THE IDEA THAT MADE A NATION
When Thabo Mbeki stood in Parliament in 1996 to deliver “I Am an African,” he did not speak of a pure or singular people. He spoke of a being formed from many histories, many migrations, many wounds. He claimed kinship with the Khoiand the San, with European settlers, with enslaved people brought to the Cape, and with the kings and patriots who resisted and built across this land. The speech was not a denial of difference. It was an insistence that difference could be held within one identity. That idea did not disappear when the Constitution was adopted. It became the moral grammar through which South Africa has tried to understand itself. To ask whether South Africans are xenophobic is therefore to ask whether that grammar still holds.
A COUNTRY BORN OF MIGRATION
South Africa has never been a closed place. Its cities, mines, farms, and universities were built by people who came here from elsewhere, and by people whose ancestors were brought here against their will. The languages we speak at home and in the streets carry words from Dutch, English, Portuguese, Hindi, and from across the continent. The food we eat, the music we make, the churches we attend, all bear the marks of movement. This is not an accident of geography. It is the condition of our existence.
Mbeki’s speech named this condition openly. To say “I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home” is to admit that migration is part of our origin story, not an interruption of it. To say “I am also made of the flesh of the slave” is to admit that forced migration is also part of that story. A nation that begins with that confession cannot easily pretend that newcomers are foreign to its nature. They are, in fact, continuous with it.
THE TENSIONS OF A CROWDED PRESENT
It would be dishonest to claim that South Africa has not experienced moments of hostility toward foreign nationals. There have been attacks, insults, and political rhetoric that scapegoats people from other African countries for unemployment, crime, and failing services. Those moments are real, and they cause real harm. They are photographed, shared, and remembered, and they leave the impression that the country as a whole has turned inward.
But an impression is not the whole truth. What is often missed in the telling of those events is the context in which they occur. They happen in places of extreme poverty, where state services have collapsed, where young people have no work, and where frustration looks for a target. In those moments, the foreigner becomes a visible symbol of competition. This is not unique to South Africa. It is a pattern seen wherever inequality is sharp and hope is thin. The danger is to mistake a symptom of desperation for the character of a people.
THE DAILY EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY
The more enduring evidence lies outside those flare-ups, in the ordinary life of the country. Walk through any taxi rank, hospital, church, or university and you will hear Shona spoken next to isiZulu, French next to Sesotho, Portuguese next to Afrikaans. You will see landlords renting rooms to tenants from Malawi, Zimbabwe, and the DRC. You will see South African businesses employing people from across the continent, and African-owned spaza shops serving South African customers every day. You will see families that are mixed by marriage, by friendship, by school.
This is not celebrated in headlines because it is not dramatic. It is simply life. South Africans argue with their neighbours, borrow sugar from them, attend the same funerals, and play on the same soccer teams. The xenophobic narrative cannot account for this quiet, persistent coexistence. It cannot explain why, after every outbreak of violence, communities themselves are often the first to shelter victims, to condemn the attacks, and to demand that the law take its course. That response does not come from policy documents. It comes from a shared sense that to turn on the stranger is to turn on part of ourselves.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL COMMITMENT
The Constitution that Mbeki introduced with his speech makes a promise that is unusual in the world. It does not limit rights and dignity to citizens alone. It speaks of everyone in the country. That was a deliberate choice, made by people who remembered what it felt like to be classified, excluded, and declared less than human. The drafters understood that a country born from migration and dispossession could not build its future on the exclusion of others.
This commitment is tested constantly, and it is often not met. But the fact that the standard exists matters. It gives South Africans a language to challenge their own worst impulses. When civil society groups, faith leaders, and ordinary citizens speak out against attacks on foreign nationals, they do so by appealing to that founding idea: we are not a people who define ourselves by who we keep out. We define ourselves by the kind of society we are trying to build together.
A PEOPLE BECOMING
To say that South Africans are not xenophobic is not to claim moral perfection. It is to say that xenophobia is not the central truth of who we are. The central truth is the one Mbeki named: we are a product of many peoples, and our pride is that we have survived them all and are still becoming.
That becoming is messy. It involves conflict, fear, and mistakes. But it also involves generosity, adaptation, and the daily work of living together. The history in our blood, from the desolate beauty of the Khoi and San to the journeys of migrants and the resistance of kings, does not allow us the luxury of a narrow identity.
South Africa will continue to struggle with poverty and inequality, and those struggles will continue to test our patience with one another. Yet the deeper current runs in the other direction. It runs toward inclusion, because inclusion is written into the story we tell about ourselves. We are Africans, not by geography alone, but by the decision to recognize ourselves in each other, no matter where we came from.