Opinion|Published
Prof Armand Bam
South Africa has never been one thing. Before we were provinces, we were kingdoms, communities, languages, migrations, memories and wounds. Before we spoke of “foreign nationals”, people moved, traded, married, worked, worshipped and built lives across a continent whose borders were drawn long after its people had already found one another.
That is the first thing xenophobia and supremacist thinking asks us to forget. It asks us to imagine South Africa as pure, fixed and easily protected from the outside. But there has never been such a South Africa. Not in our food. Not in our music. Not in our languages. Not in our faiths. Not in our struggle. Not even in our families. We are not a nation made weaker by difference. We are a nation made possible by it.
Every Mandela Day, we remind ourselves of this. We quote Nelson Mandela. We speak of ubuntu. We spend 67 minutes serving others and doing good. We celebrate the idea that our democracy was born not simply from political victory, but from the belief that a country broken by division could still choose shared humanity.
The deeper question
But as you celebrate this Mandela Day, there is a deeper questioning to be considered. Who do we include when we say “us”? We have become remarkably skilled at recognising injustice when it is directed at us. We remember apartheid. We remember forced removals. We remember the humiliation of pass laws. We remember being treated as strangers in our own country.
These memories are central to our national identity. They should be. But memory becomes dangerous when it only teaches us how to recognise our own pain, and not the pain of others. We are a nation born from resistance to exclusion, yet we increasingly normalise exclusion ourselves. We speak passionately about human rights until those rights belong to someone with a Zimbabwean, Malawian, Congolese, Somali, Ethiopian, Nigerian or Mozambican passport. When South Africans seek opportunities in London, Perth, Toronto, Dubai, Auckland, or parts of the United States, we call it ambition. We call it survival. We call it looking for a better life. When Africans cross our borders seeking the same thing, too many call it invasion. There is something deeply dishonest about that.
We understand movement perfectly well when it is our children leaving. We understand fear when it is our families seeking safety. We understand dignity when we want it recognised in another country. Our imagination works beautifully when the migrant is one of our own. It simply seems to fail at the border. But people have always moved. Long before passports, permits and immigration queues, movement shaped this region. Labour migration sustained the mining economy. Regional mobility built cities, industries and communities. During apartheid, South Africans found refuge across Africa because neighbouring countries chose solidarity over suspicion. They opened their doors when our country had closed its humanity. That history should not merely be remembered on Mandela Day. It should disturb us.
Because the person arriving here today in search of work, safety or possibility is not so different from the South African who leaves tomorrow in search of the same thing.
None of this means that South Africa should abandon immigration laws. No serious argument requires that. Citizens have every right to expect secure borders, fair processes, proper documentation, effective public services and an accountable state. But xenophobia is not immigration policy. It is political failure looking for a human face to blame.
The blame game
It tells the unemployed South African that the migrant is the reason there is no work. It tells the struggling parent that the foreign shopkeeper is the reason food is expensive. It tells the angry community that if only “they” were gone, everything would somehow become easier.
That is the lie. The migrant did not collapse the municipality. The migrant did not steal the school infrastructure budget. The migrant did not design an economy that leaves millions outside the promise of work. The migrant did not make corruption a national sport. The migrant is often standing in the same queue as the citizen, waiting for a state that has failed them both. That is why xenophobia is so useful to those who benefit from our anger being misdirected. It gives the poor someone poorer to fight. It gives the excluded someone more excluded to reject. It turns neighbours into enemies while the real architects of despair remain untouched.
And still, this country keeps showing us another possibility. Look closely and you will see it everywhere. In the taxi rank where languages mix before sunrise. In the spaza shop where credit is given before payday. In the church where a Congolese song meets a Xhosa hymn. In the classroom where children with different surnames share the same lunchbox. In the hospital queue where suffering does not first ask for a passport. In the workplace where the accent may differ, but the exhaustion sounds the same.
This is South Africa too. Not the fantasy of purity. The reality of entanglement. We are Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Tswana, Indian, Coloured, English, Sotho, Tsonga, Ndebele and Pedi. We are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, atheist and searching. We are rural and urban, rich and poor, disabled and able-bodied, citizen and newcomer.
We are not one because we are the same. We are one because, again and again, we have had to decide that difference will not be the end of us. That is the South Africa worth defending.
A South Africa that is not frightened by the sound of another language in the queue. A South Africa that does not confuse cruelty with patriotism. A South Africa that can demand capable governance without surrendering its soul. A South Africa that knows borders may define territory, but they should never define the limits of our humanity.
More than a ritual
Mandela Day should not become a ritual where we admire values in the morning and abandon them by evening.
It should ask whether we mean what we say. Do we believe in dignity only when it is safe? Do we believe in ubuntu only when it is familiar? Do we believe in belonging only when it is convenient?
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: the world is watching how we treat those who come to us. And some South Africans are also asking that same world to recognise their fears, protect their dignity and open its doors to them.
If that is what we hope strangers will do for us abroad, then surely it is not unreasonable to ask what kind of strangers we choose to become at home.
South Africa is not great despite its diversity. South Africa is great because of it. And if Mandela Day is to mean anything beyond 67 minutes of public goodness, it must remind us that ubuntu cannot stop at the border.
It must travel with us into the queue, the clinic, the workplace, the classroom, the voting booth and the neighbourhood. Because the true measure of our democracy is not how warmly we remember Mandela. It is how honestly we recognise one another.
*Bam is the Head of Social Impact and PGDip NPO Leadership Development at Stellenbosch Business School
