South Africa: Scapegoating the Stranger - Xenophobia Exposes South Africa's Hollowed-Out State Capacity

A nation does not heal by attacking the people who reveal its weakness. It heals by repairing the weakness.

Five years ago I buried my mother, and I wrote that corruption was a disease.

I was half-right.

She died of Covid at the height of the pandemic. But the virus is rarely the whole story. Gogo Dlamini had underlying conditions -- the hereditary kind our history hands down, and the lifestyle kind we inflict on ourselves -- and the doctors were honest with me about how it works. It finds a body whose defences have already been worn thin, and it finishes what years of quieter damage began. What took my mother was not only the thing that arrived. It was everything that had left her unable to fight it off.

Nations die the way bodies do. Rarely from a single wound. More often from years of accumulated weakness that leave them unable to survive the next shock.

So when I am told that South Africa's problem is the migrant -- the foreigner, the man who runs the spaza two streets down in Braamfontein, the one competing for the same scarce rand -- I want to say what the doctors said to me. Before you name the infection, look at what was already broken.

This is the distinction...