations Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX), the South African Informal Traders Forum (SAITF), the Inner City Federation (ICF) and Abahlali BaseMjondolo for their principled defence of fundamental human rights in their notable court victory over both the City of Joburg and Operation Dudula. We congratulate likewise the Treatment Action Campaign, Doctors without Borders, Kaax represented by Section 27 for consolidating this victory less than a month later. In a scathing judgement, 15 government respondents including provincial health authorities, SAPS, district officials and management structures were ordered to take immediate action to end obstruction to public health care facilities.
Prior to SERI winning the case in the Gauteng High Court the ANC government was only too happy with Operation Dudula doing as they please as shown by their removal of informal traders SA and foreign nationals alike, trading in De Villiers Street, Johannesburg. Former Johannesburg mayor, Sello Dada Morero, defended these illegal actions as necessary to ensure compliance with bye-laws.
SERI representatives, including women like Executive Director, Nomzamo Zondo, have shown courage under fire. They have been subjected to intimidation and death threats. They have been demonised in the media by reactionary anti-democratic forces including government officials; attacked on social media; had their cell phones monitored and were personally followed. These threats were so serious that SERI was obliged to temporarily close its offices at one stage. We commend all the formations that organised counter-demonstrations against Operation Dudula. Their numbers dwarfed those of Operation Dudula showing that it owes its public profile far more to disproportionate media coverage than to active support in society.
This marks a new low in the dive into the sewer of right wing and far right reaction flowing across political developments in many countries across the world – the effluent from the underbelly of global capitalism in a deep economic, social and political crisis.
For the generations that fought against apartheid reliant on the support of neighbouring countries for refuge, political support and the provision of bases for the armed struggle, Operation Dudula and its ilk’s very existence is deeply offensive. It is an open repudiation of the pan Africanist and international solidarity in the struggle that gave them the freedom to campaign to spread their filth today. It is an insult to the memory of many who died in the struggle for the freedoms these reactionary formations are abusing today both in SA and in the Front Line states whose economies were strangled by the apartheid regime. The mining industry has been the backbone of SA’s economic development. It relied on migrant labour from SA’s southern Africa hinterland – Lesotho, Mozambique, eSwatini, Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi.
For over a century workers from the subcontinent lived peacefully side by side, inter-married and created SA’s rich cultural mix. SA’s first trade union for Black and Coloured workers, the Industrial and Commercial Union, founded in 1919 was led by a Malawian, Clements Kadalie. The first president of the National Union of Mineworkers, founded in 1982, was Lesotho-born James Motlatsi.
The xenophobes have provided oxygen for the revival of the very ideas against which the struggle against apartheid was fought. Xenophobia has dragged along with it in tow its blood relatives – racism, religious bigotry and misogyny.
How then, is the rise of xenophobia to be explained?
Objective factors
Xenophobia’s origins cannot be explained by subjective factors like the corrupt ambitions of the leaders of the likes of the PA, ActionSA, the DA, MK, Operation Dudula and its off-shoots or the ANC alone. They have their origins in objective factors – the crisis of capitalism and the conscious class calculations of the ruling economic and political elite. This applies to SA and the world.
Their reactionary ideas are cynically promoted to divide the working class against itself as the capitalist class steps up its attempt to divert attention from its culpability for the crisis of unprecedented inequalities between rich and poor, mass unemployment, and poverty. The subjugation of women, attacks on the LBTQI community, the instigation of religious sectarianism Islamophobia, the weaponisation of anti-semitism, intensified discrimination against racial and religious minorities, environmental disaster, war and genocide – these are all weapons in the arsenal of the class war on the working class worldwide.
In 2025, the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population owned 75 percent of global wealth, the middle 40 percent held 23 percent, and the bottom half controlled only 2 percent. The wealthiest 0.001 percent – fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires – now control three times more wealth than half of humanity.
Xenophobia in SA is not something new. It has been an undercurrent in SA politics from 1994. According to data compiled by the Wits University’s Xenowatch project, at least 669 people died in xenophobic attacks across South Africa between 1994 and March 2024. The more than 900 violent xenophobic incidents recorded have led to the displacement of 123,700 people, and looting of about 4,850 shops.
The formations enjoying such public attention today, did not exist at the time of the barbaric xenophobic pogroms that claimed 63 lives in 2008 and several more in outbreaks thereafter. Until then these outbreaks were localised, orchestrated by a combination of marginalised youth, the lumpen proletariat, small business owners unable to compete with the more successful organised immigrant spaza shop businesses and criminals out to loot.
Since then, the sharp deterioration in socio-economic conditions has fertilised the grounds for the escalation of xenophobia in a much more organised form and entry into the political mainstream. It is the political equivalent of seed dormancy – the synchronisation of their life cycle with more favourable climatic conditions. Xenophobia has sprouted like poisonous vegetation from the qualitative worsening of social conditions following the 2008 global financial crisis that claimed over 1m jobs in SA.
Despite all the fanfare and extravagant promises of the 2012 Ramaphosa-headed National Development Commission’s Plan for 2030, not a single goal has been achieved in jobs, economic growth, investment, poverty reduction or anything much else.
To achieve these goals the ANC government’s neo-liberal capitalist programme went into top GEAR with eyewatering social spending cuts. Instead of failing to arrest the nosedive in economic growth, it accelerated it. The NDP set itself a target of 5.4.% economic growth per annum for ten years consecutively to eradicate not poverty in its entirety but extreme poverty. Economic growth has averaged just 1% in the nearly two -and-a-half decades since. Millions more have been thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment as the latest retrenchments bloodbath shows.
The logic of the ANC’s capitalist policies has necessitated not only the continuation, but worsening, of the working class’s pre-1994 existence. Mass unemployment, inequality between the classes has widened within every population group including Whites.
The World Bank has classified SA as the world’s most unequal society where it competes for the world cup of inequality with the likes of Brazil. According to the latest World Inequality Report 10% of the population own 86% of the wealth in income and assets. This is captured in the fact that it would take a typical Shoprite worker between approximately 991 to 1,180 years to earn its CEO, Pieter Engelbrecht’s total annual remuneration for the 2024 or 2025 financial years.
It is these astronomical inequalities alongside the collapse in social services – housing health, education, sanitation – aggravated by corruption, rising crime, and the appearance of multiple symptoms of a failing state, that constitute the objective material conditions from which xenophobia and racism and the increase in crime have sprung. These conditions have combined with subjective factors: the role of the capitalist class in funding some of these formations, the political legitimacy the ANC has provided them, the active role of the ANC itself in the promotion of xenophobia and the absence of a united counter-campaign and narrative for workers unity and internationalism by the working class and labour movement.
Subjective Factors
These conditions provide the explanation for the main difference between the character of the pre and post -2024 election xenophobia. The former manifested as more or less spontaneous outbreaks of reaction; the latter orchestrated consciously. The forces promoting xenophobia have benefitted on the one hand from funding by big business and corrupt criminal cartels operating as business forums. On the other, their quest for political legitimacy has benefited from and been boosted by the main political parties – the ANC, DA, MKP, ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance – both in word and deed, by way of political propaganda and action.
The founder of the most prominent of the champions of xenophobia, Operation Dudula, Nhlanhla Lux, was courted and funded by the Oppenheimer family. Lux, who has since parted company with his creation, boastfully posted FB pictures of himself posing with his Oppenheimer patrons, luxury home and butterfly winged Porsche. Operation Dudula, undeterred by its 2024 electoral failure, has set its eyes on the 2026 local government elections. This will give it the opportunity to access the trough of self-enrichment, patronage and corruption. Its invasions of clinics and targeting of schools is an selectoral strategy – the translation of its 2024 election platforms into direct action.
SA’s 2024 elections campaign saw for the first time political parties that incorporated xenophobia into their manifestos. In public speeches they openly called for the deportation of undocumented migrants. Without exception, they received their funding from the rich – millionaires from across the political spectrum, black and white who poured billions into the election campaign coffers of these other new capitalist political formations.
As we pointed out at the time, the capitalist class was gripped with fear over the political instability that could follow should the ANC’s hitherto unchallenged grip on power weaken through the loss of its overall majority. Over the three decades till then, the ANC was the capitalist class’s main instrument for the preservation of post-apartheid capitalism. Big business poured unprecedented amounts into the coffers of new bourgeois formations like Rise Mzansi and the short lived Change Starts Now as well as existing formations like ActionSA. These were to serve as props for a diminished ANC.
The duplicitous complicity of big business in legitimising xenophobia is shown by capitalist political columnist and former Financial Mail editor Peter Bruce’s explanation for his support for ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba. He’s xenophobia makes him wince he stated, but he is a capitalist. Similarly, renowned columnist in leading domestic and international capitalist newspapers, Justice Malala said about ActionSA: “Its utterances on immigration are deplorable, but the party is key to the strengthening of our democracy”, but it must not be allowed to fail. He (Mashaba) did, after all, build a multimillion-rand business empire from nothing…He did it under apartheid.” BL PREMIUM 09/02/2022)
In the next, Part 3 of our series on Xenophobia, we analyse how the ANC and its partners in the GNU have increasingly adopted and promoted xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, echoing apartheid-era tactics and blaming migrants for socio-economic crises, while undermining constitutional rights and failing to address the root causes of poverty and service delivery failures in South Africa.
