- Xenophobia in South Africa is linked to long-standing systems of labour exploitation and capitalist extraction.
- Migrant labour systems evolved from slavery and colonialism into modern forms of economic disposability.
- Automation and artificial intelligence may become the next phase of worker exclusion and economic displacement.
The word Abahambe (let them go) carries a heavy resonance in the South African lexicon. It is a phrase often born of frustration and political theatre, yet it serves as a modern echo of a centuries-old structural logic.
When we examine the current state of international labour political economy, particularly across the African continent, it becomes clear that we are not witnessing a series of isolated xenophobic outbursts or modern policy failures. Instead, we are seeing the latest iteration of a cycle of extraction, mobility and disposal that began in the 1800s.
From an international labour political economy and economic history perspective, this op ed interrogates the long history of economic exploitation in South Africa and how this structural design has often created conditions of conflict and confrontation amongst the oppressed classes. Importantly, the aim is to demonstrate how the capitalist system mutates, showing remarkable flexibility to adapt to new conditions in its extraction exploits.
‘Abahambe’ as the recycling of disposability
In political economy terms, xenophobia is rarely an irrational eruption of mass hatred. Rather, it is a horizontal conflict between differently positioned workers or informal traders, vertically enabled by capital and the state. As Christopher Changwe Nshimbi argues, hostility towards immigrants in Southern Africa is “rooted in a regional system of labour migration established in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.”
When the formal economy contracts through deindustrialisation, falling foreign direct investment or logistics collapse, surplus labour is expelled from formal employment into the informal sector. Competition over vending space, housing and piecework intensifies. Yet rather than confronting capital or the state, the system’s logic channels resentment towards the most precarious foreign nationals.
Abahambe is therefore not a spontaneous cry but a recycled mechanism. Alan Jeeves’s study of South Africa’s gold mining economy demonstrates how, between 1890 and 1920, private recruiting agents and labour companies controlled the black labour supply, aiming “both to exploit the workers and to extract heavy fees from the employing companies.”
Thus, the colonial state and mining capital recruited workers when they were needed and deported them through pass laws and repatriation when demand fell. Post 1994, with the collapse of formal labour control systems and the shrinkage of mining employment, capital no longer manages expulsion directly. That work has been devolved to the streets via angry mobs that claim “to protect South Africans.” The cry of “let them go” is the democratisation of disposability. In other words, exclusion and expulsion are no longer just official policies. They are now also carried out socially by citizens themselves.
The desperation of precarious poor citizens against those even more precarious, namely, foreigners, leaves the structures of power untouched. When South African informal traders burn foreign-owned shops, they are unconsciously replaying a script written by the Chamber of Mines in 1890, divide the workers, and the surplus flows upward. Abahambe is not an irrational shout. It is the voice of the dispossessed, repeating the command that capital once gave, but now directed at each other because the boss has left the room.
Historical precedents and the tragedy of the oppressed class
Both the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism were critical engines of capitalist expansion, outward extensions of capitalism’s intrinsic drive for profit, new markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. They facilitated the global violent accumulation of wealth and resources, transforming subordinate colonised regions to feed the industrialisation and growth of European capitalist economies.
Standard accounts separate slavery before 1834, indentured labour after 1834 and colonial migrant labour from the late 19th century onward as distinct regimes. But from a systemic view, they are phases of the same logic, the creation of a disposable, legally differentiated labour force whose mobility is controlled by capital and the colonial state.
The transatlantic slave trade treated humans as fixed capital, a geographic transfer without wage payment and lifetime extraction. Indentured labour involving Indian, Chinese and African workers meant temporarily fixed capital, state-enforced contracts and penal sanctions for breach. Colonial migrant labour in South African mines meant rotating low-wage workers housed in compounds and subject to pass laws and deportation.
Importantly, the end of the slave trade did not signify a victory for humanity but a new mode of operation. The British switched to indentured labour, another phrase for cheap disposable workers, from India for sugarcane farms and from China for gold mines, while also repurposing companies that had profited from the slave trade in Delagoa Bay to supply mines with African labour.
Colonial and apartheid governance systematically nationalised labour categories, Mozambicans in mines, Malawians on farms and Zimbabweans in domestic work. Ethnic and national identities were used as administrative tools to prevent solidarity among cross-border workers. The post-1994 state inherited these categories but lacked the redistributive power to dismantle them.
The South African case is a condensed laboratory
Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in the Cape to Kimberley to Witwatersrand trajectory. Slavery at the Cape between 1652 and 1834 directly supplied labour for grain, wine and stock farming, with enslaved populations drawn from Madagascar, Mozambique, Indonesia and India under legal ownership by the VOC and British settlers.
After abolition in 1834 and the subsequent British anti slavery patrols, the Cape elite did not switch to “free labour,” but recruited, indentured and pass-controlled African labour from the Eastern Cape and beyond. The Masters and Servants Ordinances criminalised breach of labour contract, effectively re-enslaving workers through debt and imprisonment.
Then came the Mineral Revolution between 1867 and 1886, when diamonds and gold required tens of thousands of workers. The solution was compounds, closed contracts and migrant labour from Mozambique, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Nyasaland.
The continuity is structural. Each transition preserved low wage costs and high supervisory control while shifting the legal form. In each case, the worker is territorially alien, uprooted from a subsistence base, but legally constrained from full integration into the wage bargain as a free citizen. This is the essence of what Karl Marx called primitive accumulation, not a one-time prehistory, but a continuing process.
The global economy did not merely produce unequal exchange, though that existed, but actively created underdeveloped regions as reservoirs of cheap labour and primary commodities. Key mechanisms included taxation in kind or cash, such as hut taxes and poll taxes, which forced African households into wage labour. Land alienation through the Natives Land Act of 1913 reduced subsistence agriculture to starvation-level plots, generating a labour supply for mines and farms. Currency monopolies and colonial trade blocs ensured that earnings from labour migrated back to imperial centres via imports of manufactured goods.
Therefore, the migrant was not a failure of development but its engine. Remittances to rural areas enabled capital to pay wages below the reproduction wage, while sending areas remained reservoirs of future labour. At one point, tensions arose between urban black labourers and rural recruits in the Witwatersrand. The violence between hostel dwellers and townships was informed by long periods of amoeba-like shifts by the capital.
From colonial extraction to postcolonial ‘Abahambe’
In the colonial period, the state and capital managed the “go or stay” decision entirely. They recruited when needed. They expelled through pass laws, deportation or repatriation when labour demand fell during the 1930s Depression or the early 1960s recession, for example. Post 1994, the state’s capacity to manage this system collapsed, not because capitalism left, but because it mutated.
Formal mining employment fell from approximately 850 000 in the 1980s to around 450 000 today. State welfare grants replaced some rural subsistence, but not enough to do so fully. Cross-border migration shifted from state-managed recruitment to self-organised movement by Zimbabweans, Malawians, Somalis and Ethiopians.
What happens when capital no longer manages expulsion, but the structural need for a surplus labour reserve remains? The work of expulsion is devolved to the streets. Abahambe becomes the democratisation of disposability.
But what the masses often miss in their effort to drive out foreigners, both legal and undocumented, is that the next challenge will not come from Zimbabweans, Malawians, Somalis or Ethiopians. It will come from the cloud.
The new mutation from foreign flesh to the cloud
As automation, artificial intelligence and platform capitalism advance, capital is discovering its most flexible source of labour yet, the algorithm. Warehouses that once employed hundreds of pickers now deploy robots. Customer service centres that hired night shift workers now run chatbots. Mines that rely on migrant labour are testing autonomous haul trucks. The dispossessed South African shouting Abahambe at a Somali spaza shop owner is aiming at the wrong target.
Capital is not necessarily replacing citizens with foreign workers, but it is replacing all workers with technology. The real expulsion has already begun, not from the township or the informal settlement, but from the payroll itself.
When the last job is automated, there will be no foreigners left to blame. Only then will the dispossessed realise that Abahambe should never have been about nationality. It is about the capital’s eternal search for a workforce that asks for nothing, not even a place to stay.
Si ya yi banga le economy!
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