Between 2021 and 2024, South Africa was shaken by a wave of coordinated attacks on foreign-owned businesses, makeshift shelters housing migrants, and individuals simply identified as foreigners on the basis of their appearance or accent. The violence, concentrated in Johannesburg’s inner city and the port of Durban, killed at least 42 people and displaced thousands. It prompted diplomatic crises with several African governments whose citizens were targeted, and it forced the African National Congress government to confront a reality it had long avoided: that South Africa’s post-apartheid Rainbow Nation narrative had never fully accounted for the grievances of citizens who felt abandoned while foreigners seemed to thrive.
Now, in 2026, those tensions are resurfacing — and the pattern of violence is changing.
From Spontaneous Rage to Organised Campaigns
Where the 2021-2024 attacks were largely spontaneous eruptions of frustration — triggered by social media misinformation, economic shocks, and opportunistic criminal elements — the current wave shows signs of greater organisation. Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand, who have been tracking anti-foreigner incidents since 2019, document a marked shift: attacks are now longer in duration, more geographically coordinated, and increasingly preceded by organized community meetings in which foreigners are formally “notified” to leave.
In at least four incidents documented in the past six weeks, local community members used social media group chats to coordinate simultaneous actions across multiple suburbs. In one case in Johannesburg’s Riverlea neighbourhood, a WhatsApp group with over 300 members was used to organise a boycott of foreign-owned shops before violence erupted. Police, who were aware of the group, did not intervene until after the first attacks.
“We are seeing the criminalisation of a political grievance,” says Dr. Penelope Marchetti, who leads Wits’ Migration and Society Research Unit. “The people doing this are not just poor unemployed youth. Some of the organisers are local businesspeople who benefit from removing competition.”
Economic Grievances: Real But Misdirected
The economic argument deployed by perpetrators and their supporters is straightforward: migrants — primarily from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia, and increasingly Ethiopia and Tanzania — accept lower wages, work in the informal sector without paying taxes, and take housing in already overcrowded townships. With official unemployment above 32 percent and youth unemployment closer to 60 percent, the presence of millions of documented and undocumented foreigners in the economy is a potent grievance.
The problem with this argument, economists are quick to point out, is that it misidentifies the culprit. South Africa’s unemployment crisis is primarily a structural problem rooted in low growth, inadequate skills development, and an apartheid-era spatial geography that concentrates economic opportunity in a handful of metropolitan areas. Studies of sectors where migrants and locals compete directly — construction, domestic work, informal trading — show wages are depressed less by migrant labour than by employer monopsony and the broader weakness of collective bargaining.
“Migrants are not taking South African jobs,” says Dr. Thabo Mokoena, an economist at the South African Institute of Race Relations. “They are filling jobs that South Africans do not want because the wages and conditions are terrible.”
The Failure of the State
What has been most striking to observers is the government’s apparent inability — or unwillingness — to contain the violence. In several documented cases, communities that reported planned attacks to the South African Police Service were told that resources were insufficient to deploy preemptively. In other cases, police were present during attacks but confined themselves to observation.
Police inaction during the 2021-2024 attacks prompted investigations by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, which found that officers in several precincts had explicitly refused to intervene on the grounds that “foreigners were not their concern.” None of those officers faced disciplinary action.
Regional Implications
The surge in anti-foreigner violence comes at a delicate moment for South Africa’s relationships across the continent. Zimbabwe, whose citizens form the largest group of documented foreigners in South Africa, has issued multiple diplomatic protests. Somalia has recalled its ambassador for consultations. At the African Union level, several member states have quietly signalled concern about the direction of South Africa’s treatment of continental migrants — a particularly sensitive issue given South Africa’s self-appointed role as a champion of human rights and Pan-African solidarity on the continent.
What happens in South Africa’s townships matters beyond its borders. The country has long positioned itself as Africa’s moral leader, the nation that defeated apartheid and demonstrated that multiracial democracy was possible on the continent. That moral authority is now being eroded, not by external critics, but by what South Africans are doing to each other — and to their fellow Africans.