At dawn on 30 June, long queues begin to form outside the Zimbabwean consulate in Johannesburg. These are not people applying for visas. They are men and women looking for a way to return home. Some have lost their jobs. Others have closed their businesses out of fear of retaliation. Still others have decided to leave before the situation deteriorates further.
In those same days, the consulates of Malawi and Mozambique also report a surge in requests for assistance, while buses organised by neighbouring governments begin transporting hundreds of their citizens back across the border.
There is no official deportation order.
There is no war.
Yet one date has been circled on everyone's calendar: 30 June, the day by which several anti-immigration movements had demanded that undocumented migrants leave South Africa.
The demonstrations organised across several cities, clashes with police, arrests and the subsequent deployment of the army quickly drew international attention. But to describe these events simply as another outbreak of xenophobic violence would be to miss the point.
What is unfolding in South Africa reveals something far deeper: how an economic and institutional crisis can evolve into a political mobilisation capable of identifying an enemy, shaping its public image and persuading an increasing share of the population that the state is no longer able to manage the problem.
It is within this vacuum of trust that vigilantism emerges—the belief that ordinary citizens can legitimately replace public institutions in exercising authority and enforcing order.
To understand why thousands of people have taken to the streets against immigrants, we need to step back.
Not by a few weeks.
But by at least fifteen years.
Violence against immigrants is not new in democratic South Africa.
In May 2008, the country experienced the deadliest wave of xenophobic attacks since the end of apartheid. More than sixty people were killed, thousands were forced to flee their homes, and tens of thousands sought refuge in emergency shelters. Most of the victims came from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Somalia.
Similar episodes followed in 2015, again in 2019, and during the unrest that erupted after the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma in 2021.
This continuity changes the way we should frame the question.
The real issue is not why South Africa has suddenly become xenophobic.
Rather, it is why tensions that never truly disappeared have, over the past few years, evolved into a far more organised political movement with a much greater capacity for mobilisation.
South Africa remains one of Africa's most advanced economies, but it is also one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Economic growth has stagnated for years. Unemployment remains among the highest globally, while youth unemployment consistently exceeds forty per cent. Widespread crime, overstretched public services, an ongoing energy crisis marked by recurring blackouts, pressure on the healthcare system and growing public distrust of institutions all contribute to a pervasive sense that the promises of the post-apartheid era remain unfulfilled.
According to United Nations estimates, South Africa is home to several million foreign nationals, most of them from neighbouring countries. Many are legally employed. Others are waiting for refugee status or other forms of legal protection. Others still live in irregular conditions.
As in many parts of the world, the lack of easily accessible data and the slow pace of administrative procedures fuel the perception that migration has become an uncontrollable phenomenon.
And it is precisely this perception—more than the actual numbers—that anti-immigration movements have successfully built upon.
One of the most common mistakes when analysing this story is to describe groups such as Operation Dudula simply as xenophobic movements.
Certainly, their rhetoric targets immigrants, and numerous human rights organisations have documented acts of intimidation and discrimination. Yet stopping at that definition risks overlooking what is perhaps the movement's most significant feature.
Operation Dudula emerged in 2021, in the aftermath of the violence that shook South Africa following the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma.
Its name, derived from isiZulu, means "to push back" or "to force out."
Its declared objective is straightforward: to compel the state to enforce immigration laws and tackle the presence of undocumented foreign nationals.
So far, it might appear to be just another political campaign calling for stricter border controls. But there is a crucial difference. Operation Dudula does not simply ask the state to act. It behaves as though the state has already failed.
Its members organise inspections in working-class neighbourhoods, enter shops owned by foreign nationals, demand identification documents, challenge businesses employing migrant workers, stage protests outside hospitals accused of treating undocumented foreigners and carry out informal patrols.
Officially, the movement insists that it distinguishes between documented and undocumented migrants. In practice, numerous journalistic investigations have documented checks based on accents, languages spoken or presumed national origin, affecting even people whose legal status is beyond question.
This marks a profound shift. We are no longer looking at citizens demanding that the state fulfil its responsibilities. We are looking at citizens convinced that someone else should carry them out instead.
In their public messaging, the leaders of these movements repeat the same argument over and over again: the government has lost control of the country's borders, tolerates irregular migration and is no longer capable of guaranteeing security or enforcing the law.
From this premise follows a conclusion that resonates well beyond the most radical circles: if the state fails to act, citizens are entitled to act themselves. This is where the debate moves beyond immigration. It becomes a question of legitimacy.
Over the past few months, this narrative has found a new expression in the campaign promoted by the movement March and March, which set 30 June as the symbolic deadline by which undocumented immigrants were expected to leave South Africa.
The campaign's strength did not lie in its ability to enforce that deadline. Its real success was transforming a political demand into a collective countdown. In the days leading up to the announced date, many businesses owned by foreign nationals closed their doors as a precaution. Numerous families chose to leave South Africa temporarily. The governments of Zimbabwe and Malawi prepared assistance programmes for their citizens, while police and military forces were mobilised to prevent a possible escalation of violence.
Even when a movement fails to achieve the outcome it promises, it can still produce a very real effect. It changes people's behaviour.
And it is precisely this ability to reshape everyday life that marks the transition from a protest movement to a genuine political actor.
How, then, was it possible to build such broad public support around this narrative in just a few years?
The answer lies not only in South Africa's economic difficulties. It also lies in the way those problems have been narrated, shared and gradually transformed into a story that is simple, emotionally compelling and immediately recognisable. A story that has found its most powerful accelerator in social media.
Every political movement builds its support around a set of priorities. Those priorities, however, are not always grounded in facts or supported by evidence. More often than not, they are driven by emotions. In the case of South Africa's anti-immigration movements, the key question is this: are immigrants really responsible for the country's deteriorating living conditions?
The accusations are familiar—and strikingly similar to those heard in many other parts of the world. Immigrants are said to be taking jobs from South Africans, fuelling crime, overwhelming hospitals, exploiting public services and opening businesses without respecting the rules.
Some of these claims contain elements of truth. Others are based on perceptions that are difficult to substantiate, while others are contradicted by the available evidence. It is precisely this mixture of facts, personal experiences and sweeping generalisations that makes the narrative so persuasive.
For decades, South Africa's economy has relied on a significant number of foreign workers, particularly in the informal economy, construction, agriculture and small-scale retail. Many accept lower wages and more precarious working conditions, a dynamic that can indeed create tensions with local workers.
Yet numerous studies point to a different conclusion: the country's central problem is not immigration itself, but a labour market incapable of generating enough jobs and a regulatory system that struggles to address illegal employment.
Blaming immigrants for unemployment means reducing a structural issue to a single, visible cause, overlooking the deeper roots of the crisis—slow economic growth, entrenched inequality and persistent shortcomings in education and labour policy.
The picture is equally complex when it comes to crime.
South Africa suffers from exceptionally high levels of violence, and the presence of transnational criminal networks is a well-documented reality. However, the available research does not show that immigrants are, overall, more likely to commit crimes than South African citizens.
As in many other countries, isolated incidents are often transformed into evidence of collective responsibility, reinforcing the automatic association between immigration and crime even when the broader data fail to support it.
This does not mean that every concern is unfounded.
It means that genuine problems are repeatedly reduced to a single explanation—one that is easier to identify, easier to communicate and, ultimately, easier to turn into a political message.
Many scholars avoid the term xenophobia when describing what is happening in South Africa. Instead, they speak of Afrophobia.
The distinction is more than semantic.
The primary targets of attacks and intimidation campaigns are overwhelmingly other Africans: people from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not all foreigners are perceived in the same way.
The fault line runs primarily within the African continent itself, where geographical proximity makes migration more frequent and economic competition more visible.
This distinction helps explain why the issue is not simply the rejection of "foreigners." Rather, it is the construction of a social hierarchy in which certain groups gradually become identified as being responsible for the deterioration of collective living conditions.
In other words, the target is not chosen at random.
It is chosen because it is visible, numerous, vulnerable and politically underrepresented.
For years, we have described social media as tools capable of amplifying public discontent. While this definition is accurate, it is no longer sufficient.
In South Africa, digital platforms appear to have played a different role. They have not simply spread a message—they have helped organise a movement.
Videos filmed during improvised inspections in working-class neighbourhoods, Facebook Live broadcasts outside businesses owned by foreign nationals, short clips shared on TikTok, and WhatsApp groups used to coordinate demonstrations and circulate alleged sightings of undocumented immigrants: each piece of content performs several functions at once. It informs, reinforces a shared identity and turns political action into a public performance.
It does not simply describe what is happening. It suggests who is actually doing something about it.
This is perhaps the most significant transformation.
Contemporary propaganda rarely asks people to believe in an abstract idea. Instead, it shows concrete action: an inspection, a protest, a patrol, a shop forced to close, a confrontation with the police.
The implicit message is powerful: the state stands still—we act.
Every video therefore becomes visual proof of a political argument.
The algorithms do the rest.
Emotional, confrontational and highly shareable content tends to receive greater visibility, while complexity struggles to find space. An economic analysis of unemployment is unlikely to spread as widely as a video showing a heated confrontation outside a local business—not because the latter explains reality more accurately, but because it is designed to provoke an immediate emotional reaction.
This is where social media become decisive.
They do not create public anxiety, nor do they invent distrust. They give both a narrative structure, a language, a target and, above all, an organisation.
Every share reinforces the perception that the phenomenon is everywhere. Every new video appears to confirm the previous one. Every individual testimony is interpreted as evidence of a broader trend. The algorithm becomes the engine driving the endless circulation of these fuel-like videos, and the incendiary consequences of this mechanism are evident.
This is how a perception can gradually evolve into a collective conviction.
It would be easy to dismiss what is happening in South Africa as the product of an exceptional context: a country marked by extreme inequality, a long history of violence and institutions under severe strain. It would also be reassuring. But it would probably be a mistake.
South Africa illustrates with particular clarity a mechanism that, in different forms, is becoming increasingly visible elsewhere.
Xenophobia does not emerge by chance. It develops when genuine social hardship meets a vacuum of trust in public institutions—and when someone is ready to exploit that fracture, widening it and directing it first towards a target and then towards a political consensus whose consequences are impossible to predict.
Social media do not create that hardship, but they give it a form, a language, a target and, above all, an organisation. When citizens stop asking the state to intervene and begin convincing themselves that someone else can replace it, the transition from discontent to vigilantism becomes possible.
This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the entire story. Because the target can, in theory, change. Today it is immigrants.
Tomorrow it could be another minority, another community, another vulnerable group that is easily portrayed as being responsible for problems whose origins are, in reality, far deeper and far more complex.
Democracies are not measured solely by their ability to guarantee rights. They are also measured by their ability to prevent distrust in public institutions from being filled by those who promise simple solutions to complex problems.
It is a lesson that concerns South Africa. But it would be naïve to believe that it concerns South Africa alone.