Abahlali baseMjondolo leader: Xenophobia is a tool to divide the poor, not a solution

Thapelo Mohapi has watched xenophobia rise and fall and rise again in South Africa. He lived through the violence in 2008, again in 2015, and he has seen it metastasize into something more systematic—a tool wielded by politicians and municipal officials to explain away their own failures. As General Secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers' movement, Mohapi speaks from the ground where the poorest South Africans live, where the shortages are most acute: jobs, housing, land, water. He knows the desperation. He also knows where it is being deliberately misdirected.

In 2010, a fire swept through the Briardene informal settlement where Mohapi lived. Homes burned. People lost everything—possessions, photographs, the material traces of their families. Among those displaced were migrants from Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe who had been renting space in the settlement. The community made a collective decision: no one would pay rent while rebuilding. Everyone would own their own piece of land. For a moment, the distinction between South African and migrant dissolved. They were simply people trying to recover from catastrophe.

That unity became a problem for officials. Mohapi describes what happened next with the clarity of someone who has watched the machinery work: municipal authorities, working alongside ruling party politicians and right-wing parties, began telling residents that their lack of services—the blocked sewage, the running human waste, the absence of water—was not a failure of governance but a consequence of migration. The sewage system, they said, was designed for a certain population. Migrants had exceeded that number. They were not in the budget. The blame shifted from the state to the foreigner. Hate followed.

This is the mechanism Mohapi wants named: xenophobia is not spontaneous. It is manufactured. Poor people do not naturally turn on other poor people. They are told to. "People live in harmony and peace amongst themselves, regardless of which country they come from," Mohapi says. "It is when the government, through officials, through politicians, come into the community" that the division takes root. The real enemy—neoliberal policy, the concentration of wealth, the deliberate underfunding of services—remains invisible. The migrant becomes the scapegoat.

When pressed on whether even a partial solution—removing migrants to ease pressure on services—might be worth considering, Mohapi's response is empirical and unsparing. Three hundred Ghanaians were deported. No jobs were created. The country has experienced record migrant deportations in recent years. Unemployment has increased. The evidence is plain: migrants are not the problem. They are a distraction from the problem. "The enemy is giving us wrong information so that we fight amongst ourselves," he says.

What makes Mohapi's position distinctive is that it is rooted not in abstract principle but in lived experience and organized political education. Abahlali baseMjondolo requires members to undergo political education before joining. The organization teaches that human dignity—not South African dignity, not African dignity, but human dignity—is the foundation of struggle. "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," he invokes: a person is a person through other people. This is not sentiment. It is the basis on which the movement organizes.

But Mohapi also sounds an alarm about what xenophobia portends. The violence targeting migrants today—a Malawian burned alive in Mayville, a young Tsonga-speaking South African killed in recent attacks—is a preview of a larger fracturing. The amabutho, traditional Zulu regiments, have been mobilized in these marches, echoing tactics used in the 1980s by Inkatha to destabilize Natal through ethnic violence. Once migrants are expelled, Mohapi warns, the logic of exclusion will turn inward. Xhosas will be told to leave. Sothos will be blamed. The unity forged against apartheid—when Black South Africans fought not as Zulus or Xhosas but as a single oppressed people—will be shattered into tribal fragments.

The path forward, as Mohapi sees it, requires a return to grassroots political organization and education. The culture of "each one teach one," the street committees and community conscientization that characterized the United Democratic Front era, has been abandoned. Without it, the right wing fills the vacuum. Abahlali baseMjondolo demonstrates an alternative: political education conducted in the languages and on the terms of the communities themselves, leadership that is principled and accountable, members who listen because they understand the analysis beneath the position. The Left, he argues, must reunite around what actually makes people poor—not around the petty divisions that have fractured it—and rebuild the organic organizing that once held a nation together.