'Fix Your Country': South Africa's Xenophobia and the African Brotherhood That Keeps Breaking Down

A video goes viral. A Ghanaian man surrounded by fifteen people on a street in KwaZulu-Natal is told to prove he belongs in South Africa. He explains that he left his passport at home because it was raining and he feared the document would get wet. They dismiss him. Someone tells him to shut up. Another voice tells him to go and fix his country.

That footage, circulating on social media this week, lit a diplomatic fire between Accra and Pretoria. Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa summoned South Africa’s acting high commissioner. A Ghanaian lawyer was separately confronted and ordered to prove his legal status before being told to leave. In the Eastern Cape, mobs ransacked shops, homes, and cars belonging to foreigners, with reports that attackers even entered hospitals to drag out foreign nationals seeking treatment.

These are not scenes from fiction. This is April 2026, on the continent that keeps talking about pan-Africanism, borderless Africa, and shared destiny.

The Insult in the History

There is something particularly bitter about Ghana being on the receiving end of this. When apartheid had South Africa by the throat, Ghana under Nkrumah had already positioned itself as the heartbeat of African liberation. Accra was a sanctuary. Pan-Africanism was not a conference theme then. It was a policy. Ghana bled for the idea that Africa looks after its own.

Ablakwa reminded Pretoria of exactly that history. He described the attacks as “naked hatred” and “baseless xenophobia,” and stressed that attacking law-abiding Africans was a betrayal of everything the continent’s founding fathers stood for. South Africa knows this history. Which makes the silence of its streets, the passivity of its police, and the aggression of its mobs all the more difficult to explain away.

What Is Actually Happening on the Ground

A Ghanaian resident in South Africa, Prince Kontonkyi, reported that the current violence started in the Eastern Cape and has now spread. He noted that in previous outbreaks, Ghanaians were largely spared. Not this time. He also alleged that South African police stood by and watched without intervening. If that is accurate, it is not just a failure of policing. It is complicity.

The grievances local agitators recite are familiar: foreigners are stealing jobs, taking their women, running drugs. Consider what that actually means on the ground. Ghanaians in South Africa are largely running barber shops, nail salons, beauty stores, and small cosmetics businesses. These are survival trades in communities that South African formal enterprise does not bother to serve. The question of who is stealing whose opportunity is more complicated than a mob in the street is willing to sit with.

And what of South Africans abroad? There are thousands of them in other African countries, Ghana included. Nobody is surrounding them on wet streets. Nobody is storming their workplaces. Ablakwa himself assured that Ghana would not tolerate reprisals against South Africans living here. That contrast says something important about who this continent’s hospitality actually extends to.

Is South Africa Naturally Xenophobic?

The question makes some people uncomfortable. It still deserves a straight answer.

Research by Dr. Christopher Claassen, published by Afrobarometer, paints a damning picture. In the 1995 World Values Survey, South Africans ranked as the most xenophobic nation among 18 countries surveyed. A 1998 poll found that 72% of South Africans supported requiring foreigners to carry identification at all times, and 66% wanted the border fence electrified. By 2006, barely anything had shifted. The proportion of South Africans holding a favourable view of immigrants did not exceed 26%, regardless of whether the question was about Africans, Europeans, or Americans, and regardless of whether the respondents themselves were black or white.

Violence in May 2008 killed 62 people and displaced 100,000. Another wave hit in April 2015, with the Zulu monarch publicly calling African foreigners “lice.” Between those two events, 350 foreigners were killed for their perceived national origins. Every few years, the pattern repeats.

But Claassen’s research also tells us something useful. The cause is not cultural difference. The “symbolic threat” theory, which argues that hostility grows from how different foreigners look or worship, found almost no support in the South African data. What actually predicted xenophobia were poverty, relative deprivation, frustration with government, and social mobilization. In plain terms: people who feel poor, who feel cheated compared to their neighbours, and who believe their government has abandoned them are the most likely to point at a Ghanaian barber and call him the enemy. The mechanism is scapegoating. Frustration that should be directed at the state gets redirected at the nearest visible and vulnerable group.

A Crisis Looking for a Villain

South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 31.4% in the last quarter of 2025. Youth unemployment sat at 43.8%. Those numbers help explain why anti-migrant rhetoric spreads so easily in townships. They do not justify it.

South Africa’s labour crisis is rooted in weak economic growth, a broken education-to-work pipeline, decades of apartheid spatial exclusion, and a state that has consistently failed its poorest citizens. Foreign nationals did not create any of that. They have simply become a face onto which those failures are projected.

South Africa’s government has now promised a crackdown, with the police ministry stating that those found participating in or inciting xenophobic violence will be apprehended and prosecuted. Fine words. South Africans have been hearing versions of the same statement since 2008. The pattern has not stopped.

The Legality Argument Does Not Hold

Some South Africans raise the documentation question, suggesting that if a foreigner is undocumented, the complaints are complicated. Even accepting that argument at face value, it collapses under basic scrutiny.

If someone is in a country without the right papers, the lawful response is deportation through proper procedure, handled by the state, not a mob surrounding a man in the rain demanding his passport and telling him to go home. The moment private citizens take immigration enforcement into their own fists, they have become criminals themselves, whatever the status of the person they are confronting. The law does not work by street intimidation. The moment South Africa accepts that logic, lawlessness has found a respectable cover.

The Contradiction South Africa Cannot Outrun

South Africa presents itself on the continental stage as a leader, a champion of African integration, a country whose freedom was paid for partly with the solidarity of the rest of the continent. Presidents travel to AU summits with beautiful speeches about one Africa.

Then the same country cannot protect a Ghanaian man walking home from a barber shop.

No nation is born hating its neighbours. But a society that has reproduced the same violent patterns every few years since 1994, where surveys consistently show that roughly a third of the population would actively participate in action to exclude African immigrants, where police watch and do nothing, and where government condemns but does not prevent, that society has a problem that cannot be blamed on fringe elements.

The research is clear on one final point. The conditions driving xenophobia, poverty, hopelessness, a government seen as indifferent, have not been resolved in South Africa. Until they are, the videos will keep coming. Another man, another wet street, another instruction to go fix his country.

Africa cannot build itself with one hand while beating itself with the other.

Alpha Osei Amoako is an educator, school administrator and education columnist based in Accra, Ghana. He writes regularly on education, society and public affairs for modernghana.com, one of Ghana's leading online platforms for commentary and analysis. He also engages a wide Ghanaian audience through social commentary on Facebook, where he addresses issues at the intersection of education, culture and national development.

Email: Kwamealpha@gmail.com
Mobile: +233208007439

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