In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja challenges conventional explanations of xenophobic violence in South Africa by underscoring the concept of “survival populism.” Rather than viewing anti-immigrant mobilization simply as irrational hatred or economic frustration, Dr. Solaja argues that it represents a decentralized form of grassroots political reasoning emerging from structural abandonment, fractured citizenship, and deep socio-economic inequality. Drawing on the legacies of apartheid, decolonial theory, and contemporary populism studies, the commentary explores how marginalized communities construct exclusionary notions of belonging in their struggle for resources, dignity, and recognition. By examining xenophobia as a political response to insecurity rather than merely a social pathology, Dr. Solaja offers a compelling reinterpretation of populism from below and highlights the profound crisis of citizenship, solidarity, and democratic inclusion in post-apartheid South Africa.
By Dr. Oludele Solaja
Familiar narratives about unemployment, criminality, poverty, and social frustration have been used repeatedly to account for recurrent attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa. Politicians, commentators, and sometimes even academics depict xenophobic violence as either “irrational hatred” or “spontaneous public anger” over economic decay. Such accounts, although not completely false, are analytically weak. They do not reflect the underlying political logic of anti-immigrant violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Xenophobia in this case is not only hatred toward foreigners; increasingly, it has come to constitute a form of grassroots political reasoning rooted in conditions of structural abandonment, economic precariousness, and fractured citizenship.
What we have witnessed in South Africa might best be described as survival populism: the everyday, decentralized form of exclusionary politics in which economically marginalized populations establish moral and territorial boundaries in an effort to safeguard their access to scarce resources, space, urban living, and social legitimacy. Unlike conventional populism mobilized by leaders with charismatic personalities in an electoral context, survival populism evolves horizontally through conversations, neighborhood watch meetings, community patrols, forums, taxi associations and informal markets, in addition to social networking sites. It is populism without populists; an everyday political reasoning that communities use to construct a definition of "the people" in contrast to outsiders.
The above understanding challenges popular thinking on populism within contemporary political theory. Most studies of populism concentrate on political actors of elite origin such as the United States’ Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who have mobilized nationalist resentment via an anti-elite and anti-immigrant stance (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Within this context, populism is understood as an electoral strategy led by charismatic personalities. What takes place in South Africa is different in that xenophobic mobilization seldom appears through coherent ideologies and central leaders. Rather, exclusionary politics arise from what could be called everyday populism: everyday political reasoning that shapes a people against outsiders.
From Internal Foreigners to External Outsiders
This differentiation is critical because it exposes populism as not just a form of political expression occurring in parliaments, ballot boxes or rallies, but also an element that emerges from places of survival like informal settlements, townships economies, crowded taxi ranks and local markets where politics takes place through practical struggles.
The architecture of exclusion has much to do with the history of South Africa as not merely a racial but also a spatial and economic system defined by the containment of Black South Africans. Pass laws, migrant labor hostels, separate territorial structures, and fragmented spatial organization resulted in a society in which Black Africans were regarded as only temporary residents. For many decades, millions of Black South Africans were stripped of their permanent urban citizenship, yet they built South Africa’s cities through their labor.
Apartheid made many Black South Africans internal foreigners, with conditional residency in urban South Africa. Understanding the fact that Black South Africans were internal foreigners helps us realize how the modern form of xenophobia reproduces these spatial logics, with migrants presented as illegitimately possessing jobs, wealth and legitimate residency. The policing of migrants and their access to urban South Africa mirrors previous systems of apartheid governance.
One of the striking features of xenophobic attacks in South Africa is that they almost exclusively target foreign Africans from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria, rather than European migrants and expatriates. This racial and national specificity of South African xenophobia reveals a history of unequal relations, the persistence of colonial hierarchies, and ideas of belonging that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa (Mignolo, 2011). The most ironic and tragic fact is that it is precisely here—the place from which the international struggle against apartheid was championed and which was seen as a beacon of African liberation and pan-African unity—that a recurrent war against Africans takes place. The support that Africa provided in the struggle against apartheid has not been reciprocated with welcome and security for African immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Unfulfilled Promise of Democratic Citizenship
In 1994, the democratic dispensation promised inclusion, human dignity, and socio-economic justice. Yet political liberation has neither brought about structural transformation nor eliminated the socio-economic inequalities inherited from the apartheid state. South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, characterized by widespread poverty, high unemployment, and spatial segregation (Piketty, 2014). For many Black South Africans, formal citizenship and the promise of democratic rule remain shallow promises.
It is this disconnect between formal political inclusion and the lack of concrete socio-economic benefits for most South African citizens that helps explain how survival populism is born. While citizens exist on paper, they often fail to achieve basic human dignity. In a society where access to and the distribution of resources are fiercely contested, particularly where the state is absent in providing economic security, protection, and opportunities, people find themselves in conditions of chronic abandonment and exclusion. Xenophobia emerges as an ultimate response to exclusion from economic benefits in society, becoming a tool through which individuals establish an ethical claim to resources and place.
It is here that the township economy becomes an interesting phenomenon. While it provides alternative livelihoods, it also represents conditions of uncertainty, competition, and survival. Furthermore, it is a site where foreign migrants often display economic success, in part through the transnational networks and cooperative practices they share, as well as their lower overhead costs (Crush & Ramachandran, 2014). Their relative visibility within township economies allows them to appear as an important source of economic anxiety for some citizens in this society.
In many township spaces, foreigners and the shops they own are portrayed not merely as competitors but as those responsible for taking over opportunities. Such descriptions and narratives serve as a way of politicizing migrants as legitimate strangers who have illegitimately claimed a portion of the available resources, while local citizens have been abandoned and subjected to misery by their own government.
Here, a Laclauian understanding of populism becomes significant. According to Laclau, populism is essentially a political discourse structured around enmity between “the people” and their enemies (Laclau, 2005). In this context, “the people” are framed as deprived yet hard-working citizens of the South African state who have been excluded from its promises. Migrants are thus represented as foreigners who, despite lacking rights and a legitimate stake, have invaded the state and appropriated what rightfully belongs to South Africans.
Populism without Leaders: Informal Sovereignty from Below
The interesting dimension here is that no such political reasoning necessarily arises from the leadership of populist figures. Rather, it is reproduced within political networks on the ground, from street committees and neighborhood patrols to organizations like Operation Dudula, which not only advocate for stricter immigration policies but also actively patrol urban areas, monitor shops and businesses, and enforce exclusive boundaries, thereby performing informal sovereignty in the absence of legitimate state authority (Misago, 2019).
Such actions are a response to a deeper malaise within the post-apartheid state. It is clear that, in many cases, state institutions have become delegitimized; citizens, feeling neglected by the state, resort to popular measures to enforce governance. Thus, xenophobic movements are not merely attacks against immigrants but expressions of citizens’ anger over the state’s incapacity to provide. Communities assert control over their territory and defend it against perceived external threats.
However, an exclusively domestic reading of the popular dynamics of discontent obscures the decolonial underpinnings of xenophobic violence in South Africa. The reality of xenophobic violence is inextricably linked to a coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007) that persists beyond the period of colonial rule and continues to value and categorize people according to histories of colonial experience. African immigrants are often despised simply because they are African and are treated by many South Africans in ways similar to how they themselves would have been treated by colonial rulers.
This means that, in a tragic sense, one formerly oppressed population has turned against another. This has much in common with what Frantz Fanon warned about decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth—that without genuine redistribution, liberation could transform former victims into oppressors themselves.
Survival populism arises precisely in this vacuum of fractured solidarity. As citizenship loses its material content due to ever-increasing economic insecurity, a range of alternative political communities based on exclusion are formed by ordinary citizens. Migrants then become convenient targets onto whom structural frustrations can be projected. Xenophobia, in this sense, is not the absence of politics; it is politics under conditions of abandonment. Yet, while the political logic of xenophobia may be recognizable, its moral implications cannot be condoned.
Migrants themselves often become victims of precisely the neoliberal inequalities from which poor South Africans suffer. Many have fled persecution, economic disaster, or armed conflict in neighboring countries, only to be subjected to violence and exclusion in South Africa. Ultimately, xenophobic mobilizations provide scapegoats that divert anger away from structural causes—corruption, inequality, unemployment, and policy failures—and toward vulnerable migrants and poor South Africans. However, ignoring these factors will result in underestimating the significance of xenophobia as a political practice and force.
Xenophobia can persist only as long as it provides a language through which the abandoned can voice their grievances, articulate a form of resistance, and renegotiate access in contexts where formal citizenship offers little tangible substance—in other words, as a distorted political response to systemic marginalization. The global significance of such a phenomenon cannot be overstated.
The Global Lessons of Survival Populism
Everywhere across the globe—from Europe to Latin America, across Africa and into Asia—increasing economic precariousness can foster exclusionary ideologies targeting migrants and minority groups. However, South Africa is remarkable because it is the historically oppressed Black majority that is involved, largely without elite populist rhetoric or direction. This challenges our conventional ways of understanding populism, nationalism, and citizenship. While populism is usually understood in elite- and election-driven terms, in South Africa it demonstrates how a populist discourse can emerge from the ground up, be highly localized, and center on survival.
A populist mode of address can emerge whenever abandoned people face the struggle for self-defense and access to resources under conditions of precarity. It is South Africa’s greatest post-apartheid tragedy that populations once excluded under the apartheid system now themselves construct an “outsider” in order to re-establish their own space through exclusion.
Xenophobic violence is a testament to a deeper crisis of belonging within the democratic framework and to the lack of transformation of apartheid’s economic landscape. This is a world in which citizenship and political freedom coexist with mass abandonment, a world where the challenge lies not only in containing migration and the violence that accompanies it, but also in reforming society so that citizenship offers material benefits, the capacity to exercise and enjoy the material aspects of citizenship is more equitably distributed, and an inclusive sense of belonging becomes the norm rather than exclusion. Until that happens, survival populism will remain one of the defining languages of the post-apartheid urban sphere.
References
Crush, J., & Ramachandran, S. (2014). “Xenophobic violence in South Africa: Denialism, minimalism, realism.” Migration Policy Series, 66, 1–35.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Misago, J. P. (2019). “Political mobilisation as the trigger of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa.” African Studies Review, 62(4), 111–135.
Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Neocosmos, M. (2010). From “foreign natives” to “native foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. CODESRIA.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). “Coloniality and modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178.
Survival Populism and the Crisis of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja challenges conventional explanations of xenophobic violence in South Africa by underscoring the concept of “survival populism.” Rather than viewing anti-immigrant mobilization simply as irrational hatred or economic frustration, Dr. Solaja argues that it represents a decentralized form of grassroots political reasoning emerging from structural abandonment, fractured citizenship, and deep socio-economic inequality. Drawing on the legacies of apartheid, decolonial theory, and contemporary populism studies, the commentary explores how marginalized communities construct exclusionary notions of belonging in their struggle for resources, dignity, and recognition. By examining xenophobia as a political response to insecurity rather than merely a social pathology, Dr. Solaja offers a compelling reinterpretation of populism from below and highlights the profound crisis of citizenship, solidarity, and democratic inclusion in post-apartheid South Africa.
By Dr. Oludele Solaja
Familiar narratives about unemployment, criminality, poverty, and social frustration have been used repeatedly to account for recurrent attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa. Politicians, commentators, and sometimes even academics depict xenophobic violence as either “irrational hatred” or “spontaneous public anger” over economic decay. Such accounts, although not completely false, are analytically weak. They do not reflect the underlying political logic of anti-immigrant violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Xenophobia in this case is not only hatred toward foreigners; increasingly, it has come to constitute a form of grassroots political reasoning rooted in conditions of structural abandonment, economic precariousness, and fractured citizenship.
What we have witnessed in South Africa might best be described as survival populism: the everyday, decentralized form of exclusionary politics in which economically marginalized populations establish moral and territorial boundaries in an effort to safeguard their access to scarce resources, space, urban living, and social legitimacy. Unlike conventional populism mobilized by leaders with charismatic personalities in an electoral context, survival populism evolves horizontally through conversations, neighborhood watch meetings, community patrols, forums, taxi associations and informal markets, in addition to social networking sites. It is populism without populists; an everyday political reasoning that communities use to construct a definition of "the people" in contrast to outsiders.
The above understanding challenges popular thinking on populism within contemporary political theory. Most studies of populism concentrate on political actors of elite origin such as the United States’ Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who have mobilized nationalist resentment via an anti-elite and anti-immigrant stance (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Within this context, populism is understood as an electoral strategy led by charismatic personalities. What takes place in South Africa is different in that xenophobic mobilization seldom appears through coherent ideologies and central leaders. Rather, exclusionary politics arise from what could be called everyday populism: everyday political reasoning that shapes a people against outsiders.
From Internal Foreigners to External Outsiders
This differentiation is critical because it exposes populism as not just a form of political expression occurring in parliaments, ballot boxes or rallies, but also an element that emerges from places of survival like informal settlements, townships economies, crowded taxi ranks and local markets where politics takes place through practical struggles.
The architecture of exclusion has much to do with the history of South Africa as not merely a racial but also a spatial and economic system defined by the containment of Black South Africans. Pass laws, migrant labor hostels, separate territorial structures, and fragmented spatial organization resulted in a society in which Black Africans were regarded as only temporary residents. For many decades, millions of Black South Africans were stripped of their permanent urban citizenship, yet they built South Africa’s cities through their labor.
Apartheid made many Black South Africans internal foreigners, with conditional residency in urban South Africa. Understanding the fact that Black South Africans were internal foreigners helps us realize how the modern form of xenophobia reproduces these spatial logics, with migrants presented as illegitimately possessing jobs, wealth and legitimate residency. The policing of migrants and their access to urban South Africa mirrors previous systems of apartheid governance.
One of the striking features of xenophobic attacks in South Africa is that they almost exclusively target foreign Africans from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria, rather than European migrants and expatriates. This racial and national specificity of South African xenophobia reveals a history of unequal relations, the persistence of colonial hierarchies, and ideas of belonging that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa (Mignolo, 2011). The most ironic and tragic fact is that it is precisely here—the place from which the international struggle against apartheid was championed and which was seen as a beacon of African liberation and pan-African unity—that a recurrent war against Africans takes place. The support that Africa provided in the struggle against apartheid has not been reciprocated with welcome and security for African immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Unfulfilled Promise of Democratic Citizenship
In 1994, the democratic dispensation promised inclusion, human dignity, and socio-economic justice. Yet political liberation has neither brought about structural transformation nor eliminated the socio-economic inequalities inherited from the apartheid state. South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, characterized by widespread poverty, high unemployment, and spatial segregation (Piketty, 2014). For many Black South Africans, formal citizenship and the promise of democratic rule remain shallow promises.
It is this disconnect between formal political inclusion and the lack of concrete socio-economic benefits for most South African citizens that helps explain how survival populism is born. While citizens exist on paper, they often fail to achieve basic human dignity. In a society where access to and the distribution of resources are fiercely contested, particularly where the state is absent in providing economic security, protection, and opportunities, people find themselves in conditions of chronic abandonment and exclusion. Xenophobia emerges as an ultimate response to exclusion from economic benefits in society, becoming a tool through which individuals establish an ethical claim to resources and place.
It is here that the township economy becomes an interesting phenomenon. While it provides alternative livelihoods, it also represents conditions of uncertainty, competition, and survival. Furthermore, it is a site where foreign migrants often display economic success, in part through the transnational networks and cooperative practices they share, as well as their lower overhead costs (Crush & Ramachandran, 2014). Their relative visibility within township economies allows them to appear as an important source of economic anxiety for some citizens in this society.
In many township spaces, foreigners and the shops they own are portrayed not merely as competitors but as those responsible for taking over opportunities. Such descriptions and narratives serve as a way of politicizing migrants as legitimate strangers who have illegitimately claimed a portion of the available resources, while local citizens have been abandoned and subjected to misery by their own government.
Here, a Laclauian understanding of populism becomes significant. According to Laclau, populism is essentially a political discourse structured around enmity between “the people” and their enemies (Laclau, 2005). In this context, “the people” are framed as deprived yet hard-working citizens of the South African state who have been excluded from its promises. Migrants are thus represented as foreigners who, despite lacking rights and a legitimate stake, have invaded the state and appropriated what rightfully belongs to South Africans.
Populism without Leaders: Informal Sovereignty from Below
The interesting dimension here is that no such political reasoning necessarily arises from the leadership of populist figures. Rather, it is reproduced within political networks on the ground, from street committees and neighborhood patrols to organizations like Operation Dudula, which not only advocate for stricter immigration policies but also actively patrol urban areas, monitor shops and businesses, and enforce exclusive boundaries, thereby performing informal sovereignty in the absence of legitimate state authority (Misago, 2019).
Such actions are a response to a deeper malaise within the post-apartheid state. It is clear that, in many cases, state institutions have become delegitimized; citizens, feeling neglected by the state, resort to popular measures to enforce governance. Thus, xenophobic movements are not merely attacks against immigrants but expressions of citizens’ anger over the state’s incapacity to provide. Communities assert control over their territory and defend it against perceived external threats.
However, an exclusively domestic reading of the popular dynamics of discontent obscures the decolonial underpinnings of xenophobic violence in South Africa. The reality of xenophobic violence is inextricably linked to a coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007) that persists beyond the period of colonial rule and continues to value and categorize people according to histories of colonial experience. African immigrants are often despised simply because they are African and are treated by many South Africans in ways similar to how they themselves would have been treated by colonial rulers.
This means that, in a tragic sense, one formerly oppressed population has turned against another. This has much in common with what Frantz Fanon warned about decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth—that without genuine redistribution, liberation could transform former victims into oppressors themselves.
Survival populism arises precisely in this vacuum of fractured solidarity. As citizenship loses its material content due to ever-increasing economic insecurity, a range of alternative political communities based on exclusion are formed by ordinary citizens. Migrants then become convenient targets onto whom structural frustrations can be projected. Xenophobia, in this sense, is not the absence of politics; it is politics under conditions of abandonment. Yet, while the political logic of xenophobia may be recognizable, its moral implications cannot be condoned.
Migrants themselves often become victims of precisely the neoliberal inequalities from which poor South Africans suffer. Many have fled persecution, economic disaster, or armed conflict in neighboring countries, only to be subjected to violence and exclusion in South Africa. Ultimately, xenophobic mobilizations provide scapegoats that divert anger away from structural causes—corruption, inequality, unemployment, and policy failures—and toward vulnerable migrants and poor South Africans. However, ignoring these factors will result in underestimating the significance of xenophobia as a political practice and force.
Xenophobia can persist only as long as it provides a language through which the abandoned can voice their grievances, articulate a form of resistance, and renegotiate access in contexts where formal citizenship offers little tangible substance—in other words, as a distorted political response to systemic marginalization. The global significance of such a phenomenon cannot be overstated.
The Global Lessons of Survival Populism
Everywhere across the globe—from Europe to Latin America, across Africa and into Asia—increasing economic precariousness can foster exclusionary ideologies targeting migrants and minority groups. However, South Africa is remarkable because it is the historically oppressed Black majority that is involved, largely without elite populist rhetoric or direction. This challenges our conventional ways of understanding populism, nationalism, and citizenship. While populism is usually understood in elite- and election-driven terms, in South Africa it demonstrates how a populist discourse can emerge from the ground up, be highly localized, and center on survival.
A populist mode of address can emerge whenever abandoned people face the struggle for self-defense and access to resources under conditions of precarity. It is South Africa’s greatest post-apartheid tragedy that populations once excluded under the apartheid system now themselves construct an “outsider” in order to re-establish their own space through exclusion.
Xenophobic violence is a testament to a deeper crisis of belonging within the democratic framework and to the lack of transformation of apartheid’s economic landscape. This is a world in which citizenship and political freedom coexist with mass abandonment, a world where the challenge lies not only in containing migration and the violence that accompanies it, but also in reforming society so that citizenship offers material benefits, the capacity to exercise and enjoy the material aspects of citizenship is more equitably distributed, and an inclusive sense of belonging becomes the norm rather than exclusion. Until that happens, survival populism will remain one of the defining languages of the post-apartheid urban sphere.
References
Crush, J., & Ramachandran, S. (2014). “Xenophobic violence in South Africa: Denialism, minimalism, realism.” Migration Policy Series, 66, 1–35.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.
Misago, J. P. (2019). “Political mobilisation as the trigger of xenophobic violence in post-apartheid South Africa.” African Studies Review, 62(4), 111–135.
Mudde, C. & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Neocosmos, M. (2010). From “foreign natives” to “native foreigners”: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. CODESRIA.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). “Coloniality and modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178.
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Survival Populism and the Crisis of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa
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