The current wave of marches led by figures such as Jacinta Ngobese, Ngizwe Mchunu, Phakel’umthakathi and Xolani Khumalo has reopened one of South Africa’s most uncomfortable debates: where does patriotism end and xenophobia begin?
What is striking is not merely the mobilisation itself but the speed with which the Zulu identity has once again been reduced to caricature. The old accusation has returned with predictable urgency: Zulus are xenophobic, violent and hostile to foreigners. Like many lazy political narratives, this one survives because it relieves some sectors of society from serious analysis.
There is something deeply dishonest about how few South Africans discuss immigration. They have become comfortable with moral grandstanding while communities collapse under the pressure of uncontrolled migration, criminal syndicates, collapsing infrastructure, drug networks and economic exclusion. The ordinary South African who raises these realities is quickly condemned before they are even heard. The accusation of xenophobia has increasingly become less a moral principle and more a political instrument used to silence legitimate frustration from poor black communities.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the reaction to the recent marches. Images of amabutho, men dressed in Zulu regimental attire, marching in disciplined formation through the streets immediately triggered panic among sections of the political and media establishment. The symbolism alone was enough to convict them. But symbolism is not substance.
South Africa must ask itself an honest question: is it xenophobic to demand that immigration laws be respected?
The Immigration Act 13 of 2002 is explicit. Foreign nationals entering South Africa are required to do so legally, possess valid documentation and conduct themselves within the confines of the law. There is no constitutional principle anywhere that grants immunity from immigration control. No democracy survives without borders, documentation and regulation.
Yet in South Africa, enforcement itself has become controversial.
Entire sections of Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria have effectively been surrendered to criminal economies linked to undocumented migration, counterfeit trade, drug trafficking and extortion rackets. In many townships, local informal traders openly complain that they cannot compete against networks that evade taxation, labour regulation and municipal compliance. These grievances are not inventions of political opportunists; they are lived realities in communities abandoned by the state.
To acknowledge this is not to condemn all foreign nationals. South Africa has long benefited from legal migration through skilled professionals, entrepreneurs and workers from across the continent. What many South Africans reject is not foreign presence itself but lawlessness. The deliberate collapsing of this distinction is intellectually dishonest. It creates a false binary where one must either endorse uncontrolled migration or be labelled xenophobic.
Xenophobia, properly understood, is the irrational hatred or fear of foreigners merely because they are foreign. It manifests through indiscriminate violence, prejudice and dehumanisation. Patriotism, however, is something entirely different. Patriotism concerns loyalty to one’s nation, protection of national interests and insistence that the state fulfil its obligations to its citizens.
Notably, many of the recent demonstrations have not descended into violence. There have been no organised campaigns of murder or ethnic cleansing. There has instead been protest action and political expression, constitutionally protected activities. One may disagree with the rhetoric or presentation but disagreement alone does not transform activism into xenophobia.
The Zulu dimension of this debate is particularly revealing.
Historically, the Zulu nation has always possessed a strong martial and protective tradition. Under Shaka kaSenzangakhona, the Zulu kingdom emerged through discipline, military organisation and territorial defence. The ibutho system was founded upon duty, order and collective responsibility. Throughout South African history, Zulu identity has often been intertwined with notions of guardianship and resistance.
To invoke amabutho today is therefore not automatically a declaration of violence. It is equally an invocation of memory, identity and collective consciousness. The problem is that South Africa remains deeply uncomfortable with assertive African identities, especially when they emerge outside the sanitised language preferred by elite institutions. When affluent communities organise around border control, it is framed as national security. When poor black communities express similar concerns through indigenous symbolism, it suddenly becomes extremism.
This double standard exposes the class character of the xenophobia debate.
Middle-class South Africans often experience migration abstractly. Wealthier suburbs rarely absorb the direct pressures of overcrowded clinics, informal settlement expansion, illicit economic competition or violent turf battles linked to undocumented criminal networks. Those realities are disproportionately borne by the black working class. Yet when these communities articulate frustration, they are moralised to rather than listened to.
The failure of the South African state has worsened these tensions. Weak border management, corruption within Home Affairs, poor policing and chronic unemployment have created conditions ripe for social resentment. Political leaders who refuse to address these failures instead retreat into slogans about African unity and pan-Africanism, as though rhetoric alone can substitute for governance.
But solidarity cannot exist without order.
No society can sustain social cohesion while simultaneously abandoning immigration enforcement. Even the world’s most progressive democracies regulate entry, employment and residency. South Africa cannot be expected to function without the very controls universally accepted elsewhere. To insist on lawful migration is not hatred. It is statecraft.
What South Africans are witnessing now is not simply xenophobia but the eruption of accumulated frustration from communities that believe the democratic state no longer prioritises them. Whether movements like March and March or Phakel’umthakathi ultimately help or inflame the situation remains open to debate. But dismissing them through simplistic stereotypes about Zulus avoids the deeper crisis entirely.
South Africa must resist two dangerous temptations simultaneously: the temptation to demonise all foreign nationals and the temptation to silence every concern about illegal immigration through accusations of xenophobia. Both extremes destroy the possibility of rational national dialogue.
A country without humanity ceases to be a society. But a country without borders ceases to be a state.
The challenge before South Africa is to defend both.
Zwe Nxumalo is an activist, ActionSA member and a Chief Whip in the Newcastle Municipality