This past week has been heavy. Marches in over a hundred towns. More than nine hundred arrests. Shops looted in some places. And thousands of people — mothers, fathers, children — packing what they can carry and leaving the country they had made their home, some because of a "deadline" shouted at them, some because of threats no human being should ever receive.

I want to say something about it. Not as a politician — I'm not one. As someone who lives and works in a township community, who runs a camp shop, and who believes the words we choose right now matter more than they have in a long time.

The frustrations are real. Let's not pretend otherwise.

People are not marching for fun. Unemployment is crushing. The borders have not been managed properly for years. Communities feel unheard, and when people feel unheard for long enough, they follow whoever finally says "I hear you." Even the President acknowledged that these concerns are real and deserve answers. That part is true, and dismissing it as ignorance wins nobody over.

Briefly Ngizwe Mchunu's anti-immigration campaign heads to Johannesburg Ngizwe Mchunu expands his anti-immigration campaign to Johannesburg after a tense Durban CBD march, sparking debate and clashes with foreign-owned businesses.
EWN Anti-illegal immigration activist ‘Phakel Nkosikhona Ndabandaba briefed the media in Durban on Wednesday, a day after the unofficial deadline he had set for undocumented migrants to leave South Africa expired.

But a frustration aimed at the wrong target fixes nothing

The man selling amagwinya on the corner did not break our border. The woman plaiting hair did not close a single factory. A failed system did that — and a failed system is fixed with documents, courts, budgets and ballots, not with a crowd outside somebody's shop. When the law needs enforcing, that is the work of the state, done lawfully. The moment a deadline is enforced by fear instead of by law, we have not fixed the system. We have only added one more broken thing to it.

Remember who opened their doors for us

There is something our grandparents would want us to remember this winter. When South Africans were the ones fleeing — during the darkest years of apartheid — it was Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe that took us in. Our exiles were schooled in their classrooms, hidden in their villages, buried in their soil. Some of those countries were bombed for the crime of sheltering us, and they sheltered us anyway.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other people. That is not a slogan for good times only. It is exactly for times like this one, when it costs something to live by it.

Violence eats the township first

We have been here before, in 2008, and we know how it ends. A burned shop does not become a South African-owned shop — it becomes a burned shop. The stock is gone, the jobs are gone, the street is emptier and more dangerous than before, and the money that used to circulate on that corner circulates nowhere. Fear does not shop. Fear does not lend. Fear does not build. Every township business — mine included — depends on the one thing violence destroys fastest: trust between neighbours.

If we want more South African-owned shops, the answer is to build them

Here is where I put my money where my mouth is. You do not build a shop by burning another man's. You build it by opening your own. That is the entire reason SparzaFi exists: so that a South African with no capital, no credit history and no shop front can open a shop, get fair credit, save safely and deliver through people in their own community. Competition is not chasing someone away from the table. Competition is building a longer table and taking your rightful seat at it.

You don't build a shop by burning another man's — you build it by opening your own

If even a fraction of the energy spent marching went into opening shops, registering businesses, and demanding working systems from the people we elected, the townships would not need anyone to leave in order for us to rise.

A word for our own streets

So in our camps and our communities, let's hold the line on a few simple things:

  • Greet your neighbour. Sawubona — I see you. It costs nothing and it is the opposite of what fear wants.
  • Don't carry rumours. A forwarded voice note has burned more shops than any match. Check before you share.
  • Report crime to the police — any crime, by anyone — not to a crowd. That is what "we are a country of laws" means in practice.
  • Protect the vulnerable. If a family near you is afraid this week, a knock on the door and a kind word is ubuntu doing its work.
  • Build something. The most powerful answer to "they own everything" has always been "watch what we build."

The people shouting the loudest right now will move on to something else. The community that must live together on the same streets afterwards — that's us. Let's make sure that when this season passes, our words were the kind we're proud to have said, and our hands were found building.

Peace to every home reading this. Ukuthula.