There is a particular kind of betrayal that cuts deeper than an enemy’s blow, the betrayal of a friend who watched you being wronged and said nothing. That is the betrayal Africa is now living through with South Africa.
For months, a movement calling itself “March and March” and other groups set a deadline for undocumented foreign nationals to leave South Africa, and when that deadline passed on June 30, mobs took to the streets of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town to enforce it themselves. In Khayelitsha, a township outside Cape Town, a 40-year-old Ghanaian father of three named Bashiru Isak was shot dead during the unrest. He did not die in a war. He died because a section of South African society decided that a fellow African did not belong on African soil, and their government, for too long, sat back and watched it happen.
Let that sink in. A country liberated in no small part because Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia, and nearly every corner of this continent stood against apartheid, hosted exiled freedom fighters, funded the struggle, and paid a real diplomatic and economic price for doing so, has allowed its own citizens to hunt down the descendants of that same solidarity. Ubuntu, the philosophy Nelson Mandela carried to the world as South Africa’s gift, I am because we are, has been buried somewhere between Khayelitsha’s shacks and the silence of the Union Buildings.
A body flown home, and a government finally speaking
Isak’s remains were finally repatriated to Ghana, received at the airport by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and his grieving family before being taken to the 37 Military Hospital. Ghana’s government has since demanded a full and transparent investigation, filed formal protests with South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, and pledged that his killers will be brought to justice. That is the bare minimum a state owes a citizen murdered abroad for the “crime” of being African in another African country. The South African government saw the warning signs, the threats and the marches with deadlines were all visible for months before June 30. It only met and shook hands with organizers of the xenophobic marches
And what of the excuse offered by the mobs and, by extension, tolerated by a government that failed to confront them early enough? That foreigners are “taking their jobs.” Let us be honest about what that really means. Many of the Ghanaians, Nigerians, Ethiopians, and other African nationals running spaza shops, salons, and small enterprises across South African townships did not walk into existing South African jobs and push locals out the door. They built those businesses from nothing, took on the risk, and in doing so employed South Africans to work behind their own counters. If there is an apology owed, it is this: we apologise for creating jobs your own economy didn’t create for you. But let it also be said plainly, if today the grievance is that Africans took “your jobs”, South Africans’ grievance tomorrow should not be “we took their customers too”, because that is the honest, uncomfortable trajectory of xenophobic logic. It never stops at jobs.
The visit that should never happen
Days after Isak’s killing, reports emerged that Ghana had denied President Cyril Ramaphosa entry for a planned visit tied to the Ghana-South Africa Bi-National Commission. Pretoria moved quickly to soften that narrative, insisting the engagement had merely been “postponed” through diplomatic channels rather than rejected, and South African officials pushed back hard on Accra’s framing of events, with one government minister accusing Ghana of spreading misleading information that could damage South Africa’s image. Whatever the diplomatic choreography, and however this gets sanitised in communiqués on both sides, one thing should be said without apology: Ramaphosa should not be welcomed with open arms in Accra, or anywhere else on this continent, until his government demonstrates, through action, not statements, that it will protect African migrants the way Africa once protected South Africans in exile.
This is not about punishing a man for the sins of a mob. It is about accountability for a government that had every institutional tool to de-escalate weeks of open threats against foreign nationals and chose, instead, to let the “March and March” campaign run its course to a killing. Silence from the top, in the face of organised xenophobic mobilisation, is itself a policy choice. South Africa’s leadership may have succeeded, for now, in managing the optics of this crisis. But success bought through the blood of a Ghanaian father, and the fear of a thousand-plus other African nationals who fled the country in a hurry, is not success worth congratulating. It is a cost that must still be paid, diplomatically, economically, and in the court of African public opinion.
A continent owed better
Africa cannot keep extending unconditional brotherhood to a country that treats that brotherhood as disposable the moment its own domestic politics get uncomfortable. Ghana’s response, the protest notes, the demand for justice, the deferred visit is a start, but it must not end there. Other African governments should be asking the same hard questions Accra is now asking. The African Union’s own Protocol on Free Movement of Persons means nothing if member states can watch their citizens die in xenophobic violence and receive nothing more than a diplomatic postponement in return.
Nelson Mandela built a South Africa that told the world Ubuntu was possible even after the deepest wounds of apartheid. What we are watching now is proof that Ubuntu did not survive him. It will take more than a rescheduled commission meeting to bring it back, it will take a government willing to say, clearly and without spin, that an African life lost to xenophobia on South African soil is a national disgrace, not a public relations problem to be managed.
