Red Alert: The Campaign of Xenophobic Terror Menacing South Africa

Small groups of armed men are moving through impoverished and working-class neighbourhoods, forcing families from their homes and shuttering or seizing their businesses. Everyone the mob deems 'foreign' is at risk — documented or not — and South Africans of minority ethnicities have also been targeted.

March and March rose to prominence earlier this year when it sought to bar the children of migrants from entering school. Since then it has also blockaded clinics, and hospitals, demanding that people produce identity documents; organised intimidatory marches; and engaged in repeated street thuggery.

In this latest effort to channel the fury of an immiserated society toward its most vulnerable, March and March announced 30 June as a "deadline" for all undocumented migrants to leave the country, escalating intimidation on the ground with a vast social media operation in which death threats have become routine. Xenophobic intimidation and violence has now been decentralised and often operates through locally organised thuggery.

There have already been murders, and thousands of people have been driven from their homes at the 30 June deadline nears. Ten thousand displaced people are now sheltering in a park in Durban in abject conditions. The governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, and Mozambique are urgently repatriating their citizens.

The right in South Africa has a long and lethal history of inciting xenophobia — the worst of these waves came in 2008, when 62 people were killed, 21 of them South Africans, many from minority ethnicities, and more than 150,000 displaced. Many now fear that if urgent action is not taken there could be a pogrom of even greater scale.

The cultivation of xenophobic politics feeds on an acute social crisis. Unemployment is among the highest in the world at 44 per cent, and a catastrophic 70 per cent among 15-to-25-year-olds. Hunger and violence are endemic; pervasive corruption, collapsing public institutions and services, and regular assassinations of grassroots activists have hollowed out faith in democracy itself.

On 17 June the country's four largest trade union federations — COSATU, FEDUSA, SAFTU and NACTU — declared: "Migrants must not be made scapegoats for failures they did not create. Removing foreign nationals from workplaces, communities or public spaces will not reopen factories, repair municipalities, strengthen public healthcare or create sustainable jobs. The frustrations of local communities must be addressed by fixing the economy, creating decent work and rebuilding the state."

The federations warned, too, that the surge in anti-migrant mobilisation is increasingly coordinated and politically orchestrated — designed to fracture the working class and to shield the architects of poverty, unemployment, and collapsing public services from accountability.

Progressive forces are fighting back. Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), and others face intense pressure and routine threats of violence as the atmosphere grows ever more febrile in the days before 30 June.

Progressive forces around the world must stand with all those who are living in fear in South Africa, including migrants, South Africans of minority ethnicities — and all the movements refusing to let the working class be turned against itself. Their fight is ours.