Whilst sitting at my Fathers Day luncheon at he Suki Restaurant in Walmer on Sunday I got lost in thought for a while.
This after observing a large table of older Chinese couples just across the way from us. They were having a great time eating food and conversing.
Apparently it is true – If you want authentic Chinese food then go to a restaurant patronised by people from China.
BUT, I am not writing to crit the food (excellent and lots of by the way) but to flesh out my random thoughts as I watched this group of happy people sharing their food.
The main thought was; “I wonder if, in around 50 years time, when my children patronise a Somalian restaurant will they also see people from Somalia enjoying authentic Somalian food?”
With our dubious background (mind washing by an Apartheid Government) we have to remember that while the violent, township-based xenophobic attacks that caught global attention primarily escalated after 1994 (such as the Alexandra campaigns in 1994/1995, the major crisis in 2008 and more recently March and March), the groundwork was laid by the Apartheid state.
For decades, state propaganda and laws conditioned society to view other African nationals not as neighbours or refugees, but as “undesirable aliens” who were legally subject to immediate, forceful expulsion.
Before the 1960s, South African mines and farms relied heavily on hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from neighbouring countries (such as Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe). However, as the Apartheid state tightened its grip, it began viewing these foreign black workers as an economic and security threat.
Following the recommendations of the 1962 Froneman Committee, the Apartheid government declared that foreign black nationals were “aliens” who were displacing local workers and leaking capital out of the country.
In 1963, the state launched a massive, aggressive campaign to deport “unauthorized” foreign Africans. Tens of thousands of workers who had lived in South African townships for years—often marrying local women and raising families—were rounded up, stripped of their residential rights, and forced across the borders.
The state openly used the rhetoric that these foreigners were “taking jobs” from locals and causing urban decay, masking a deeper racist anxiety about the growing population of Black people in urban “white” areas.
Fast forward to today and our citizens are using the same rhetoric against a largely ANC led Government.
The Aliens Control Act of 1991 consolidated decades of racist, exclusionary immigration laws into a single, highly restrictive framework. It granted state bureaucrats and police sweeping powers to arrest, detain, and deport any foreigner without a warrant or judicial oversight.
Human rights organizations have noted that this specific Apartheid law essentially codified a state culture of xenophobia. It treated black immigrants not as human beings seeking opportunity, but as administrative pests.
Ironically, The Aliens Control Act of 1991 remained on the books and continued to heavily influence South African immigration policy well into the democratic transition until it was finally repealed in 2002.
So, in contrast, the State today is doing the same as the Apartheid Government by weaponizing immigration laws to systematically expel foreign Africans to protect black (not white) labour, preserve the BEE policies and please citizens ahead of the 2026 LGE.
