The African Enemy is Not African: Xenophobia, colonial psychology and betrayal of Pan-Africanism

As reports of renewed xenophobic attacks in South Africa circulate across the continent, many Africans find themselves asking the same painful question: how did we get here? How did a continent that fought together against colonialism and apartheid arrive at a point where fellow Africans are blamed for unemployment, poverty, crime and inequality? How did brothers and sisters become competitors? How did solidarity give way to suspicion?

The easy answer is economics. South Africa continues to grapple with staggering levels of unemployment, inequality and social frustration. But economics alone cannot explain why the anger of the poor is so often directed at other poor people. It cannot explain why a Zimbabwean trader, a Nigerian entrepreneur, a Somali shopkeeper or a Congolese migrant becomes the face of people's suffering while political and economic systems escape scrutiny.

To understand what is happening, we must look beyond the headlines and confront a deeper truth: xenophobia in Africa is not merely a political or economic problem. It is the unfinished business of colonialism.

The great Martinican psychiatrist, revolutionary and Pan-African thinker Frantz Fanon understood this reality decades ago. In The Wretched of the Earth, he argued that colonialism was not simply a system of territorial occupation. It was a system designed to reshape the consciousness of the colonised. Colonialism did not merely take land; it sought to take identity, memory, solidarity and imagination.

As Fanon wrote: "Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it."

The colonial project thrived on division. Europeans carved arbitrary borders across Africa, separated communities, elevated some groups over others, and institutionalised ethnic and national hierarchies that continue to haunt us today. The objective was never simply to govern Africa. It was to ensure that Africans would struggle to govern themselves collectively long after the colonial administrators had departed. The tragedy is that, in many ways, the project succeeded.

Today, decades after formal independence, many Africans continue to view one another through colonial categories rather than through a shared African identity. We are taught to see a Ghanaian, Nigerian, Libyan, South African, Zimbabwean or Congolese before we see a fellow African. We defend borders that were imposed upon us while neglecting the solidarity that sustained our liberation struggles.

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in South Africa. The struggle against apartheid was never solely a South African struggle. It was an African struggle. Across the continent, countries sacrificed resources, diplomatic capital and political goodwill to support liberation movements.

Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Ghana and many others provided refuge, training grounds, funding and political support to those resisting apartheid and colonial domination. Ordinary Africans stood in solidarity with South Africans because they understood that freedom anywhere in Africa was connected to freedom everywhere in Africa.

The defeat of apartheid remains one of the greatest victories in African history precisely because it demonstrated the power of collective action.

Yet today, many of the descendants of those who benefited from African solidarity find themselves turning against fellow Africans seeking safety, opportunity and dignity. This should concern all of us, not because South Africa is uniquely flawed, but because it reflects a broader continental crisis.

The uncomfortable truth is that xenophobia flourishes where hope has been abandoned. When governments fail to address inequality, unemployment and exclusion, migrants become convenient scapegoats. People are encouraged to blame those who are equally vulnerable rather than the structures that produce vulnerability.

This is not a uniquely South African phenomenon. It is a colonial logic. Colonial systems survived by ensuring that the oppressed fought one another instead of confronting the systems that oppressed them.

Today's xenophobia reproduces that same logic. It directs legitimate frustration away from failed institutions and towards fellow Africans who are often struggling under the same conditions. This pattern of division is not limited to migration or nationality.

It is also reflected in how, at moments of deep socio-economic crisis, public attention is repeatedly redirected toward socially polarising and restrictive legislative agendas that narrow civic space and weaken fundamental freedoms.

Such anti-rights agendas often emerge alongside worsening unemployment, inequality, and institutional strain, yet they dominate national discourse in ways that obscure urgent questions of economic justice and governance failure. Whether framed in moral, cultural, or security terms, the political effect is often the same: societies are turned inward, public debate becomes fragmented, and collective energy is diverted away from structural transformation.

In this sense, these dynamics can be understood as part of a broader pattern of fragmentation politics, where division becomes a governing strategy and solidarity is replaced by distraction.

This is why Pan-Africanism remains as relevant today as it was in the twentieth century. Few leaders understood this better than Kwame Nkrumah. Upon Ghana's independence in 1957, he famously declared that "the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent."

Nkrumah understood that political freedom could not survive in isolation. He envisioned an Africa united not merely by geography but by a shared commitment to collective prosperity, self-determination and dignity. Ghana became a centre of anti-colonial thought and action, welcoming freedom fighters, supporting liberation movements and championing continental unity.

That legacy continues to resonate today. Ghana has remained a consistent voice in global conversations on historical justice, including recent efforts to advance discussions on reparatory justice for Africa and people of African descent with the recent adoption of the resolution recognizing the Transatlantic Slave Trade as "the gravest crime against humanity" by the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

The growing international momentum around reparations is not simply a demand for compensation. It is a demand for truth, accountability and recognition of the enduring harms of slavery, colonialism and racial exploitation. Reparations remind us of something profound: Africa's wounds were inflicted collectively. They cannot be healed through division.

Yet reparatory justice will remain an incomplete project if we continue to reproduce colonial divisions among ourselves.

Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, warned Africans against dependence on external powers and imported solutions. His famous observation that "he who feeds you, controls you" was not only about economics. It was about sovereignty. It was about the danger of surrendering our capacity to define our own future.

Today, Africa's challenge is not only economic dependency. It is intellectual dependency. Too often, we continue to interpret ourselves through frameworks inherited from those who colonised us. We accept borders as sacred while treating solidarity as optional. We embrace nationalism while neglecting Pan-Africanism.

We compete over scarcity rather than organising for abundance. As a Pan-Africanist and a feminist, I am particularly concerned by what xenophobia does to those already pushed to the margins. Women, children, refugees, migrants, informal traders and survivors of violence are often among the first to bear the consequences of exclusionary politics. Xenophobia deepens existing inequalities and creates new forms of vulnerability for those who already navigate multiple layers of discrimination.

A feminist Pan-Africanism demands something different. It asks us to recognise our interconnectedness. It insists that human dignity must never be conditional upon nationality. It challenges us to build societies rooted in care, justice and solidarity rather than fear and exclusion.

At its core, Pan-Africanism is not simply a political ideology. It is an ethic. It is a belief that our liberation is bound together.

Fanon understood that colonialism could outlive colonial rule. He understood that the lowering of a colonial flag did not automatically produce liberation. Political independence, without a transformation of consciousness, could leave intact the very structures, hierarchies and divisions that colonialism created.

In The Wretched of the Earth, he warned that post-colonial societies risk reproducing systems of domination rather than dismantling them. His message was clear: the oppressed can inherit the institutions, attitudes and prejudices of their oppressors if they do not consciously reject them.

That warning remains urgent today. When Africans turn against fellow Africans, we are not exercising sovereignty. We are performing a script written for us long ago. When we defend colonial borders more fiercely than we defend African solidarity, we become custodians of the very logic that sought to divide us. When we blame migrants for our suffering while ignoring the political and economic systems that perpetuate inequality, we reproduce the architecture of our own oppression.

The Zimbabwean trader is not the enemy.

The Nigerian entrepreneur is not the enemy.

The Congolese migrant is not the enemy.

The Ghanaian worker is not the enemy.

The Somali shopkeeper is not the enemy.

The African enemy is not African.

Our greatest threat is the persistence of systems that continue to divide, exploit and impoverish us while convincing us that our neighbours are to blame.

As Fanon wrote: "The colonial world is a world divided into compartments."

The challenge before us is whether we will continue to live within those compartments long after colonialism's formal end, or whether we will finally tear down the walls that were built to separate us.

The dream of African sovereignty, African identity and African unity remains unfinished. The question is whether we have the courage to complete it.