On Thursday, the hard-won calm of two South African cities shattered into smoke and screams as anti-migrant protests curdled into violence. In Johannesburg’s sprawling Soweto township, streets that usually hum with morning song turned chaotic; residents chased a man they believed was from Somalia, streaming out of his shop clutching groceries and household goods while he fled for safety. In coastal Durban, a Reuters reporter counted five torched cars smoldering in the urban centre, their metal skeletons glowing amid the litter of looted foreign-owned shops. A guest house and a warehouse were partially burned; at least fourteen vehicles in the city were set alight altogether. The air thick with tear gas and ash, the police moved in to disperse crowds, but the damage was done—not just to property, but to the fragile trust that holds communities together. For the Somali shopkeeper whose life’s workwent up in flames, the day was not a political statement; it was a nightmare of loss. For those who joined the looting, it may have felt like a desperate, misguided grab at what they have been told is rightfully theirs. And for South Africa, a country still wrestling with the ghosts of apartheid and the promises of democracy, it was another painful reminder of how easily fear can be weaponised into hate.
The violence did not erupt from nowhere, and the government is pointing at a toxic haze of disinformation as the fuse. Hours before the unrest, a group of demonstrators had demanded that a refugee centre in Durban stop processing asylum applications. Then, as the day worsened, government spokesperson William Baloyi stepped forward with a sobering explanation: the trouble was triggered by people deliberately spreading false information about a constitutional court ruling from July. That ruling, he clarified, stated simply that asylum seekers cannot be denied access to South Africa’s asylum system solely for procedural reasons—such as having entered the country illegally. It was a narrow, technical correction about legal process, not a sweeping grant of rights. But somewhere between the courtroom and the street, the truth metastasized into rumour: that the country’s highest court had opened the borders, that undocumented migrants were suddenly entitled to refugee status, permanent residence, and a host of legal privileges. Baloyi was emphatic that the ruling had been widely misrepresented and did nothing of the sort. “We are deeply concerned by what is going on now,”he said, his words carrying the weight of a government watching its social fabric unravel over a lie. In this telling, the real culprits behind the torched cars and ransacked shops were not just angry crowds, but anonymous voices spreading poison online—people willing to sacrifice neighbourly peace for their own agenda.
The state’s response was swift, at least in terms of muscle. Police announced that more officers had been mobilised in Durban, where the flames had been busiest, and in Soweto, where the situation was tense but under control. Lieutenant General Puleng Dimpane, a top police official, stood before reporters in Soweto and issued a firm vow: “Those responsible for acts of violence and destruction will be identified, investigated, and where sufficient evidence exists, arrested and brought to book.” His words were meant to deter, but they also acknowledged a painful reality: briefly, order had slipped. Ten vehicles had been burned in Soweto alone, and although the crowds had scattered, the smoke had not fully cleared. The police, too, were caught in a broader storm, trying to enforce law whilepublic anger had been inflamed by falsehoods. There is something deeply unsettling about a state having to announce an investigation into its own citizens for attacking other citizens over a story that was never true. The officials’ statements were necessary, but they also underscored the fragility of a society where misinformation can spark arson within hours. The question lingering in the smoke was not just whether the arsonists would be caught, but whether the deeper flames of xenophobia could be extinguished before they spread further.
This week’s explosions of rage are not an aberration in South Africa’s recent history; they are the latest flare in a long, smouldering season of anti-migrant sentiment. For months, marches have snaked through streets with banners blaming foreigners for everything from unemployment to crime to the strain on hospitals and schools. Some of these marches have descended into the same ugly pattern of violence and looting; thousands of African foreign nationals—Zimbabweans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Malawians, Congolese—have gathered a few belongings and fled their homes, their shops, their adopted communities, in search of somewhere safer. The pattern is painfully familiar around the world, but it cuts especially deep in South Africa, a nation whose own freedom was won through solidarity among people of many origins. Migrants are often accused of taking jobs, fuelling crime, and draining public services. These accusations are repeated so often that they harden into common sense, yet social scientists say the evidence simply does not back them up. Studies have repeatedly found that migrants are more likely to create jobs than steal them, that crime rates among foreign nationals mirror or are lower than those among citizens, and that their presence revitalises neighbourhoods rather than exhausting them. But evidence, however solid, cannot always compete with the raw power of scapegoating—especially in a country where so many citizens feel left behind and are desperately searching for someone to blame.
Underneath the anger lies a fractured society, a wound that has never fully healed. Three decades have passed since apartheid’s collapse, yet South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries on Earth. The divisions of race and class persist, etched into geography, education, opportunity, and the daily texture of life. About a third of South Africans are out of work; among young people, unemployment is even higher, leaving millions stuck in the gap between promise and possibility. For a young South African born into poverty, seeing a migrant set up a bustling shop on a corner can feel like a cruel math problem: why does this newcomer have what I cannot earn? Yet for the migrant, the equation is equally desperate: fleeing war, hunger, or political persecution, they arrive with nothing but hope, and are willing to work any hours, endure any hardship, just for a foothold. The two struggles butt against each other in crowded settlements, where poverty is shared but dignity feels scarce. South Africa, despite its troubles, remains Africa’s largest economy, a magnet for the continent’s ambition and despair. It is precisely because the country offers so much potential—and delivers so unevenly—that the encounter between citizen and migrant is often so combustible. Neither side is a villain; both are heirs to a history of displacement and exclusion. But in the heat of a burning street, complexity collapses into caricature, and the stranger becomes an enemy.
What happens next depends on which story South Africa chooses to tell itself. The government’s first task is to douse the disinformation: to explain, patiently and repeatedly, what the constitutional court ruling actually does and does not say, so that rumour cannot again become riot. There must be accountability for the burned cars, the looted shops, the guest house reduced to ash—not out of vengeance, but to affirm that violence is never an acceptable answer to frustration. Yet accountability alone will not heal the underlying hurt. South Africa must look inward, at the inequality that makes scapegoating so seductive, at the unemployment and hopelessnessare that leave people vulnerable to cynical mobilisers. It must recognise that migrants are not the cause of these wounds; they are fellow human beings, often fleeing the very same kinds of hardship that South Africans once fled and overcame. The country’s greatest story is not one of walls but of welcome, not of purity but of mixture, not of division but of the long, difficult work of building home together. Everyone—citizen and foreigner, official and ordinary person—deserves a place with dignity, work, and safety. If South Africa can confront its own demons of misinformation and inequality, it can still show the world how strangers become neighbours, and how a democracy born in resistance can mature into a nation of belonging. But that future will not arrive on its own. It must be built, block by block, truth by truth, heart by heart—just as freedom itself was built, and as every torched shop will have to be rebuilt, by people who refuse to let fear have the final word.