JOHN AKINRIBIDO urges South Africa to confront honestly the structural causes of xenophobia
Africa welcomes approximately 67 million international tourists annually, generating more than $38 billion in revenue. Yet intra-African tourism — Africans traveling within Africa — remains underdeveloped, constrained by visa restrictions, inadequate air connectivity, and, increasingly, fear. Images of burning foreign-owned shops in Johannesburg or Durban, South Africa, do not remain confined to national borders. They reverberate across the continent and the diaspora at the speed of a WhatsApp forward.
The irony is profound. South Africa, the nation that gave the world Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the living philosophy of Ubuntu — I am because we are — periodically erupts in horrifying attacks against fellow Africans: Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Malawians. Neighbors in geography, kin in history, yet treated as adversaries. The torch of African liberation burns at one end, while a mob extinguishes livelihoods at the other.
This contradiction is not merely a domestic disgrace. It is an economic catastrophe with a specific and measurable casualty: African tourism, and through it, the continent’s most credible path toward integration and shared prosperity.
Ubuntu is not a slogan for democratic transition. It is a comprehensive ethical system that recognizes the humanity of the stranger, the refugee, and the foreign worker, precisely because community cannot end at a border. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who embodied this philosophy, was unequivocal: Ubuntu demands that we see ourselves diminished when others are diminished.
Xenophobia is the philosophical negation of Ubuntu. It proclaims: I am because you are not. Each attack on a Malawian hawker or a Nigerian pharmacist is a betrayal not only of Pan-Africanism as a political ideal but also of the moral foundation upon which South Africa’s post-apartheid identity was built. A nation cannot invoke Mandela on the world stage while its citizens torch the livelihoods of Mozambicans, a country that sheltered the ANC during the liberation struggle.
The debt of solidarity runs deep. It traverses every border on this continent.
The economic argument alone should compel reflection. Since 1994, African migrants have been instrumental in building South Africa’s informal economy. Spaza shops, taxi routes, cross border import and exports, hospitality, and construction — all sectors significantly driven by foreign African labor and entrepreneurship. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), headquartered in Accra and championed by the African Union, envisions a $3.4 trillion single market. It is the most ambitious integration project in post-colonial Africa.
Xenophobia threatens to hollow it out before it takes shape. Investors, both African and global, constantly monitor political and social stability. No rational entrepreneur expands into a market where physical safety is contingent upon nationality. Nigeria temporarily recalled its High Commissioner to South Africa after the 2019 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Diplomatic capital, painstakingly built over years, evaporated in days. Trade agreements are meaningless if the human layer beneath them is fractured by mistrust and violence.
Tourism uniquely fosters empathy that politics alone cannot. When a South African travels through Tanzania’s Serengeti, a Kenyan visits Cape Town, or a Ghanaian explores Victoria Falls on a regional pass, something shifts, not as theory, but as lived experience. They eat together. They navigate together. They recognize each other.
The African Union’s Agenda 2063 explicitly identifies intra-African tourism as a strategic pillar of integration. The single African passport, championed since Kigali 2016, advances slowly but steadily. The African Union’s free movement protocol, if fully ratified, would be transformative. These are not utopian ideals; they are policy instruments awaiting political will.
South Africa possesses the infrastructure, attractions, and institutional capacity to lead this vision. It could become the continent’s tourism capital and hospitality ambassador. Instead, it risks becoming a cautionary tale of how economic frustration, when weaponized against scapegoats, undermines collective progress. How ironic is it then, that South Africa risks becoming Africa’s pariah state on its own continent?
Africa cannot afford this hemorrhage. The continent’s future is collective, or it is diminished. Pan-Africanism was never intended as a relic; it was conceived as a living architecture of mutual flourishing. Ubuntu was never meant to stop at the Limpopo River.
South Africa must confront honestly the structural causes of xenophobia: unemployment, inequality, housing scarcity, while refusing, firmly and consistently, to allow these grievances to manifest as violence against fellow Africans. Leaders must lead. Communities must be held accountable. And the continent must insist, together, that no African should fear for their life on African soil. We are because we are. All of us. Or we are nothing at all.
Akinribido writes from Johannesburg, South Africa
