The tactical transition from the July 2021 unrest to current xenophobic mobilisation suggests a coordinated assault on the constitutional state.
South Africa, like many former colonies, has seen its fair share of repression, violence, and bigotry in many forms. The 1994 democratic breakthrough signalled a decisive rupture with that past for many. The language of violence was replaced with the language of negotiation, and racial division with the ideal of a rainbow nation. The democratic change was followed by a constitution hailed as one of the best in the world, and a sense of national pride began to emerge. South Africans began to celebrate together. Black, white, coloured and Indian were increasingly replaced by a common identity: a rainbow nation united in action.
Yet, alongside the jubilation, unseen or underestimated by much of the leadership, a slow brewing counterrevolution was taking shape. While many celebrated the hoisting of the new national flag, the building of a new education system, the reconstruction and development of the country, and the incorporation of Enoch Sontonga’s hymn Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika into the national anthem of a republic eager to rejoin the world, others were plotting its collapse.
We have to confront an uncomfortable truth: some among us were never happy with the collapse of apartheid. We can, in a sense, understand the disgruntled white South Africans who saw the end of apartheid as the end of their grand looting sprees and gravy train. What stings far more is the betrayal by those who once stood against apartheid. These were men and women who gave their all to the struggle for total abolition, only to reveal themselves, in the post-apartheid era, as bigoted actors hell bent on ensuring that the new order fails.
Nowhere was this more visible than in the July 2021 unrest that engulfed KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. The South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) report on that period should have been treated as a national warning siren.
Buried in the archives of this Chapter 9 institution is a deeply disturbing picture: a pattern of deliberate, systematic, and well-resourced protest actions aimed at undermining the constitutional order, in other words, the democratic project itself. The instigators of these protests leveraged the socio-economic crisis precipitated by the Covid 19 pandemic, spiralling unemployment and a general loss of trust in the capacity of the state. They turned these legitimate crises into weapons. Mass lootings and road blockades were not spontaneous eruptions of anger. They were tactics designed to grab the attention of the state and to destroy what little the democratic breakthrough had achieved.
And what did the state do in response? Very little. It failed to establish the political, social and security architecture required to extinguish this fire. Five years on, we still sit with deep-rooted socio-economic distortions that are visible even to the most lay observer. In that vacuum of state capacity and political courage, something darker has been allowed to grow.
Why call it fascism?
Fascism is a political philosophy most infamously associated with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. It rests on ultra nationalist, ultra conservative and deeply bigoted assumptions about the world. In practice, it manifests as organised hatred: the systematic targeting of particular groups on the basis of who they are, not what they have done. In Nazi Germany, the myth of pure Aryanism was invoked to justify the removal, and ultimately the extermination, of those deemed other: the disabled, black people, queer people and, most damningly, Jews. Their identity alone was enough to condemn them, while the Aryan figure was elevated to something like a demi god.
Returning to the July 2021 unrest, the parallels with this fascist template are uncomfortable but unavoidable. The organisers leaned heavily on cultural symbols as weapons, brandishing ethnicity and tradition to divide and mobilise. They chastised and threatened those who did not belong to particular ethnic groupings. The SAHRC report confirms that there were plans to burn trucks, restaurants and other businesses that employed foreign nationals. At the heart of this was not a policy dispute, but outright hatred of foreign nationals as a category, and a decision to destroy their places of work as a means of erasing them from public life.
Fast forward to 2026, and a similar trend is emerging, this time even more ferociously. Once again, foreign nationals are cast as the problem. Their total removal from our shores is presented, in some quarters, as necessary to restore sanity to the nation. Recent protests began under the banner of targeting illegal foreigners, but the line between illegal and legal has steadily blurred. Increasingly, genuine South Africans find themselves harassed because they look like foreigners. Ultranationalism has moved from the margins closer to the mainstream.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that these terrains are treacherous for anyone who falls outside the dominant Nguni ethnic groups, and even more so for those whose phenotype is read as Nigerian, Somali or any other shorthand for foreignness. This is not a minor tension on the edges of society. It is an assault on the social fabric itself. It sows division among the people and destabilises the state.
We should stop pretending that this is just community frustration or isolated xenophobia. A politics that elevates one group as the true nation, that normalises violence or the threat of it against those deemed outsiders, and that treats constitutional protections as obstacles rather than guarantees, is unmistakably flirting with neofascism.
South Africa has seen where hate driven politics lead. We do not have the luxury of complacency. The question is whether our leaders, and the rest of us, will recognise the rising tide of neofascism in time to turn it back.
