There’s no shortage of analysis when it comes to xenophobia in South Africa. We’ve heard it explained as the outcome of deep structural inequality, the failure of post-apartheid redistribution, or the slow-burning crisis of unemployment and social insecurity. Writers like Patrick Bond, Mary Galvin, Mazibuko Jara, Trevor Ngwane, Christopher Classen, and Phillip J. Lewis have all helped build this picture. I don’t disagree with their work. But I want to come at the issue from a slightly different angle—one rooted in political theory, and in how we understand the very idea of who belongs.

There’s a short but quietly radical paper by Mahmood Mamdani called “Democratic Theory and Democratic Struggles.” In it, he argues that democratic movements in Africa have too often taken their cues from Euro-American traditions—importing ideas about rights and citizenship without stopping to ask whether those frameworks actually make sense in our context. The problem isn’t just imitation. It’s that we’ve accepted, almost by default, a model of democracy that was never built to deal with the complexities of our histories.

Mamdani’s first critique is that democratic theory is treated as a universal script—as something given, static, and ready-made. His second is that we’ve failed to learn seriously from our own anticolonial struggles, especially those that erupted after the Second World War. That was the moment when colonial powers, faced with rising resistance, scrambled to reconfigure their rule—not by relinquishing power, but by reorganizing it. They redesigned colonial societies to contain revolt. And they did so, crucially, by reshaping political identities.

At the core of Mamdani’s argument is a reckoning with the tradition of rights that emerged in Europe: the belief that nations are the rightful bearers of collective self-determination, and that citizens, by virtue of belonging to those nations, hold individual rights. This idea didn’t emerge overnight. It gathered force across centuries, from Renaissance humanism to Enlightenment philosophy, from the French Revolution to Wilson’s post–World War I principles. As Allen Lynch has noted, “self-determination” was already in the air long before it became the slogan of decolonization.

But in the European context, something else was happening alongside the spread of rights: The nation was coming to be imagined as a shared cultural community. Once self-determination was attached to this idea of cultural sameness, it became a way of defining not only who was entitled to govern themselves but who counted as a political subject in the first place. Rights became tied to nationality. Citizenship became the gatekeeper of belonging. And in this framework, where you’re born—and whether your name, language, or history match the imagined nation—determines whether you’re entitled to rights at all. This is the legacy that many postcolonial states inherited without question. And it’s this template—of equating political inclusion with nationality—that, Mamdani suggests, helps explain why xenophobia and ethnic violence continue to haunt the African continent.

But what does any of this have to do with xenophobia in Africa—especially since Africa is, after all, not Europe or America? The answer starts with a reminder: The modern state in Africa was not born through negotiation or consent. It was imposed, violently, through the colonial project. Speaking about the 2013 political crisis in Sudan—which left thousands dead and drove many more into exile—Mamdani argued that the roots of that conflict stretch back to British colonialism. The British, in attempting to consolidate internal sovereignty in Sudan, redrew the social map. They carved up the territory along ethnic lines and transformed cultural identities into political ones.

This was not an accidental byproduct of colonial rule—it was central to its logic. The British defined ethnicity as an exclusive category. They tied each ethnic group to a specific, bounded homeland. They then installed local authorities—drawn from the same ethnic group—to govern those homelands. These authorities were given sweeping powers: to control land, settle disputes, and administer customary law. But they were not accountable to the people they governed. Their authority was propped up by the colonial state, and justified in the name of “tradition.”

The consequences were far-reaching. Those who could claim indigeneity—those seen as “natives” of a given homeland—were recognized as having rights under customary law. Those who could not were treated as outsiders, with no claims to land, protection, or participation. The effect was to harden identity into a rigid and exclusionary system. What might once have been fluid—language, lineage, belonging—was turned into something fixed. Ethnicity became a political passport. The “tribe” became a kind of micro-state. And rights were rationed out accordingly.

This wasn’t unique to Sudan. The same pattern held across colonial Africa—whether in Kenya under the British, South Africa under apartheid, or Nigeria under indirect rule. Once the colonial state brought multiple ethnic groups under a single sovereign authority, it had to answer a basic question: How do you govern people you do not intend to empower? The answer was to divide them. To codify cultural differences. To draw hard lines around identity. And, just as crucially, to manage labor.

Colonial economies depended on the movement of people. Migrant labor didn’t begin with colonialism, but under the colonial state it was transformed. Labor migration was engineered as a way to displace, divide, and exploit. Migrant workers were deliberately excluded from political life. They were used to undercut local wages, to destabilize communities, and to provide the cheap labor that capitalist accumulation required. In other words, the roots of both ethnic exclusion and migrant marginalization in Africa lie in the colonial attempt to manage difference—not by transcending it, but by weaponizing it.

Modern Africa’s reality has been shaped by two entangled legacies: colonial rule and migrant labor. Neither can be separated from the other. As Mamdani reminds us, even when the United Nations declared the “right to self-determination of peoples” and the universal protection of “human rights” after the Second World War, a question hung in the air: Who are the “peoples” and “humans” being spoken of?

Europe’s answer to the violence of state formation—the genocides, expulsions, and forced assimilations carried out in the name of national unification—was to affirm the right of every nation to self-determination. But as Mamdani points out, turning national minorities into national majorities has never solved the deeper problem: the question of co-belonging. These solutions merely redrew the lines of exclusion. Worse still, they trained generations to see the world through the lens of separation—of who “we” are, who counts as part of the political community, and who doesn’t. Who is entitled to rights, and who must live without them.

The tragedy of postcolonial states is that they did not take these histories seriously. Instead, they inherited the European tradition of rights wholesale, without examining how it had been used to divide and govern in colonial contexts. The result is that much of today’s xenophobia—along with ethnic and so-called tribal conflict—can be traced back to these unexamined inheritances.

Take South Africa. The country never truly detribalized. The post-apartheid imagination of the nation still draws its boundaries around certain ethnic categories deemed “indigenous” or “authentic” to the state. That much was made clear during the recent Chidimma Adetshina saga, when Patriotic Alliance leader Kenny Kunene argued that only people with South African names—by which he meant Xhosa or Zulu names—deserve recognition. Or consider Operation Dudula, which has physically barred Black people suspected of being “foreign nationals” from accessing public health care.

These incidents may look different on the surface, but they share the same logic. At their core is the idea that certain people—those whose names or accents or skin shade are read as foreign—do not belong to the “we” of the South African nation. That they are outside the circle of rights, not because of what they’ve done, but because of where they (supposedly) come from. This is what happens when ethnicity is tied to geography, when cultural identity is mistaken for national purity. And it is telling that white South Africans, whose lineage is not remotely indigenous, are rarely subjected to this same scrutiny.

The truth is that we do not have nation-states in Africa, not in the way Europe imagined them. What passes for nationalism on this continent is, more often than not, a statist ideology. And this ideology—designed to manage labor and maintain order—creates sharp divides between citizen workers and non-citizen workers, between those entitled to rights and those rendered invisible.

This is why popular slogans like “tighten the borders” or “put South Africans first” are not just xenophobic—they are politically empty. Sometimes these ideas even edge into tribalism, as when people are told to “go back to your province” as if crossing internal borders made them suspect. But as Mamdani reminds us, apartheid itself was built on the denial of rights to non-citizen labor. Laws like the pass system or the Urban Areas Act didn’t just restrict Black mobility—they erased Black citizenship, rendering millions into deportable, temporary, and utterly exploitable workers. The Bantustan system followed the same logic: create categories of people who live on the land but have no claim to it.

If we want a political order that actually reflects our history, then we have to stop using the Euro-American template. We have to rethink what rights are and whom they are for. Rights must be tied not to where someone was born, but to where they live and labor. Migrant presence—residence, contribution, life—should be the basis of political belonging. Not paperwork. Not passports. Not ethnicity dressed up as nationhood.