Diaspora Has a South Africa Problem — and We Should Know Better

Right now, the diaspora has a South Africa problem — and it’s the kind of problem we’ve seen before but have always been slow to say out loud.

Since March of this year, there’s been an organized, aggressive, and at times deadly campaign to purge non-South-African-born Africans from the country. It marches under a few different banners — Operation Dudula, “March and March,” the whole “Put South Africa First” crowd — but the message is the same: foreigners out. And they’ve meant it literally.

Groups have stationed themselves at the gates of public hospitals and clinics — Hillbrow, Rosettenville, Addington in Durban, RK Khan in Chatsworth — stopping patients and demanding an ID before they’ll let them through to see a doctor. Let that sit for a second. Grown men blocking a sick woman from a clinic because she might be Zimbabwean. They’ve stood outside schools trying to keep foreign children out of classrooms. And it’s turned lethal — by mid-May, at least seven people were dead. In Mossel Bay, two Mozambican men were killed and more than fifty shacks were burned to the ground. In a single two-week stretch, over 13,000 foreign nationals — Malawians, Zimbabweans, Ghanaians, Nigerians — were deported or “voluntarily” repatriated, which is a polite word for people running for their lives. One deadline came with a slogan I can’t shake: leave, or come back in a coffin.

Here’s my position, and I’m not going to soften it: this is historically dangerous. And Black South Africans, of ALL people, should know better. We should expect better.

Now let me be clear about exactly where I’m standing when I say that, because I’m not going to float above this like some neutral referee. I was born in Nigeria. I’m an American citizen. So I’m writing this from the comfort of the States, with a blue passport in a drawer — the kind of safety most of the people being chased out of South Africa will never have. I know that, and I’m not going to hide it or dress it up. But understand this too: when those crowds say “especially the West Africans,” they are talking about MY people. Nigerians are right there on those deportation lists — 300 of us moved out in two weeks. So I come to this carrying both things at once — a measure of privilege AND a very real stake — and I’d rather name both out loud than have you wondering which one I’m trying to slip past you.

So let’s take the argument head on. What you hear is that there are simply too many foreigners — especially West Africans — draining resources meant for South Africans. It’s the reason offered for every raid and every blockade. But the truth of the matter is the numbers don’t bear it out. The country’s own 2022 census puts the foreign-born population at under 4% — somewhere between 2.4 and 3.1 million people in a nation of more than 60 million. That’s it. Barely a rounding error is being blamed for the failures of an entire government. So we have to ask the honest question: who benefits when you point the poor at the poor? Who sleeps easier when working people are busy blaming a Malawian street vendor instead of the politicians who’ve had thirty years to fix the water, the jobs, and the schools?

Because this is the same tired xenophobic script perfected in white circles — the same fire spreading across Europe and the United States right now, where “they’re taking our jobs, they’re draining our system” has been the oldest trick in the book. I watch it play out in my own country, the one whose passport I carry, aimed at people who look like me and came here the same way my family did. But this is Africa. The MOTHERLAND. Fifty-four countries that have ALL felt the evil, heavy hand of colonialism, imperialism, and racism from the moment Europeans stepped foot on the continent. And of all the places on earth to run this playbook, it’s happening in South Africa — a country that bled through apartheid within living memory. A country that still, to this day, is home to Afrikaners with the audacity and the temerity to look Black tribesmen in the eye and tell them who does and doesn’t belong on their own soil.

That’s what makes this hurt. It’s one thing to watch a stranger repeat history. It’s another to watch your own brothers and sisters pick up the tools of the very people who oppressed them and turn those tools on other Black folks — folks who left home for the exact same reason anybody leaves home, the same reason my own family once did: a shot at something better. We rage at them for “enjoying the system” without ever stopping to ask what colonialism did, and still does, to make them leave in the first place. And we never turn the question toward the leaders we put in power — the ones who quietly made this migration so attractive, then handed us a scapegoat the moment it got convenient.

Knowing better is the whole point. A people who survived apartheid are supposed to recognize the machinery of it — the ID checks, the checkpoints, the “these ones don’t belong” — because it was run on them, in their lifetime. When you’ve been on the receiving end of that evil and you still reach for it, “we didn’t know” isn’t available to you anymore. That’s why I hold South Africa to a higher standard here, and I think we all should. Not because they’re worse than anybody else — but because they, more than almost anyone alive, should know exactly where this road ends.

And before anybody says it — no, being American-comfortable doesn’t buy me out of this conversation. It buys me an obligation to it. The diaspora is not a spectator sport. The courts have already said it out loud: a South African High Court ruled this conduct unlawful and unconstitutional. And the movements did it anyway. So the law by itself won’t save us here. What might is us — all of us, from the townships to the West African diaspora to a Nigerian kid who grew up American — refusing to look away, refusing to stay quiet, and being honest enough to call this what it is. Not a resource problem. A xenophobia problem. And on the Motherland, of all places, that should stop every one of us cold.

We don’t duck the hard conversations on the show — we sit in them. If you want more of this, the history and the honesty without the shouting, come build with us. Become part of the family at intheblackpdcst.com/become-family.

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