By Richard Aderounmu |
South Africa is, by most measures, one of Africa’s most industrialized and constitutionally sophisticated nations. It is also a country that seems to lurch from one crisis of violence to the next — massacres under apartheid, township uprisings, mine-worker shootings, waves of xenophobic killing, and now, in 2026, a new season of anti-migrant marches spreading through Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town.
To call this a “curse” risks sounding fatalistic. It is more accurate to call it a pattern — one with identifiable causes, repeat actors, and a political economy that keeps producing the same explosive conditions decade after decade.
A History of Unrest
South Africa’s instability did not begin with democracy in 1994; it was inherited from the system democracy replaced.
- Sharpeville, 1960. Police opened fire on a crowd protesting the pass laws that restricted Black South Africans’ movement, killing 69 people. It remains one of the defining massacres of the apartheid era and the moment South Africa’s liberation struggle turned decisively toward armed resistance.
- Soweto, 1976. Students protesting the forced use of Afrikaans in schools were met with police gunfire. Estimates of the dead range into the hundreds. Soweto became a generational turning point, radicalizing young Black South Africans and drawing international condemnation of apartheid.
- The transition years, 1990–1994. The negotiated end of apartheid was not peaceful. Political violence between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party, much of it concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal and the Witwatersrand townships, killed thousands in the years surrounding Nelson Mandela’s release and the first democratic election.
- Marikana, 2012. Police shot and killed 34 striking platinum miners near Rustenburg — the single deadliest use of force by South African security services since apartheid ended. It shattered the post-apartheid narrative that the new state would never turn its guns on Black workers the way the old one had.
- Service delivery protests, ongoing since the mid-2000s. South Africa has one of the highest rates of public protest in the world, driven by anger over unreliable electricity, water shortages, and failing municipal governance — grievances aimed squarely at the ANC-led local governments meant to have fixed these problems decades ago.
- The July 2021 unrest. Triggered by the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court, riots and looting swept KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, killing more than 300 people and causing billions of rand in damage. It exposed both the fragility of the state’s security apparatus and how quickly elite political grievances can be transformed into mass unrest.
- Xenophobic violence, recurring since 2008. Riots that began in Alexandra township in May 2008 killed more than 60 people and displaced tens of thousands, targeting Mozambican, Malawian, and Zimbabwean migrants. Similar violence recurred in 2015 and 2019. Operation Dudula, a vigilante movement that emerged around 2021, formalized anti-migrant sentiment into an organized political force.
The Current Crisis: 2026
Through the first half of 2026, a movement called March and March — led by a former Durban radio presenter — organized nationwide demonstrations demanding the deportation of undocumented migrants, setting a June 30 deadline for foreigners to leave the country.
The lead-up to that deadline saw documented killings: Mozambican nationals died in attacks in Mossel Bay in the Western Cape, where dozens of shacks in a migrant settlement were burned; gunmen opened fire on an informal settlement in Cleveland, Johannesburg; and Human Rights Watch documented vigilante attacks on African and Asian shopkeepers across Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban with what it described as an insufficient police response.
The government, wary of a repeat of the deadly July 2021 unrest, deployed a roughly 600-million-rand security operation for the June 30 deadline. More than 900 people were arrested nationwide; the day passed largely peaceful but not without looting and at least one further shooting death.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has publicly rejected vigilante enforcement of immigration law while acknowledging that public anger about undocumented migration is real. The United Nations Secretary-General and UN human rights experts have both condemned the violence and called on South African authorities to do more to protect foreign nationals.
The Economics Behind the Anger
It would be dishonest to talk about this unrest without talking about the labor market that surrounds it. South Africa’s official unemployment rate hit 32.7% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 31.4% the previous quarter, with the economy shedding 345,000 jobs in three months alone.
Youth unemployment — ages 15 to 24 — stood at a staggering 60.9%, and more than a third of young South Africans are neither employed, in school, nor in training. By global comparison, where the International Labour Organisation puts worldwide unemployment near 5%, South Africa’s numbers are not a variation on a global trend — they are a category of their own.
This is where the loaded framing so often applied to this crisis needs to be corrected, not indulged. The idea that Black South Africans are broadly “unemployable” gets the causality backward and ignores the historical record.
Apartheid was, by design, an economic system: it confined the Black majority to under-resourced schools, restricted them from skilled trades and professional licensing, controlled where they could live and work through pass laws, and reserved capital, land, and quality education almost entirely for the White minority.
Three decades of democracy have not undone that architecture — inequality in South Africa remains among the highest in the world, and the skills and asset gaps opened by apartheid persist largely along the lines apartheid drew. What the data shows is not a population incapable of work; it’s a population still locked out of the education pipelines, capital access, and networks that determine who gets hired — a legacy of dispossession, not a deficit of ability.
The Faces Behind the 2026 Unrest
This wave of unrest has identifiable leadership, not just an anonymous mob — and the political map is more complicated than a single “anti-migrant nation” narrative suggests.
Driving the anti-immigration marches is March and March, fronted by
Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a former Durban radio presenter who set the June 30 deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country.
Other figures associated with the broader anti-illegal-immigration movement include Ngizwe Mchunu and an activist known as Phakelumthakathi, both prominent voices amplifying the campaign on social media and at rallies.
This current mobilization builds on groundwork laid by Operation Dudula, the vigilante movement that emerged around 2021 and helped normalize anti-migrant enforcement as a grassroots cause rather than a fringe position.
On the other side of this fight, somewhat surprisingly to outside observers, is Julius Malema, leader of the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters — a politician better known internationally for fiery, radical rhetoric on land and race. Through 2026, Malema has repeatedly and publicly broken with the anti-migrant movement.
At a Workers’ Day rally in May, he accused South Africans of directing at African migrants a frustration they were too afraid to direct at White South Africans, arguing that anti-immigrant protests produce no actual jobs. He has gone further, calling xenophobic violence “state-sponsored,” accusing police and state institutions of failing to intervene and alleging that authorities have historically allowed tribal and ethnic divisions to be exploited to fuel unrest.
In July, addressing Botswana’s president directly during a visit to Gaborone, Malema dismissed the March and March leadership as “a few groups of thugs” attempting to divide Africa, and at a separate press conference apologized to African migrants on behalf of the country, calling the violence a source of shame.
Malema’s position complicates any simple story about South Africa’s political class uniformly exploiting xenophobia for gain. It also illustrates the more precise version of the “manipulation” argument: this isn’t one unified elite steering public anger in a single direction, but a genuine contest between political forces — some amplifying anti-migrant sentiment, others actively working to defuse it — playing out against a backdrop of unemployment and governance failure that neither side has yet solved.
Are People Being Manipulated? A Fair Look
The question of whether ordinary South Africans are being used by their own political class is worth asking honestly, and serious analysts have asked it.
The pattern is visible enough: unemployment and failing service delivery are real and severe, but rather than being channeled into pressure on the ANC-led government that has presided over both, public anger has repeatedly found a more convenient outlet in foreign migrants who have no political power to retaliate.
Politicians across the spectrum — including some within the ruling party and opposition parties like the newer populist formations — have at times echoed or tacitly encouraged anti-migrant rhetoric rather than confronting it, correctly calculating that blaming Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, or Malawians for joblessness is politically cheaper than addressing decades of governance failure, state capture-era corruption, and stalled economic reform.
Researchers with groups like the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa have explicitly framed vigilante xenophobic movements as “opportunistic,” feeding off the country’s frustration and unaddressed equity gaps rather than solving them.
That said, this shouldn’t be flattened into a single conspiracy where ordinary citizens are merely passive dupes. The frustration over crime, strained public services, and competition for scarce informal-sector jobs in townships is genuine and, in many cases, well-founded — undocumented migration does place real pressure on already-overwhelmed municipal systems.
The more defensible claim is narrower: that South Africa’s political class, across multiple parties, has had every incentive to let that anger point outward rather than do the harder work of building the education systems, industrial policy, and functioning municipal governance that would actually address unemployment.
Manipulation and legitimate grievance are not mutually exclusive — the tragedy is that a real problem is being answered with a target that, migration researchers note, has historically caused lasting economic disruption for the countries that expelled migrant labor without addressing what generated the anger.
Ramaphosa’s Response
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s posture through 2026 has been consistent but has satisfied almost no one. On May 11, he publicly condemned the anti-immigration violence and warned against vigilantism, insisting that South Africans are “not xenophobic” and that there is “no space” for xenophobia, racism, or Afrophobia in the country.
On June 7, he addressed the nation directly, announcing a package of tougher immigration enforcement measures — including dedicated courts to fast-track deportation cases — while revealing that the Border Management Authority had intercepted more than 450,000 attempted illegal entries over the preceding year. He framed this as evidence the state was listening to legitimate concerns about undocumented migration, while insisting that enforcing immigration law was the government’s job alone, not a licence for citizens to act as vigilantes.
That balancing act has largely failed to defuse the movement. Anti-foreigner marchers in Ekurhuleni’s industrial belt publicly rejected his reforms just a day after his national address, continuing to pressure businesses to fire foreign workers — including those with valid documentation — ahead of the June 30 deadline.
March and March’s Ngobese-Zuma has said she requested several meetings with Ramaphosa that went unanswered, while Ramaphosa’s office maintains he did meet with some anti-immigration leaders before the deadline, telling them protest rights come with a responsibility to remain peaceful. Days before the deadline, a coalition of roughly 160 civil society organizations, the Siyafana Sonke Action Campaign, requested an urgent meeting with the presidency and called for the deadline to be cancelled outright, warning of “pogroms” against migrant communities.
For the June 30 marches themselves, Ramaphosa’s government deployed a roughly 600-million-rand security operation, and more than 900 people were arrested nationwide.
Political analysts have read Ramaphosa’s caution as partly electoral: with local elections approaching and March and March strongest in KwaZulu-Natal — the same province where the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party has built its base — some analysts at the Mapungubwe Institute and Wits University’s African Centre for Migration and Society have suggested the ANC-led Government of National Unity risks losing ground on this issue regardless of which way it leans, caught between migrant-rights advocates demanding stronger protection and a domestic electorate demanding stronger enforcement.
The net effect, so far, is a government seen by critics on both sides as reactive rather than in control of events — condemning the violence after each new killing, tightening enforcement after each new deadline, but not clearly ahead of a movement that has already announced it will keep marching weekly for the next six months.
What Awaits
Predicting doom is a mug’s game, and South Africa has proven more resilient than pessimists have expected before — it has a functioning judiciary, an unusually free press for the region, and a constitutional order that has so far survived multiple political earthquakes, including the removal of a sitting president under domestic pressure and years of state capture-era corruption revelations.
But the trend lines are not encouraging. A 32.7% unemployment rate and a youth unemployment rate near 61% are not stable equilibria in any society — they are conditions that history shows eventually find a political outlet, whether constructive or violent.
Analysts at Forbes Africa and the Institute for Security Studies have already warned that the 2026 unrest signals reputational and investment damage layered on top of an economy that badly needs foreign capital to create the jobs its own citizens are demanding.
The precedents cited by researchers — Uganda’s expulsion of its Asian minority in the early 1970s, Ghana’s 1969 expulsion of migrant workers — are cautionary tales of countries that solved a scapegoat problem and made their actual economic problem worse.
The realistic scenarios ahead are not a single dramatic collapse but a continuation of what’s already visible: recurring cycles of protest and vigilante violence whenever unemployment data disappoints or a political flashpoint (a court ruling, an assassination, a load-shedding crisis) provides a trigger; further erosion of investor confidence that makes the underlying jobs crisis harder to solve, not easier; and a widening gap between South Africa’s constitutional ideals and the lived reality for the millions of young people the economy has failed to absorb.
None of that is inevitable. It depends on choices — about industrial policy, land and education reform, accountable local governance, and whether South Africa’s political leadership finds it more useful to keep pointing outward than to fix what’s broken at home.
The curse, if there is one, was not written by fate. It was written by policy, and policy can still be rewritten.
