Xenophobic unrest — you cannot condemn the fire after you lit the match

As South Africa approached 30 June, an extraordinary political spectacle unfolded.

Government ministers convened urgent press conferences calling for calm. Parliament reminded the country that violence against foreign nationals is a betrayal of our constitutional democracy. ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula invoked ubuntu, reminding South Africans that our own liberation depended upon the solidarity of neighbouring African states. Even politicians whose careers have been built on anti-immigrant rhetoric, from Herman Mashaba to Gayton McKenzie, suddenly discovered the language of restraint.

The state has now mobilised significant policing resources to prevent violence against migrants. It is a necessary intervention. Every person living in South Africa deserves protection from intimidation, assault and hatred.

But it also exposes a profound irony. The same political establishment now calling for peace spent years cultivating the very political conditions that made these threats possible. The uncomfortable truth is that the marches of 30 June did not emerge from nowhere.

They are the harvest of what we have sown. For months, academics, politicians and commentators have attempted to explain the resurgence of xenophobia. They point to unemployment, inequality, economic stagnation, collapsing public services and political opportunism. Much of this analysis is correct.

But it is remarkable for what it leaves out. The elephant in the room is the Stilfontein mine disaster.

Because Stilfontein was not simply a humanitarian tragedy. It was a defining political moment in which the democratic state demonstrated that once people are successfully labelled “illegal”, ordinary constitutional morality can be suspended.

Ninety-three poor black men died underground, not because South Africa lacked the capacity to save them, but because South Africa had first been persuaded by those in power that they were unworthy of being saved.

During the operation, the government repeatedly framed the crisis not as a humanitarian emergency but as a law-enforcement exercise. Ministers spoke of “smoking them out”. Public statements emphasised criminality, illegality and foreignness. The humanitarian catastrophe unfolding underground was systematically displaced by a narrative centred on border control, organised crime and illegal immigration.

The language mattered. Political language is never merely descriptive. It tells society who deserves empathy, whose rights matter and whose suffering can be ignored.

The miners did not become less deserving of protection because they were trapped underground. They became less deserving of protection because they had first been transformed into “illegal miners”, “foreign nationals” and enemies of society.

Politically acceptable

Once that transformation was complete, the unimaginable became politically acceptable. The right to life became conditional, human dignity became negotiable, humanitarian obligations became optional, and as a result, 93 people died.

It is therefore impossible to understand the current moment without understanding Stilfontein.

Much of the contemporary discussion treats xenophobia as something that emerges from below, from poor communities, unemployed young people, social media misinformation and populist movements. There is truth in that. But it is only half the story.

Every society eventually decides where to direct its anger. It can demand accountability from those who hold power, or it can be persuaded to turn against those who have none.

Every day, for the last nine months, South Africans have watched the real causes of our crisis unfold before our eyes during the proceedings of the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry. Alongside the public spectacle, we have watched municipalities collapse, billions disappear through State Capture and procurement fraud, executives enriching themselves while workers are retrenched, and communities living beside some of the richest mineral deposits on Earth while remaining without water, decent schools or functioning clinics.

The architects of our poverty are not hidden.

During Stilfontein, we were told to look away. To look away from the mining sector, that rich seam of political patronage, corporate extraction and elite enrichment, and instead to look sideways, towards the stranger struggling to survive alongside us.

Dehumanising words

The vocabulary was familiar: Illegal. Foreign. Criminal. Invader. Threat.

Each word narrowed the circle of public concern. Each word moved the victims a little further outside the boundaries of constitutional protection. Each repetition made it easier to accept extraordinary cruelty as ordinary governance.

But the consequences did not end at the mine shaft. Stilfontein demonstrated how political power can redirect public anger away from those responsible for society’s failures and towards those with the least power to defend themselves.

Once society accepted that description, it became easier to accept everything that followed.

Once the governing party demonstrated that there was little political cost in dehumanising a politically powerless population, it created space for others to compete over who could speak the language of exclusion most loudly.

Migration became one of the few issues capable of generating immediate political attention.

ActionSA built significant parts of its political identity around immigration. The Patriotic Alliance increasingly embraced similar themes. Other parties, like MK, entered the terrain opportunistically. Organisations such as Operation Dudula, March and March and other anti-migrant campaigns found themselves operating within a political environment in which exclusionary rhetoric had already been normalised.

The point is not that these organisations are identical, nor that they alone are responsible for today’s tensions. It is that they inherited a political landscape in which the boundaries of acceptable public discourse had already shifted.

The match had already been struck. This is also where many academic analyses fall short.

Structural drivers

Recent scholarship has correctly identified the structural drivers of xenophobia: unemployment, inequality, neoliberal restructuring, state failure and political opportunism. These analyses make valuable contributions to our understanding of the crisis. Yet remarkably, many continue to treat the state primarily as an institution responding to xenophobia rather than as an institution that actively helped produce its contemporary political vocabulary.

Stilfontein barely features. That omission is simply not empirical.

One cannot explain how hatred becomes politically legitimate while ignoring the moment in which democratic institutions themselves demonstrated that humanity could become conditional upon legal status.

The media must confront an equally uncomfortable truth. Large sections of the media did not merely report Stilfontein. They became part of what might be called an architecture of amplification. This complicity was again repeated during this cycle of hate, which I wrote about previously.

By foregrounding criminality, nationality and spectacle while relegating starvation, constitutional obligations and humanitarian responsibility to the margins, many newsrooms helped transform a human rights catastrophe into a debate about “illegal miners” and “foreign nationals”.

The same pattern has reappeared in recent months.

Significant sections of the media have repeatedly platformed anti-migrant organisations, amplified unverified claims, sensationalised inflammatory rhetoric and treated organised scapegoating as simply another legitimate perspective in public debate.

Undemocratic ideas

The consequence has been to confer democratic legitimacy on profoundly undemocratic ideas. When the media mistakes amplification for journalism, it does not merely reflect public opinion; it helps manufacture it.

Today, the state spends enormous public resources attempting to prevent violence against migrants. It should. Every constitutional democracy has a duty to protect those within its borders from violence.

But before we congratulate ourselves for condemning xenophobia, we should ask a more uncomfortable question.

Why are we now trying to extinguish a fire that so many of our institutions helped ignite?

The tragedy of Stilfontein was not only that 93 men died. It was that South Africa learned a lesson.

It learned that once people are successfully labelled illegal, foreign, criminal or undeserving, extraordinary suffering becomes politically tolerable. And today it echoes through threats against migrants, vigilante mobilisation and calls for exclusion.

If South Africa is serious about confronting xenophobia, then our reckoning cannot begin and end with condemning those who stoke the flames of hate. It must also include an honest accounting of the politicians who discovered electoral advantage in anti-migrant rhetoric. It must include the governments that repeatedly substituted scapegoating for governance. It must include the media institutions that amplified fear while neglecting scrutiny. And it must include the intellectual establishment that has too often analysed xenophobia while overlooking the defining event that exposed how democratic institutions themselves can produce it.

Until we confront Stilfontein for what it truly was, not simply a humanitarian crime, but a watershed in the normalisation of state-sponsored dehumanisation, we will continue to mistake the flames for the fire itself.

We cannot condemn the fire after we lit the match. DM