Xenophobia Is a Social Construct

By Gillian Schutte

A nationwide march against undocumented migration is planned across South Africa in May 2025. It emerges from the deepening frustration of the country’s Native majority — people who have carried the weight of systemic failure, structural exclusion, and political marginalisation. Already, elite voices across NGOs, liberal media, and donor-funded platforms are preparing to label this mobilisation as xenophobic. This framing, long familiar in South Africa’s post-apartheid landscape, does not seek understanding. It seeks containment. It turns legitimate dissent into moral panic before it even arrives.

In post-apartheid South Africa, the Native majority stands at the edge of a precipice carved by neglect. Not only is their pain relentlessly managed — it is criminalised. Not only are the poor among them expected to endure indignity — they are demonised when they name it. Every time South Africa’s Native majority demands what is theirs — land, livelihood, dignity — the machinery of power moves swiftly to silence them.

The transition to democracy promised equality. Instead, it delivered deregulation, privatisation, elite enrichment, and donor surveillance. The Native majority was expected to wait. They were told to be patient. They were disciplined for demanding too loudly, too soon. And when the system failed to deliver even the basics — housing, safety, jobs — the rage that surfaced was treated as an aberration rather than the outcome of systemic neglect.

The country’s poor were stripped of opportunity and left to absorb the fallout of a collapsing state. Infrastructure decayed. Informal settlements grew. Public health imploded. Into this vacuum flowed unregulated migration, illicit trade, and foreign-run networks that embedded themselves into local economies. The township became the frontline of a new struggle — for space, survival, and control of the last fragments of a social contract.

And in the midst of this struggle, a word rose in volume. “Xenophobia.” It entered media reports, NGO briefs, conference panels, and donor memoranda. It became the label for every eruption of anger, every protest, every refusal. It became the moral charge levelled at those already stripped of everything else.

Framed as a moral failure of the poor, “xenophobia” erases the neoliberal structural forces that created scarcity, collapse and rage. It offers donors, NGOs, and the state a convenient scapegoat — the Native South African framed as barbarian, intolerant, violent. It absolves those who engineered the crisis and shifts blame to those left to survive its wreckage.

Destabilisation by Design

South Africa’s borders were reconfigured in the early 1990s under donor influence and the soft-power machinery of the United States and Europe. The post-apartheid state was not designed to serve its citizens, but to serve capital. Liberalised trade, open borders, and structural adjustment became the pillars of a new economic order. The CIA’s Cold War playbook was retooled for the global South — disorient, fragment, contain. Tanks were replaced with consultants. Direct coups gave way to civil society capture. The objective remained the same: to neutralise the revolutionary potential of the Native majority.

The township became the frontline of this war. State services were withdrawn. Jobs disappeared. Infrastructure rotted. The vacuum was filled by syndicates, informal economies and illicit networks that replicated colonial extractivism under neoliberal branding.

The Spaza Shop Economy and its Shadows

The spaza shop sector in South Africa is estimated to include over 150,000 outlets, generating between R180 billion and R200 billion annually. Most of these businesses operate informally, without registration or oversight, making them vulnerable to illicit use. Recent investigations have revealed that some spaza operations are tied to networks engaged in money laundering, trafficking, and the distribution of counterfeit or expired goods. In this sector, there have been multiple reports of labour exploitation, with undocumented workers trafficked into bonded labour under the guise of retail employment.

Township informal economies, once the economic backbone of South Africa's township majority, were transformed into nodes of transnational extraction. Local traders were pushed out by foreign-run spaza shop empires coordinated through syndicates engaged in laundering, trafficking, and commodity dumping. These operations are not monolithic — while some are tied to unregulated and illicit trade, many involve undocumented individuals trying to survive within a hostile and deregulated system. A source informs that some local business cabals, outside of the majority, are running these shops as money-laundering operations, smirking at all regulations.

In 2024 alone, more than 372 cases of foodborne illness were reported in Gauteng, many involving children. At least 23 children died from ingesting contaminated snacks purchased at informal shops. Some of these snacks contained hazardous pesticides such as terbufos and aldicarb, both banned for food use. The government did initiate investigations and began enforcing regulations to tackle food safety, resulting in raids and closures of several non-compliant spaza shops. Despite these measures, enforcement remained insufficient, and children continued to suffer due to gaps in oversight and persistent illicit networks.

Criminalising the Cry for Protection

When township residents demanded protection, they were met with ideological condemnation. The call for regulation was branded as hate. The demand for oversight was framed as violence. The term “xenophobia” was deployed as a shield — not for migrants, but for capital.

It was used to obscure the distinction between war refugees and undocumented actors embedded in criminal syndicates. It blurred lines deliberately — collapsing nuance to preserve a status quo in which the poor carry the burdens of failed statehood.

The Betrayal of Culture and the Academy

This containment of Native voice has been reproduced across cultural and intellectual institutions. Artists, filmmakers, and academics built entire careers on the pathology of the poor. Donor funding flowed to those who reiterated the official script: that South Africa’s Native majority was regressive, violent, and resistant to progress.

Institutional Erasure and Epistemic Violence

Across these institutions, foreign nationals, Indian elites, and white liberals became the stewards of public knowledge about poverty and protest. Those who emerged from the liberation movement — those who carried memory in their bones — were silenced. They were labelled too angry, too radical, too parochial.

This was not an oversight. It was structural design. It was epistemic violence. The Native majority was dispossessed of land, then of story, then of theory. They became data points, cautionary tales, and moral theatre for upwardly mobile professionals.

Phoenix: The Violence That Was Sanctioned

In July 2021, the logic of this containment reached its brutal apex. In Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal, Indian vigilantes murdered over thirty-six members of South Africa’s Native majority during a week of unrest. They were hunted, tortured, executed. The state remained still. The media offered euphemisms. The Human Rights Commission eventually called it racism — but the court proceedings were held in camera. The justification was to protect the dignity of the accused. But when is dignity afforded to South Africa’s Native majority? When are their deaths treated as national tragedies? When are they seen as deserving of justice and visibility?

This is a nation that has broken its Native majority on all their centres of beingness. Structural dispossession. Economic exclusion. Epistemic erasure. They have been consistently policed, criminalised, stripped of ancestral memory, and pushed to the back of every queue. Every demand for inclusion is met with containment. Every effort to reclaim space is treated as deviance. Every act of protest is criminalised. And yet they are told to wait. To carry the weight of the nation while receiving none of its dignity.

Who Benefits from the Xenophobia Narrative?

This narrative protects power. It secures corporate supply chains. It preserves the reputations of NGOs. It feeds university research agendas. It justifies state withdrawal. It ensures that multinational capital, donor governments, elite policymakers, and curated intellectuals remain insulated from critique.

And Yet, the Ground Shifts

This nationwide march against undocumented migration planned across South Africa is a direct response to the systemic failures that have burdened the country’s Native majority without protection, voice, or recourse. Even before the first placard is raised, the narrative is being set. But this mobilisation must be understood on its own terms. It marks a rupture with donor narratives, curated analysis, and NGO paternalism.

Across the continent, and within South Africa, a shift is underway. In the Sahel, young Africans are refusing the binary of liberal democracy and military rule. They are reclaiming sovereignty. In South Africa, landless communities, disaffected youth, and betrayed workers are beginning to articulate a politics uncontained by donor language.

The Native South African is not a threat to order. They are the bearer of a history this nation has failed to honour. Their demands are rooted in memory, not hate. As Sipho Singiswa states, “I reject the term Black. I am native to this land. My set of circumstances — structural and economic, ontological and epistemic — are entirely different to others categorised as Black. Land goes back to us, the original people of South Africa.”

The term xenophobia cannot contain what is unfolding.

The reckoning will not be polite. It will not be curated. It will not be authorised.

It will be the return of voice to those who never lost the right to speak. What this nationwide action signifies is that the Native majority is refusing to be mischaracterised or labelled. There is no hate toward fellow Africans — there is a call for sovereignty, dignity, and economic security. The message is clear: the system must look after its own, or face the political consequences. Sahel is coming.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.