JOHANNESBURG — The question lands with a weight that history alone cannot carry. If Africans are told to leave South Africa, where exactly are they supposed to go? The answer is not simple geography.
It is a tangle of colonial lines, migration patterns, and family ties that span decades. By June 30, groups like ‘March and March’ have given an ultimatum.
The violence is already here. People have been harassed, beaten, threatened. The demand is blunt: go back home.
The problem is that home, for many of these people, is South Africa. They were born here.
They work here. Their children go to school here. But the borders being invoked to push them out were never drawn by Africans.
They were imposed by colonial powers, carved up at conferences where no African sat at the table. Those lines served the administrative needs of London, Paris, Berlin. They split families.
They divided language groups. They created nations on paper that had no basis in how people actually lived.
Now those same artificial lines are being used as weapons. The irony is bitter. South Africa itself was forged in a struggle against a system that told people where they could live based on race.
Apartheid drew its own borders inside the country, confining millions to homelands they had never seen. The fight to end that system was a continental effort.
Other African nations hosted exiles. They provided soldiers. They imposed sanctions.
They bled for this country. To now tell their children to leave is to erase that history in a single ugly gesture. The practical reality is worse.
Many of those targeted have no other country to go to. They may hold a passport from a place they have never visited.
They may speak a language they do not know. The question “where should they go” is not rhetorical. It is a crisis of identity that the continent has refused to confront since independence.
The borders remain sacred in law but absurd in practice. A person can be born in a city, live there for forty years, and still be told they are a foreigner because their grandfather crossed a line that did not exist before 1885.
What is happening now is not new. Xenophobic attacks in South Africa have flared before. But the ultimatum from ‘March and March’ gives it a deadline.
The violence is not random. It is organized. It is directed.
And it is being justified by a narrow idea of nationality that ignores how nations were actually built on this continent. The young South Africans leading these chants grew up knowing only their country.
They were not taught the continental toil that went into freeing it. That ignorance is now deadly. The borders that define who belongs and who does not were never organic.
They were imposed. And now they are being invoked to justify exclusion against our own blood.
The crisis demands a collective response. Africans moved freely before the maps were redrawn. They traded.
They married. They built communities across vast spaces. That history must count for something.
If it does not, the question will keep coming back, sharper each time: if Africans must go, then where?
