As xenophobic tensions resurface in South Africa, a bold open letter by Mohammed Hersi is reigniting debate across the continent.
I will start with my fellow Africans, because you deserve honesty more than sympathy.
Every year and I mean every single year you are attacked in South Africa. Shops looted many also get killed. Every year, after the international outrage dies down and the news cycle moves on, you go back. Or more of you arrive. I need to understand why.
The excuses the locals give have shifted so many times they have lost count. First it was jobs you were stealing their jobs. Except most of you are not employed by anyone . You are self-employed, running small businesses, selling in markets, fixing things, building things. You created your own work in a country that did not want you.
Then it was crime. You were criminals, they said. As if you could take millions of people from a dozen different countries and reduce them all to one accusation. That argument collapsed under its own stupidity.
So they went further. They started raiding hospitals. Sick people genuinely ill, some in the middle of treatment were pulled out of wards and told to leave. Mothers sitting in waiting rooms with sick children were thrown out before seeing a doctor. Ordinary men and women with no authority whatsoever walked into public health facilities and appointed themselves immigration officers in a hospital think about that for a moment.
Let me speak plainly to a few of you specifically.
🤔Ethiopia, I genuinely do not understand. Your economy has been growing faster than almost anywhere on the continent. There is construction, investment, aviation +++ yet the number of young Ethiopians crossing into Kenya at Moyale, heading south toward South Africa, keeps rising. Many can barely speak English. They are crossing borders, sleeping God-knows-where, risking everything to reach a country that has made it abundantly clear it does not want them. Surely what is waiting for you in a South African township that is not available at home? Stay. Build something. Ethiopia’s problems will not be solved from a shack in Johannesburg.
🤔Nigeria — I have a lot of love for Nigeria but I will not sugarcoat this. You have oil you have gas. You have some of the sharpest, most driven, most educated people on this continent. You also have a habit of running from a burning house instead of picking up a bucket of water. Look at what Dangote did. He decided to build a refinery — one of the largest on the continent on Nigerian soil. He was fought every step of the way. Undermined, sabotaged by fellow Nigerians. People whose country would directly benefit from it. Today that refinery is running, and it is not just helping Nigeria it is reshaping energy supply for the whole region moreso with ongoing Middle East war. . That is what it looks like when someone refuses to leave and insists on fixing things from the inside. Nigeria needs more of that energy at home, not less of it.
🤔To everyone I have mentioned. I am not dismissing the hardships that push people to move. I know things are difficult. We have difficultties in Kenya too. We never get tired fighting for better governance.
None of the countries I have named is so broken that its citizens face death if they return. Economic pain, yes frustration, absolutely but those are problems that need you home, not away.
Now I turn to black South Africans. And I will not be gentle, because this moment does not call for gentleness.. What you are doing is barbaric, not misguided not complicated. Barbaric.
🎯You recently attacked a young Tanzanian in the street. It was not just men, women were part of that mob too, as though collective violence had become some kind of community activity. I want you to sit with that image of yourself for a moment. Is that who you are? Is that who you want to be? Do you know who Julius Nyerere was? I am asking seriously, because your actions suggest you either do not know or simply do not care. Mwalimu Nyerere was Tanzania’s founding president.
🎯When the ANC needed somewhere to operate from during apartheid when your liberation movement had nowhere safe to go Tanzania opened its doors. Thousands of ANC fighters were hosted, sheltered, armed and trained on Tanzanian soil. They were not treated as a burden or a threat. They were treated as brothers fighting for something that mattered to the whole of Africa.
Tanzania was not alone. Zambia , Zim Mozambique did the same. Nigeria funded the liberation movement diplomatically and financially for years. Ghana under Nkrumah made Pan-African solidarity the moral centre of his entire politics. It went beyond governments.
🎯In 1976, African nations walked out of the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand — whose rugby team had toured apartheid South Africa was allowed to compete. They gave up their athletes’ dreams on the world’s biggest sporting stage because they refused to normalise what was being done to black South Africans. We denied our athletes the chance to shine at a global stage both Kenyans amd Ethiopians sacrificed the ambition of their athletes.
Countries with their own poverty, their own hunger, their own problems, made that sacrifice for you.
For decades the rest of the continent refused to trade with the apartheid regime. We refused to recognise it. We refused to give it any legitimacy in any international forum.
🎯Africa collectively said we will pay whatever economic price, we will absorb whatever cost, until South Africa is free and Nelson Mandela walks out of that prison and walk out he did. The continent celebrated as though it were their own liberation because in many ways it was and this is what you do with that. You hunt Tanzanians in the streets. You throw Mozambicans out of hospitals. You burn Somali shops to the ground. You beat Zimbabweans — whose country sheltered your fighters — with the same hands that were supposed to be raised in a free Africa.
🤔I have heard the argument that xenophobia in South Africa is really economic desperation dressed up as nationalism. That unemployed, hungry people are lashing out and we should try to understand the root causes. I do understand the root causes. South Africa has staggering unemployment. The government has failed its people badly load-shedding, corruption, the slow hollowing out of every public service that was supposed to make freedom mean something. That pain is real.
🤔Well the Somali shopkeeper did not cause load-shedding. The Zimbabwean nurse did not loot state enterprises. The Mozambican construction worker did not engineer state capture. Your government failed you. Your fury landing on your African neighbour’s accent is not just misdirected . It is a betrayal of everything that was poured into giving you a free country to be angry in.
🤔Pulling a sick person from a hospital bed is not frustration. Burning down a family’s livelihood is not a political statement. Beating someone in the street because of where they were born is not economic protest. It is cruelty and wrapping it in a flag does not make it less cruel. It makes it more shameful.
South Africa used to mean something on this continent. The end of apartheid was not just a South African victory. It was an African one. People wept in countries that had never been anywhere near Johannesburg, because it meant that something that looked permanent and unmovable could be broken by enough solidarity and enough sacrifice.
That is the inheritance you are burning.
Not the immigrants’ shops.
👊Maybe just maybe you were not meant to get independence and white south Africans would have run SA in a better way looking at how DA is running Cape Town and Western Cape is anything to go by.
Reflect hard , nevertheless I still choose to remain an optimist.
God bless Africa.
Mohammed Hersi is a Mombasa based businessman.
