South Africa’s Xenophobia: Can Thabo Mbeki Change the Narrative?
Bulletin en ligne du CODESRIA, No. 6, Juillet 2026
by Yusuf Bangura
President Thabo Mbeki’s lecture during a high-level business breakfast on 22 May 2026[i] was a major pushback against the current xenophobia by black South Africans against African immigrants—a phenomenon that has generated the term ‘Afrophobia’. The lecture systematically highlighted the heroic contributions of Africans to the anti-apartheid struggles, urging his compatriots to reckon with this history and change course.
In this lecture, Mbeki recollected his vast experiences in various African countries when the ties between the ANC and Africa were unbreakable. For decades, the continent viewed its own independence as incomplete as long as minority white rule persisted in South Africa. Mbeki noted that in the first two decades of South Africa’s liberation, the vision of the ANC government was to embed South Africa’s development within a pan-African integration framework that would see South Africa and the rest of Africa prosper together. He regretted that there had been a serious regression of the pan-African spirit in South Africa in the past twenty-five years. In a sharp rebuke, he accused his compatriots, who are attacking African immigrants and blaming them for South Africa’s high level of black unemployment, of chasing the wrong target, or as he put it, ‘chasing ghosts’.
