NHLANHLA NXUMALO | The march is not just xenophobia ― it is a cry from South Africa’s invisible men

Every time unemployed South African men march against foreign nationals, our public discourse reaches for one word: xenophobia. The label is often accurate. But when it becomes the only explanation, it blinds us to a deeper national crisis — the growing economic and psychological exclusion of young working-class men.

We condemn the marches, issue statements about African solidarity and move on. In doing so, we treat the visible symptom while ignoring the social wound beneath it.

To understand what is happening in many townships and informal settlements, we must be willing to look beyond slogans and into the lived experiences of the young men at the centre of this anger.

South Africa’s unemployment crisis is not gender-neutral. Millions of poorly educated young men exist outside both the formal economy and meaningful vocational systems. The old pathways into adulthood — factory work, apprenticeships, mining, municipal labour, artisanal trades — have steadily collapsed or become inaccessible. For many young men, there is no stable route from boyhood into social usefulness.

At the same time, the informal economy has become one of the few functioning economic ecosystems left in many communities. Spaza shops, delivery work, plumbing, construction, security, transport, waste collection, street vending and small-scale services now absorb labour that the formal economy no longer can. That space is intensely competitive, and foreign nationals are often highly visible within it.

This visibility matters psychologically.

Imagine a 24-year-old man living in a township. He did not finish matric. He wants to work. He has looked for jobs repeatedly, but every small opportunity seems already occupied: loading stock at a shop, assisting at a car wash, doing delivery work, casual construction, or helping in a tuck-shop. Meanwhile, he watches immigrants — Somalis, Ethiopians, Zimbabweans, Pakistanis, Malawians — building businesses, forming networks and surviving through relentless hustle.

Then the experience becomes personal.

His mother hires a Zimbabwean gardener because “he works hard.” His sister calls a Malawian plumber because he arrives quickly and charges fairly. The local shopkeeper employs relatives or trusted acquaintances from his own migrant network. The young South African man watches all this unfold while sitting at home, unemployed, increasingly unsure of what role he serves in his own community.

One day, someone says to him, perhaps innocently: “Why don’t you ask the foreigner for work?”

That sentence lands with enormous force. Not because it is cruel, but because it confirms something he already fears — that he is no longer needed.

Foreign nationals are not responsible for the failures of the South African state, and many migrants themselves survive under brutal conditions of exploitation, danger, and insecurity.

This is the psychology we refuse to discuss honestly.

For generations, dignity for many working-class men was tied not to wealth or status, but to usefulness. To fix something. To carry something. To provide something. To be relied upon. But in many communities, that social role has eroded while no meaningful replacement has emerged.

The result is not only poverty. It is humiliation. A feeling of redundancy. A suspicion that one’s country has moved on without you.

None of this excuses violence. Looting foreign-owned shops, intimidation, assault and destruction of property are crimes. The law must protect every person living legally in South Africa, regardless of nationality. Foreign nationals are not responsible for the failures of the South African state, and many migrants themselves survive under brutal conditions of exploitation, danger and insecurity.

But acknowledging this should not prevent us from confronting another uncomfortable truth: anti-immigrant anger is often rooted not only in hatred, but in wounded dignity and economic displacement.

The foreign national is frequently not the cause of the crisis, but the most visible symbol of it.

That distinction matters.

Our public conversation often collapses into moral performance. Academics, commentators and politicians denounce xenophobia — correctly — but stop there, as though condemnation alone constitutes understanding. We cite statistics about immigrant contributions to GDP. We invoke pan-African solidarity and liberation history. We remind people, accurately, that migrants are human beings deserving of rights and protection.

Yet none of these arguments answers the emotional reality confronting many unemployed young men in townships.

When someone arrives in South Africa with very little and manages to establish a functioning business within a few years, the unemployed local man often does not simply see “competition”. He sees a painful mirror held up to his own stalled life. He begins asking himself dangerous questions: What is wrong with me? Why can others survive where I cannot? Have I become unnecessary in my own country?

Those are not inherently xenophobic questions. They are deeply human ones.

And if society refuses to engage them honestly, resentment festers underground until it erupts destructively.

A crime can also be a cry.

The young man throwing a stone at a foreign-owned shop may indeed be committing a criminal act. But he may also be expressing something else: a desperate need to be seen by a society that experiences him mainly as a problem to be managed rather than a citizen to be developed.

This is why simplistic explanations will continue to fail. We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis. We cannot hashtag our way out of it. And we certainly cannot solve it through mass deportations, which would be both morally indefensible and economically disastrous.

Until young South African men can once again imagine themselves as economically useful, socially valued, and capable of building stable futures, these marches will continue. We will keep calling them xenophobia, and in part, we will be right.

The deeper solution lies in restoring pathways to dignity.

That means large-scale employment creation targeted at low-skilled youth. It means rebuilding apprenticeships and vocational trades. It means public works programmes that produce genuine skills and stable income rather than temporary political theatre. It means investing seriously in township economies instead of treating them merely as reservoirs of unemployment.

It also means confronting a difficult policy conversation around labour absorption in the informal economy. South Africans and migrants alike require economic space to survive. Sustainable coexistence cannot be built on permanent scarcity. Most importantly, we must stop treating unemployed young men as morally disposable.

Recognising their pain does not mean endorsing nationalism, patriarchy, or violence. It means understanding that human beings who feel socially unnecessary eventually search for someone to blame. If democratic societies fail to provide meaning, dignity and economic participation, anger will inevitably attach itself to visible targets.

Today, that target is often the foreign national. Tomorrow, it may be someone else.

The tragedy is that South Africa already possesses the human energy needed to rebuild itself. The resilience visible in immigrant entrepreneurship is not proof of South African inferiority. Nor is the frustration of unemployed local men proof of moral failure. Both are responses to economic instability, weak institutions, and decades of exclusion.

What is missing is not potential. It is inclusion.

Until young South African men can once again imagine themselves as economically useful, socially valued, and capable of building stable futures, these marches will continue. We will keep calling them xenophobia, and in part, we will be right.

But we will still be misdiagnosing the deeper disease beneath them: the slow collapse of dignity among men who no longer believe their country has any use for them at all.