South Africa is once again flirting with a familiar and deadly story: that foreigners are “taking what belongs to us”. This time, the battleground is not jobs or housing, but school classrooms, spaces that should be sanctuaries for children, not fault lines for adult anger.
The frustration of parents is real. Overcrowded schools, long travel distances, transport costs that eat into already stretched household budgets, these are not imagined hardships. When a parent like Olwethu Fenako speaks of resentment and fear about how to pay R500 a month for transport, that pain deserves to be heard and addressed seriously by the state. A broken schooling system fuels anger, and anger seeks a target.
But history teaches us that when political actors and pressure groups turn frustration into a narrative of “us versus them”, the consequences in South Africa have been catastrophic.
We have been here before.
In 2008, xenophobic violence swept across townships and informal settlements leaving at least 62 people dead, thousands displaced and communities traumatised. In 2015, attacks in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng again led to deaths and mass displacement. In 2019 and 2021, renewed waves of violence targeted foreign-owned shops and residents, destroying livelihoods and deepening mistrust.
Each cycle followed a similar script: economic hardship, political failure, inflammatory rhetoric, then bloodshed.
The danger does not begin with machetes or petrol bombs. It begins with a story repeated often enough to feel true: foreigners are favoured, foreigners are cheating the system, foreigners are the reason locals suffer.
This gap between perception and reality is precisely where narrative becomes dangerous.
The data, inconvenient as it may be, tells a different story. Foreign pupils make up just 1.8% of South Africa’s total school enrolment. Even in provinces with the highest numbers, the overwhelming majority of learners are South African. Yet militant rhetoric paints a picture of “overtaken” schools and deliberate exclusion of locals, despite repeated denials by principals and education authorities and evidence that admissions are governed by application dates, space and law.
This gap between perception and reality is precisely where narrative becomes dangerous.
Schools are soft targets in social conflicts because they involve children, and children cannot defend themselves. When protests are staged at school gates, when principals are accused of betrayal, when foreign pupils are singled out by name, accent or skin tone, the message is not subtle. It teaches children who belongs and who does not. It teaches fear. It teaches silence. At its worst, it teaches violence.
South Africa’s constitution is unambiguous: every child in the country has the right to basic education. Not South African children. Not documented children. Every child. That principle is not a loophole; it is a moral line drawn precisely because of our history of exclusion.
Those who argue that foreign children should be placed elsewhere, in “refugee camps” or separate systems, should pause and remember where such thinking leads. We know, painfully, how quickly dehumanisation escalates once people are reduced to categories rather than neighbours, or classmates.
None of this means parents’ concerns should be dismissed or mocked as xenophobia by default. It is possible, necessary even, to hold two truths at once: the education system is failing many South African children, and blaming foreign children will not fix it.
The real questions are harder and far less politically convenient. Why are schools so overcrowded decades into democracy? Why is infrastructure lagging behind population growth? Why do late applications become the basis for resentment rather than a trigger for flexible, humane solutions? Why is anger directed at principals and pupils instead of sustained pressure on government planning, budgeting and accountability?
When leaders and movements choose the shortcut of scapegoating, they may gain attention, even applause. But they also inherit responsibility for the consequences. South Africa’s xenophobic past is not abstract history; it is a warning written in graves, court records and displaced lives.
Children, whether South African, Congolese, Zimbabwean or undocumented, should never be collateral damage in political theatre. They did not design the admissions system. They did not underfund schools. They did not create borders or crises.
If we allow a narrative to take root that some children are less deserving of safety, dignity and education, we will not only repeat our past, we will teach the next generation to do the same.
And that is a lesson South Africa cannot afford to pass on.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.