The protests of 30 June did not happen in the affluent suburbs of Sandton or Constantia, but in the townships, informal settlements and inner city margins. And it is this that reveals the unresolved contradictions of post-apartheid class formation.

"Abahambe!" (They must go!) This was the chant reverberating through the streets of Durban, Johannesburg and other South African cities on 30 June 2026 as anti-migrant protests escalated into one of the most coordinated xenophobic mobilisations in recent years.

Protesters, many carrying sticks and shields, marched through urban centres demanding the expulsion of undocumented migrants, invoking economic scarcity, unemployment and crime as justification for exclusion. The phrase, now central to SA's contemporary anti-immigrant politics, is simple yet profound. It condenses into two words an entire structure of displacement: a political economy of exclusion in which social crisis is projected onto migrant bodies.

The dominant public interpretation of xenophobia in SA remains trapped in moral and juridical discourse. It is frequently framed as a pathology of intolerance, a crisis of social cohesion, or the consequence of weak border management. These frameworks are not entirely incorrect, but they remain analytically incomplete. They tend to treat xenophobia as an irrational social aberration rather than as a structurally intelligible social phenomenon.

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This discussion advances a different proposition: xenophobia in SA is best understood as displaced class antagonism. More specifically, it is a horizontal struggle among the working poor, intensified by economic precarity...