Information about Africa continues to dominate this month with disturbing photographs of South Africa circulating all over the world on social media. Even the Africa Progress Summit held in Nairobi couldn’t change this case. African immigrants had been attacked, their retailers looted, and folks had been chased, assaulted, and stigmatized merely for coming from different African nations and simply attempting to make a residing in South Africa. By the way, lots of these affected claimed that that they had the correct to reside on this nation.
It is painful. It is embarrassing. And, frankly, it may flip many people into incurable pessimists about a very powerful problem earlier than us this century: African financial integration.
But when we’re sincere with ourselves, this isn’t only a South African drawback. A number of African nations, together with Ghana, at present have legal guidelines in place that prohibit different Africans (typically foreigners) from collaborating in retail markets to some extent.
Previously, Ghana deported Nigerians beneath the Alien Compliance Order in 1969. Nigeria retaliated years later with the notorious “Ghana eviction” within the early Nineteen Eighties. Throughout the continent, Africans have turned towards fellow Africans in numerous moments of financial stress.
This tells us one thing disagreeable. Xenophobia in Africa isn’t just an financial or immigration subject. Certain, it is existential psychological baggage. A colonial hangover. A lingering “divide and conquer” mentality that we’ve got inherited however have but to search out the braveness to totally confront. It’s what has been described as “Afrophobia.”
Afrophobia is the concern, hostility, prejudice, discrimination, or hatred that Africans have in the direction of their fellow Africans from different African nations. Not like classical xenophobia, which broadly targets foreigners, Afrophobia represents a contradiction that’s distinctive to Africa. Black Africans deal with different Black Africans as outsiders, threats, or inferior folks inside Africa itself.
Afrophobia is a disaster in African consciousness and identification. That is notably tragic as a result of Africa’s liberation struggles had been fought and gained on the premise of pan-African unity. The continent that preached unity and a shared future 60 years in the past is now fastidiously implementing its personal treaties and protocols for integration, nevertheless it should achieve this beneath the blinding cloud of Afrophobia. This can be a betrayal of Pan-African beliefs and a stark reminder that we’re nonetheless victims of outdated colonial constructions that may unwittingly undermine our personal future.
Colonial borders didn’t merely divide territory. They break up their consciousness. They conditioned Africans to see one another not as companions in a shared civilization, however as rivals for survival inside synthetic nation-states.
Nevertheless, historical past tells us that African civilization itself was constructed via motion. Let’s use the SADC zone for example. Lengthy earlier than colonial borders existed, Africans moved freely via what’s now southern Africa. Communities traded, married, and migrated in the hunt for grazing, commerce, and alternative. Id was fashioned not by passports and flags, however by tradition and kinship.
Satirically, South Africa itself turned what it’s at present partially as a result of it attracted immigrants and wealth seekers. The discoveries of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 turned South Africa into an financial magnet. Europeans flocked there in the hunt for prosperity. The colonial mining system then recruited staff from throughout Southern Africa, primarily Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. Immigrant staff constructed the mines, railroads, and far of the economic system itself.
Below apartheid, the labor system turned extra brutal and exploitative. Black South Africans suffered beneath site visitors legal guidelines and racial segregation, whereas African immigrants had been handled as disposable staff. Nevertheless, as a result of economies are finally constructed on human motion, labor, and alternate, regional migration continued even throughout these darkish days.
My very own father, the late surgeon Dr. JF Otchele Darko, immigrated to South Africa within the Nineteen Eighties to heal folks and train medical college students. At the moment, different African nations stood agency towards South Africa. African nations like Ghana accepted asylum seekers. Liberation fighters had been skilled throughout the continent. Zambia, Tanzania, and plenty of different nations absorbed the political and financial prices of supporting the anti-apartheid wrestle. African nations funded solidarity actions, withstood destabilizing assaults, and made financial sacrifices for South Africa’s freedom.
Its historical past is essential. This is the reason the xenophobia of Africans in democratic South Africa seems like a historic betrayal to many Africans.
To be honest, the discontent inside South Africa is actual. Unemployment charges are painfully excessive. Inequality stays among the many worst on this planet. Crime, weak police forces and insufficient service supply have left many communities pissed off and susceptible.
However Nigerian merchants, Ghanaian medical doctors, Zimbabwean academics, Somali shopkeepers, Ethiopian entrepreneurs, Congolese college students, and Mozambican staff didn’t create these structural deficiencies. Black immigrants are too usually the simplest scapegoat for deeper financial and governance issues.
Satirically, South Africa itself was one of many biggest architects of African integration, and its comparatively superior industrial capabilities imply that at present it’s economically one of many biggest beneficiaries of the one, built-in African market.
The African Union itself operated from Durban in 2002 when the Group of African Unity turned the AU. Below President Thabo Mbeki, South Africa turned a serious engine of African Renaissance and institutional Pan-Africanism.
Specifically, South Africa helped form NEPAD, the African Peer Evaluation Mechanism (APRM), the Pan-African Parliament within the Midrands, Agenda 2063 (Blueprint for Africa’s Future), and the implementation push for AfCFTA.
Below Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the AU deepened its long-term integration agenda via Agenda 2063, a blueprint without spending a dime motion, infrastructure integration and a continental single market. Now, as Chair of the African Prosperity Community, she continues to advertise the one market as a safer type of attaining financial transformation and shared prosperity, safety and integrity for Africa, Africans and folks of African descent all over the world.
Even at present, South Africa’s personal financial future depends closely on African integration. Certainly, one of many central arguments for deeper African integration is that South African companies have already demonstrated that African markets are commercially viable on a big scale. Its growth throughout the continent has successfully made South Africa one among Africa’s most economically interconnected nations.
Banks, telecommunications firms, retailers, mining firms and industrial firms are among the many most pan-Africanized companies on the continent. Simply as Africa wants South Africa, South Africa wants open African markets. Firms comparable to MTN Group, Shoprite Holdings, Customary Financial institution Group, Absa Group, MultiChoice Group, Naspers, Vodacom, Bidvest Group, Choose n Pay, Sasol and Previous Mutual are well-known throughout Africa, incomes billions of {dollars} for the advantage of South Africans and paying billions of rands in taxes in South Africa.
That is why it is changing into more and more troublesome to disregard the contradictions. South Africa can’t be each the engineer and the winner of African integration on the continental degree whereas it’s hesitant about African integration on the nationwide degree.
The legacy of Nelson Mandela, the institutional imaginative and prescient of Thabo Mbeki and the continental structure promoted by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma all level in a single route: Africa should certainly combine.
That’s the reason we on the African Prosperity Community have made it our primary purpose to champion the implementation of Africa’s Single Market Agenda. For Africa to develop, it should leverage its 1.5 billion and rising inhabitants, wealthy pure assets, range, widespread challenges and alternatives to construct an incredible single market.
That is additionally right here Ubuntu It turns into essential. Ubuntu is one among Africa’s biggest philosophical presents to humanity. In its easiest type, Ubuntu means “I’m as a result of we’re.” However at its deepest degree, Ubuntu is an ethical framework about human interconnectedness. It teaches that our humanity is tied to the humanity of others.
Actually, via the African Prosperity Community and the Make Africa Borderless Now! marketing campaign, Ubuntu is the inspiration for fascinated by Africa’s future. We consider that Africa’s prosperity comes from unity, not division. Not out of concern of one another, however out of scale, agility, collaboration, and integration.
Xenophobia is due to this fact not simply an assault on African immigrants in Africa. It’s an assault on Ubuntu itself, the non secular basis for Africa’s future achievement and collective success.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa declared in his 2026 State of the Union tackle that “South Africa belongs to all who reside in it”, he echoed the spirit of Ubuntu itself. However Ubuntu is greater than only a story. Frankly, South Africa’s leaders are clearly powerless to sort out head-on a difficulty that goes to the very coronary heart of Africa’s future.
Ubuntu can not survive as mere rhetoric. It should be protected via coverage, policing, political management, and public training. Xenophobic assaults towards Africans should be handled as hate crimes themselves.
Communities should be extra deliberately engaged. Political rhetoric that normalizes suspicions about “foreigners of African descent” should cease. The immigration system must develop into smarter and extra environment friendly, and people who violate the legal guidelines of the land should be handled accordingly.
And, importantly, Africans themselves should cease conflating transnational integration with illegality. Simply because Africa has no borders doesn’t suggest folks can do no matter they need. Though West Africa has allowed the free motion of individuals, items and providers because the adoption of the ECOWAS Conference on Free Motion in 1979, the area has not skilled the extraordinary inflow of, for instance, Ghanaians into Nigeria and vice versa, as was the case within the Sixties and Seventies.
Africa with out borders doesn’t imply uncontrollable chaos. Meaning smarter borders, with biometric ID methods, shared intelligence, mutual recognition of expertise, interoperable digital funds, honest labor requirements, and simpler authorized processes for commerce, jobs, and entrepreneurship.
The long run is already clear. From the 1991 Abuja Treaty to the 2018 AfCFTA Settlement and the 2024 AfCFTA Digital Commerce Protocol, Africa has already dedicated to deeper integration. So the difficulty now’s implementation. Due to this fact, the best solution to voice our protest towards the tradition of Afrophobia is to speed up the tempo of better financial integration.
Maybe nowhere has this dialog been extra pressing than it’s now. As Africa approaches AU Day 2026, we should ask ourselves troublesome questions. Will Africa succumb to concern or embrace fraternity? Will we proceed to deal with the identical Africans as outsiders inside Africa?
Or will we lastly construct the borderless continent our founders envisioned? Kwame Nkrumah warned greater than 60 years in the past: “My fellow Africans, allow us to now add to our resolve the concrete activity of making the USA of Africa, in order that we are able to take management of our personal future.”
That unfinished dialog now returns with new urgency.
Africa Prosperity Community shall be internet hosting a particular webinar on AU Day. Be part of APN and Make Africa Borderless at present! Be part of the marketing campaign and make your voice heard with our particular AU Day webinar.
“Afrophobia or an Africa with out borders? Selling African unity via financial integration”
Monday, Could 25, 2026
14:00 GMT
To register: https://africaprosperitynetwork.com/2nd-borderless-webinar/
With xenophobia on the rise in lots of elements of the continent, this dialog has by no means been extra needed. A affluent South Africa wants a affluent Africa. And for Africa to prosper, Africans want to recollect one factor above all else. That we already belonged to one another earlier than colonial borders divided us, and that we should come collectively earlier than we might be really free.
The writer is the founder and government chair of the Africa Prosperity Community. He’s additionally a senior accomplice at Africa Authorized Associates (ALPi Ghana), a part of the African Authorized Follow Worldwide Group. He might be reached at gabby@africaprosperity.community.
