Protests are a hard-won right earned through blood, but that right gives no licence to loot, terrorise, maim or kill today.
Community members gathered at Jabulani in Soweto during the march on illegal immigrants living in the country in Johannesburg on 29 June 2026. Picture: Nigel Sibanda / The Citizen
It’s right that people march – and force the authorities to listen when all they’ve done until now is turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to a brewing crisis that is about to boil over.
People power changed the course of this country; the pass law marches, women marching on the Union Buildings, the almost weekly marches and boycotts in the early ’90s – up to the marches in 2017 that helped bring down a president.
Protests work and they are a hard-won constitutional right, earned through blood, rubber bullets and the lash of a sjambok.
But this right does not give any one a laissez-passer to break the law; to loot, to hurt, to maim, to terrorise and to kill.
Which brings us to today.
Some businesses told their staff to take yesterday and today off, the City of Joburg issued a warning to avoid parts of town where marches are taking place.
Meanwhile, some African migrants living in this country are scared out of their wits. Some African countries are trying to repatriate their nationals.
In Durban, the Malawians have crowded into makeshift refugee camps that are so bad that the Gift of the Givers – the perennial litmus test of a catastrophe or state failure – has had to get involved.
It wasn’t so long ago that Thabo Mbeki told the world he was an African and let the rest of us dream of being true Africans, too.
Seven years later, we were necklacing those Africans in our Gauteng townships, beating others and razing spaza shops to the ground. And we’ve never taken the hate stew off the stove since.
The government’s response has been singularly appalling. It created porous borders and compounded it with ineffective and venal officials.
The politicians have been no better; far from condemning the xenophobia, some have opportunistically fanned the populism.
We, ordinary South Africans, are just as culpable. We are silent, but Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem, First, They Came, is as true now as it was 90 years ago at the start of the Holocaust.
We’re all “others” to people who don’t look or speak like us.
After the Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Nigerians, Ghanaians and Somalians, it will be the turn of South Africans: whites, coloureds, Indians and blacks of one hue or another, as we turn on each other until there’s no-one left to speak.
Let’s not let that happen. Please.
