South Africa’s investment pitch to the world is built on the phrase “gateway to Africa”. When trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau said at the 2026 South African Investment Conference “that the world sees us as a gateway to Africa”, he was echoing a long-held sentiment in the global investor community.
Brand South Africa’s archive of global firms explaining their rationale for setting up in the country illustrates how durable this idea has been. As far back as 1995, when Acer Africa established its base here, the company said: “South Africa is the only port of entry to Africa, the only place one would be able to succeed.”
The recent wave of armed groups threatening African migrants in cities across the country shows the continent’s gateway still has a violent bouncer at the door. Arguably 2008 saw the worst outbreak of attacks, but the discontent has never really abated.
There was a time when it seemed things would turn out differently based on “the youth”. In 2010 idealistic student leaders on university campuses were still living in the afterglow of Thabo Mbeki’s vision of an African Renaissance and sharpening their oratory skills on the heady aphorisms of his “I am an African” speech.
The former president was even invited to address the African Student Leaders Summit in 2010, held at the University of Cape Town. Now the resounding chant is so clearly “I am a South African”, it makes the recent past seem like an imagined political fog. Perhaps “post-colonial pan-Africanism” was always an elite hallucination (though even then student activists imagined they understood the pulse of the nation below the ivory tower).
Today the gateway to Africa narrative persists. However, more often than not it comes with a regional hedge that if not addressed signals a shrinking sphere of influence. Grant Thornton, for instance, describes South Africa as “an innovative, resource-rich and well-diversified economy which acts as a gateway to sub-Saharan Africa”.
The gateway claim carries obligations that extend to what South African firms do on the continent, what civil society demands at home and what ordinary citizens tolerate on their streets
To some, even that is generous: it’s not an uncommon view that South Africa’s real gravitational pull extends no further than the Common Monetary Area on a good day, with Nairobi, Lagos and Casablanca all staking rival claims to the continent’s commercial centre.
The ongoing attacks are undoubtedly testing South Africa’s relationships on the continent once again. Nigerian senator Adams Oshiomhole, representing his country’s governing party, has proposed the revocation of operational licences of South African companies in Nigeria in retaliation for the xenophobic attacks.
Recently Ghana’s foreign minister summoned South Africa’s chargé d’affaires in Accra, invoking Ghana’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle. Reports also indicate conditions were being created at Mozambique’s Ressano Garcia border with South Africa to receive nationals fleeing the violence.
Understandably it is now not only South African politicians who are called to answer for the situation. South African professionals who attend conferences, work at offices and otherwise do business across Africa are all too familiar with the experience of introducing yourself as South African in a taxi or at a networking session — and inadvertently becoming an official spokesperson for the country and its treatment of fellow Africans. The protestation that it is “not all South Africans” is beginning to sound nearly as weak as “not all men”.
It is on the streets of Lagos, Accra and Nairobi — where South African companies operate and rely on the buying power of ordinary Nigerians, Ghanaians and Kenyans — that this reputational battle will be fought. South African businesses are not operating in a vacuum of goodwill.
A familiar retort is that South Africa should not be singled out where similar “nation first” sentiment exists on the continent. Not only is it a weak attempt to justify intolerance and weak economic claims on the basis that others do it too, it is also not all countries that position themselves as the gateway to Africa. If we choose to do so, we invite a higher level of expectation and scrutiny.
If South Africa wants to be “a” gateway let alone “the” gateway to Africa, it must reckon with what a gateway actually is. There is a reasonable expectation that the gateway to Africa would model continental integration rather than undermine it. The gateway claim carries obligations that extend to what South African firms do on the continent, what civil society demands at home and what ordinary citizens tolerate on their streets.
The gateway claim is either earned daily or it is hollow. Right now, we are not earning it.
• Ngwenya chairs the American Chamber of Commerce (South Africa) Policy Forum. She writes in her personal capacity.
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