Anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa is at a 22-year high. The evidence points less to a migration crisis than to a collapsing information ecosystem
Guest Op-Ed: Luckson Mulako Sikananu
Luckson My grandfather left Zambia as a young man, barely out of his teens, sometime in the late 1940s, drawn south by the only economy that was hiring: the gold and diamond mines of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. He was not exceptional in this. By the height of South Africa’s gold rush, more than 100,000 workers, the overwhelming majority of them Black migrant labourers, were employed across the Witwatersrand’s reefs, drawn from every corner of the southern African subcontinent, often in large ethnic cohorts, completing contracts before returning home. My grandfather was one of those men. He went south because the colonial economy had been architected to make that the only rational choice.
He was not just a worker. In the compound networks and clandestine conversations of wartime South Africa, he found himself caught up in the current of anti-apartheid resistance. Not a frontline activist, but present, aware, and morally implicated in the struggle for the dignity of a country that was not his own. He returned to Zambia in the mid 1950s and spent the rest of his working life as a teacher. He is long gone now.
But I find myself wondering, in these strange and troubling months of 2026, what he would make of it all. The nation that he and millions like him helped build, literally with their bodies underground, is now in the streets demanding that Africans leave. The rainbow nation, whose liberation was sustained by the solidarity of its neighbours, is now organising marches to expel those same neighbours’ grandchildren. He would be, I think, both bemused and profoundly sad.
A Movement with a Name, and a Fist
The organisations driving this moment have names worth examining plainly. Operation Dudula, meaning “force out” in Zulu, became one of the most recognisable faces of South African xenophobia following the 2021 to 2022 wave of anti-immigrant violence. Its more recent partner in agitation is March and March, a shadowy movement that emerged in 2025 and has organised marches in major cities deploying the full register of anti-migrant rhetoric.
The consequences have not been abstract. A one-year-old Malawian boy died after Operation Dudula blocked him from receiving treatment at two local government clinics because his family did not have a South African identity card. A child. Turned away from a clinic. In the constitutional democracy that Nelson Mandela built.
These groups consistently claim to target only undocumented migrants, but in their practice and rhetoric, that distinction is rarely maintained. Anyone who looks or sounds foreign becomes a legitimate target, which in a country whose history of migration spans the entire southern African region implicates millions of people with every legal right to be there.
The Numbers Behind the Noise
It would be convenient to dismiss this as the work of fringe agitators. The data does not permit that comfort. The latest Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) South African Social Attitudes Survey, a longitudinal study running since 2003, shows that South Africans are now more hostile towards immigrants than at any recorded point in that 22-year history. This hardening has been most pronounced among poorer and working-class adults.
The hostility is not being manufactured purely from the top down. It is rooted in real, daily material frustration. South Africa’s unemployment rate sits above 32.7 percent, and the deteriorating socioeconomic conditions since 2024 have coincided directly with the rise of anti-immigrant activism, even as study after study disputes the claim that people on the move are responsible for unemployment, crime, or failures in service delivery.
That gap between the evidence and what millions of people believe is not accidental. It is, in a significant part, manufactured.
The Machine Behind the Rhetoric
This is where the story becomes not just a South African story, but a story about the global information ecosystem and what happens when it is captured by those with an interest in directing anger toward the most visible and most vulnerable.
South Africa’s xenophobic online machine did not emerge in 2026. Recent events have simply revealed how entrenched, interconnected, and politically influential it has already become. The playbook is consistent: real fears, unresolved events and rumours are rapidly absorbed into anti-foreigner mobilisation before facts are established. Missing-person cases, crime incidents, business disputes and anti-drug operations are transformed into symbolic stories about foreign criminality and state failure.
The architecture is worth examining closely. Analysis of South Africa’s digital landscape found that the largest anti-immigrant online community was responsible for 37 percent of all posts in a dataset while representing only 15 percent of users, a ratio researchers flag as a marker of inauthentic coordinated behaviour. A small network, generating a disproportionate volume of emotionally charged content, driving what appears to be organic public outrage but is, in meaningful part, a performance of it.
Counter-voices do exist, but these responses are characteristically reactive rather than agenda-setting. They are playing defence in an information environment designed to reward offence.
A Necessary Complication
South Africa is not a country of xenophobes. This demands to be said plainly, because the failure to say it is its own form of distortion.
I have been to South Africa. I have been welcomed there with a warmth that complicated every headline I had absorbed. Some of my closest friends here in the Netherlands, where I am myself a person on the move navigating a European city, are South Africans. They carry their country’s complexity with them: its beauty, its open-heartedness, its capacity for solidarity, and its unresolved wounds.
The country is not monolithic in its hostility. It is a society in which a well-organised, digitally sophisticated minority is setting the terms of a debate that the majority has not fully entered. That distinction is not a source of comfort so much as a strategic insight: the information battle is not lost.
An Election Is Coming
The timing of all this is not incidental. South Africa holds local government elections on 4 November 2026, and aspirant political parties seeking to maintain or gain power may seek to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment for their own ends. Elections have historically served as accelerants for xenophobia, not because they create the sentiment but because they incentivise its exploitation.
Local government elections are particularly fertile terrain. They are fought over the very issues that people on the move are most often blamed for: housing, healthcare access, job scarcity, neighbourhood safety. The online ecosystem built around anti-immigration activism overlaps with the digital networks of political parties and amplification platforms, all united by anti-immigration narratives and mobilisation calls. The infrastructure for electoral exploitation is already in place. The question is whether the information environment will be capable of offering citizens something more accurate than fear.
What Journalism Owes People on the Move
At RNW Media, we use the phrase people on the move deliberately. It is not euphemism; it is precision. The word “immigrant,” in the current climate, arrives pre-loaded with connotation: illegal, threatening, taking. People on the move restores what the disinformation machine works to erase, namely humanity, agency, and the simple fact that migration is something people do, not something that happens to a country.
RNW Media’s work on migration is rooted in the conviction that migration narratives shape public perceptions and policy. That means taking seriously both the rights and humanity of people on the move, and the genuine anxieties that migration generates among host communities. The antidote to disinformation is not counter-propaganda; it is journalism that builds common ground, challenges stereotypes on all sides, and equips media with the skills and data-driven insights to tell the full, complicated story.
The South African crisis is, at its core, an information integrity crisis dressed up as a migration crisis. At RNW Media and through our training center RNTC, we aim to equip journalists to report on people on the move with accuracy and contextual grounding, and to recognise the disinformation playbook they are operating within. RNW Media’s broader strategic framework positions information integrity as foundational to democratic resilience, with migration as a core cross-cutting theme.
In a country approaching a high-stakes election, in an information environment where a 15 percent minority of users is generating 37 percent of anti-migrant content, the value of a journalist who can distinguish a coordinated digital campaign from genuine public sentiment is not abstract. It may, in the most literal sense, shape what South Africans believe about their neighbours when they enter the voting booth in November.
What My Grandfather Understood
My grandfather went to South Africa and came back. He was, in the language of our present moment, a person on the move, part of the vast circulation of labour, knowledge and humanity across the African continent that built modern Southern Africa.
What Operation Dudula and its digital allies are selling is a different story: that South Africa’s problems were imported by the people it once invited in. It is a story built on disinformation, and amplified by algorithms.
The job of journalists, media trainers and information integrity practitioners is to ensure that story does not go unanswered. Not only because it is factually false, but because the truer story is the one that people like my grandfather actually lived: that the movement of people across this continent has always been, at its best, an act of mutual survival. That story deserves to be told well.