Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.
Image: File
Pan-Africanism is the new Ubuntu. We showed Ubuntu to the wrong people and they robbed us of our land at gunpoint. And now, Pan-Africanism is attempting to breathe inside borders designed to suffocate African unity.
South Africa once hid freedom fighters from the apartheid regime in safe houses across the continent. Today, African embassies are warning their citizens to stay indoors in South Africa, avoid crowds, carry documentation at all times and remain vigilant in the eye of a rising xenophobic storm. Countries that once carried South Africa through exile, armed struggle and international solidarity now issue safety advisories to their nationals living in the very democracy they helped defend.
The uncomfortable truth is that Pan-Africanism struggles to survive inside collapsing municipalities, mass unemployment, inequality and borders designed when Africans had no power to define themselves. We are trying to visualise one Africa while guarding colonial fences with modern anger.
South Africans are not imagining the pressures around undocumented immigration, strained public services or competition inside an already brutal economy. Illegal immigration remains one of the greatest obstacles to African unity because no society can sustain continental solidarity where borders appear unmanaged and citizens feel abandoned by the state.
When systems fail to distinguish between documented professionals, refugees, scarce-skilled workers and undocumented entrants, frustration hardens into suspicion against all foreign Africans. Yet somewhere between legitimate frustration and violent scapegoating, we are also witnessing a dangerous forgetting.
The Malawian selling fruit on the corner, the Somali shopkeeper or the Ethiopian entrepreneur did not design the economic system that continues to exclude millions of South Africans. They did not create load shedding, corruption, unemployment or collapsing local governance. But they have become the nearest and easiest targets of a deeper national anger.
At the same time, Africa itself is bleeding. Wars in Sudan, instability in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Burkina Faso and elsewhere continue to push thousands across the continent in search of survival.
South Africa, despite its own crises, still carries the image of opportunity. That reality raises difficult questions many avoid in public conversation. What does “first country of safety” mean in practice? How should states balance compassion, legality, sovereignty and economic pressure? These are legitimate debates for any nation. But they cannot be answered through mobs, looting, beatings and the language of contamination increasingly directed at fellow Africans.
Perhaps Pan-Africanism itself is being misunderstood. African unity does not begin with the erasure of borders overnight. It begins with building systems capable of managing African movement honestly, lawfully and collectively.
Instead of investing millions in expanding immigration infrastructure in distant parts of the world, African states could invest more seriously in documenting Africans within Africa itself: shared population databases, coordinated visa systems, stronger border management and continental labour tracking that protects both host countries and migrants.
That is not the abandonment of Pan-Africanism. It may be the practical beginning of it. Because the challenge is not whether Africans can unite. The challenge is whether African states can build lawful, functional and trusted systems strong enough for unity to survive without collapsing into fear.