WoMin African Alliance stands in solidarity with all African migrants and foreign nationals facing the violent horror of Afrophobia and xenophobia in South Africa. As a Pan African ecofeminist organisation, with a secretariat base in South Africa, we condemn the organised campaigns being waged against migrants and refugees in South Africa. These campaigns use and misdirect the legitimate anger of working class and poor South Africans about the poverty and exclusion they face, conditions created first under colonisation and then by the depraved apartheid system. Exclusion of the majority of South Africans – poor black and brown men and women – was cemented in the post-apartheid era by systemic government failure that can only be expected when tied to a racist, patriarchal capitalist system that has entrenched deep levels of exploitation, inequality, unemployment and lack of basic services.
Political parties and fascist movements, enabled and supported by the still largely white owned, and capitalist controlled media, have fed this Afrophobic machinery of hatred over many years. The ruling party has supported this narrative as it diverts attention from the African National Congress (ANC) failures to transform the lives of the majority of South Africans, promises made in the Freedom Charter and then in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), which represented the ANC’s election ticket in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
As South Africa prepares for November 2026 local government elections across the country, political parties such as the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party (led by former President Jacob Zuma), the Patriotic Alliance, and ActionSA to name a few, are manipulating voters by creating a literal storm of Afrophobia and xenophobia. The migrant from another African country, easily distinguished by language and appearance, is an easier and more clearly identified target for accumulated rage and discontent of the majority of South Africans. Targeting the deep roots of exclusion which lie in racial patriarchal capitalism, in Africa’s peripheral position in the global economy, in the historical and ongoing looting of our continent’s natural resource wealth by transnational capital in partnership with local elites, by tech companies that hollow out decent work, and by neoliberal policies of liberalisation and privatisation imposed (or self imposed in the South African case) on all African countries. The burning fire of poverty and neglect is directed at the Somali shopkeeper while the supermarket chains — with their casualised labour, price-fixing, and profiteering — escape scrutiny and attack.
The hatred is being fomented by a minority in South Africa. The majority in townships, informal settlements and suburbs across the country, intermarry and intermingle with Africans from across the continent in a spirit of friendship and love. As the Afrophobia unfolds, relations of marriage, cohabitation, and parenthood which unify Africans are torn apart by death, threat and forced outmigration. We say NO!
As South Africans and as Pan Africans we are called upon to protect our common humanity inscribed in the African ‘I am because we are’ Ubuntu, Unhu, Hunhu, Umunthu, Utu, Obuntu, Ubuntu, Kimuntu, Bato, Gimuntu, Biako ye, Maaya, and Maat held by Africans across our beautiful continent.
Women bear the brunt of Afrophobia and xenophobia
WoMin understands that African migrant women are among the most vulnerable in this moment, and among the most erased in public discussion. Migrant women — domestic workers, street traders, spaza shop co-owners, and care workers — face compounded violence: the violence of economic exclusion, the violence of Afrophobia, and the violence of patriarchy and racism, all at once. When mobs attack and loot migrant-owned shops, it is often women who lose their livelihoods, their savings, and their safety, particularly so in South Africa with its high rates of violence against women in South Africa. When families are displaced by xenophobic violence, it is women who are left to hold broken households together and make do in crowded relocation camps.
In spite of the great burden they carry, migrant women are largely invisibilised and their voices muted in public discourse. Their labour is invisible, their contributions unacknowledged, and their suffering unrecorded. WoMin insists that any serious response to Afrophobia must centre the experiences of migrant women and show how their labour – like their sister South Africans – has contributed to building and sustaining the South African economy and society over many many decades.
Migrant women have built relationships of trust and mutual care with people in the communities they live in. This solidarity is not an abstraction. It is the ground on which we must build.
Reclaiming Pan African Feminist Solidarity
There was a time when our movements spoke the language of Pan African unity and solidarity, when South Africa’s freedom was understood as bound up with the freedom of the entire continent. The peoples who sheltered South Africa’s exiles, who bled for its liberation, were comrades, not competitors. WoMin holds that vision as non-negotiable.
The Zimbabwean woman selling vegetables at the roadside, the Mozambican domestic worker, the Congolese mother fleeing war — these are not the authors of our misery. They are, like us, its victims, displaced by the same forces of extraction, ecological destruction, and imperial debt that impoverish us all. As a feminist organisation grounded in the struggles of women challenging extractivism across Africa, we understand viscerally that our struggles are one. The extractive economy that poisons rivers in the DRC is the same economy that keeps township women in poverty in Gauteng.
Our Calls to Action:
WoMin urges progressive organisations, trade unions, women’s movements, faith communities, and civil society formations to:
- Actively resist Afrophobic and xenophobic mobilisation in communities, workplaces, and online spaces;
- Reject the framing that attributes crime and social breakdown to foreign nationals, and reject equally the tribalist mobilisations this politics seeds among South Africans themselves;
- Build unity across nationality and ethnic lines in working-class and poor communities, and fuse the struggles of migrants and locals around shared conditions of exclusion and poverty;
- Expose and challenge the political and business interests driving these divisions;
- Reclaim the vision of Pan African solidarity, demanding the free movement of people across the continent and building cross-border alliances against capital that already moves freely across every border; and
- Invest in feminist political education and cultural work, especially among young women and youth, so that solidarity is taught as deliberately as division is.
