Understanding sociological causation is not the same as justifying it. I have outlined causal factors from analysing historical factors.
I do not retreat: ordinary South Africans should not be held responsible for the mess created by the corrupt and detached ANC leadership of the present age.
Presiding over that gangrenous, decayed Santa Claus democracy right now is Cyril Ramaphosa – the buck stops with him and his team.
The ANC is dripping with graft, sleaze and incompetence, at its core, and from every pore.
They, ANC leaders today, have proven to be of the old-time religion of many post-colonial liberation movements in Africa.
The leadership of ANC is a stinking example today of a regime of “organised thuggery and brigandage.” There is nothing revelatory about that statement. Just an ugly, easily verified fact.
Xenophobia has been very widely studied in modern history, especially that of “the final solution.” We do not need to guess what its historical causes are.
People who champion Pan Africanism, I dare to suggest, must embrace the analysis of political economy factors. Couching that in deep historicity, insulates us from linear and misleading analysis of symptoms. The latter will always lead to wrong conclusions.
Structural and systemic analyses lead to solutions that tackle the root causes of societal degeneration.
Anything else, and we stumble through darkened corridors. Lost, befuddled and confused.
James Baldwin, the literary prophet with the insight and powers of thunder and lightning combined, argued that ghettos look for something else to smash, after they have smashed themselves for so long and been ignored by the bourgeoisie.
People do not ever accept to be Ralph Ellison’s “invisible men,” in throbbing perpetuity.
Hannah Arendt, that insightful woman, never stopped warning: that a people excluded, the mob that is, will eventually destroy the society from which they are excluded.
If you want to understand SA political disapproval, look at the numbers shown here.
I am uncertain whether you mean South Africans should reject the ANC and vote EFF. Malema may have his rhetoric on xenophobia right, but he has not convinced his country that he offers an organised alternative. That is a problem or opportunity he must understand and deal with, if he can.
Organisation decides everything in political struggle.
When I lived in SA, it was unthinkable that the ANC could corrode its support base in South Africa to this extent.
But, as Fanon showed (some say, using Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP as the main case study), many liberation parties decay because they feed a new, tiny and corrupt bourgeoisie, and do too little to improve the livelihoods of the mass of their compatriots.
Apartheid left behind large pools of unskilled black African labour, because of the legacy of Bantu Education.
That is the most emblematic example, in the wrong way, of the objectives of colonial education everywhere.
The colonial system, in expressed objectives, educated people enough to keep the means of extraction going, but not so much that they could systematically and critically question the system of exploitation and overthrow it. Colonialism did not seek to dig its own grave; it sought to feed its gluttonous appetite for cheap labour and resources.
When that naked fact is super-imposed on mass poverty and mass migration into SA, you build an explosive mix.
The indigene begins to become an underclass in the South African ghetto.
And xenophobia erupts with the features of a “class” struggle; it seeks a violent overthrow of what it mistakenly perceives as the oppressive class – migrants.
There is not much that is new here. Mao, Marx, Cabral, etc wrote about this copiously. It is tragic and cruel, it is also eminently predictable.
People hardly commit class suicide, in the way Amilcar urged. They will try to destroy their oppressor instead.
The ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa in particular, as its leader at this point, has not offered leadership to the mass of our South African compatriots. Though he has led his own pockets well.
Without leadership and development, the xenophobic pressures will rise in extremely unequal societies.
The Gini coefficient in South Africa, at 0.63, is one of the highest in the world. A quarter of the population lives in extreme poverty. Unemployment is above 30%.
It is not the peasants that we should then blame.
I called this out long ago when Cyril was being valorized by many Pan Africanists for his admittedly commendable stance on Gaza. A man cannot love his neighbour’s children and leave his own in misery.
There is no way that I will join the bashing of the poor, misled, South Africans who turn to violence. We can expect it. They, too, are victims.
The solution to their despair is to improve livelihoods at scale. This is the purpose of government. Not peasants.
People keep saying Africans fought Apartheid together, so South Africans should not be ungrateful today.
Such people should remember this: those who were born in 1994 and thereafter, now constitute circa 60% of the South African population. They are the teeming, angry and hungry youth. The oldest among them are now above the age of 30.
When they wake up hungry each morning, with the pangs of hunger gnawing at the innards of their stomachs, they do not think about what support was given to their fathers and mothers by their African compatriots.
In the same way that young, hungry people in Dandora in Nairobi, Nima in Accra, Mathare in Zimbabwe, Kalingalinga in Zambia, and so on, do not wake up thinking about the veterans of their liberation struggles.
These youth have nothing to lose, and a person with nothing to lose, if James Baldwin was right – and I think he was – is the most dangerous creation of any society.
Xenophobia has arisen because the ANC has pursued a path of development that has delivered nothing meaningful in terms of hope.
Today, Cyril Ramaphosa carries that can of incompetent leadership.
Neoliberalism, graft, and greed, have decimated South Africa’s productive forces, with not much to show; but misery in the present, and a future without hope. The terminal consequences of a Santa Claus democracy are everywhere present in South Africa.
Those whose leadership only creates “a society of ten millionaires and ten million beggars,” as the great rhetorical flourish of J.M. Kariuki put it; those who, to invoke Chinua Achebe, lead in a way that their policies create “a lot of food for thought but nothing for the belly,” it is they, the ANC in this case, that must be held accountable.
Not the wretched of the earth.
South African intellectuals, all African intellectuals, have a responsibility to help find the organised alternatives that can raise society into mass dignity.
In Ghana, we have shockingly decided that the government will now vet prophecies from prophets of the God of Abednego! My God, may that not become the example Africa replicates.
Yaw Nsarkoh
12 August 2025
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