Pan-Africanism: Delegates of the fifth Pan-African Congress, Manchester, 1945. Photo: The Working Class Movement Library
Too often, Africans forget that Pan-Africanism began as a movement of peoples before it became a project of states.
Its earliest impulses came from black intellectuals, workers and organisers in the Caribbean, the United States and elsewhere in the diaspora, who understood the intimate connection between slavery, racism and colonial domination.
They saw that the destinies of African peoples were deeply intertwined. Pan-Africanism was thus, at its core, a people’s movement: a call for solidarity across borders.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945 marked a turning point. Organised by George Padmore, with W.E.B. Du Bois playing a prominent intellectual role, it brought together future independence and liberation leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta and helped move Pan-Africanism from the realm of diasporic activism and civil society agitation into the politics of decolonisation and state-building.
Nkrumah understood this people-centred vision but he also grasped the necessity of state unity. He sought to reinforce Pan-Africanism through institutions, political leadership and inter-state cooperation. That shift was historically unavoidable: colonial rule had divided Africa into demarcated territories and the struggle for liberation had to be fought through governments and political movements as well as through popular solidarity.
Yet while the union of peoples and the union of states are closely linked, the statist evolution of Pan-Africanism has at times pushed the union of peoples into the background. That is one of the enduring weaknesses of many post-independence African states.
The recent xenophobic incidents in South Africa do more than expose weaknesses in how African states manage migration. They raise a deeper question about the credibility of the African Union’s long-standing aspiration to build not only a union of states but a union of peoples.
If continental integration is to be meaningful, it must include the practical possibility for Africans to move, settle, work and trade across borders in safety and dignity. Judged by that standard, the images and reports emerging from South Africa are profoundly damaging to the broader African project.
The sight of human beings being hunted, threatened or treated as disposable because they are perceived to be foreign is morally troubling.
It also reveals a serious gap between continental commitments on free movement and migration governance, on the one hand, and public understanding and state enforcement, on the other.
Immigration control remains the responsibility of central government but that authority cannot be ceded to vigilante groups or street-level intimidation without corroding the rule of law itself. Laws and institutions have a duty to protect all who live within the state’s jurisdiction, especially the weak and the most exposed.
The South African case is especially troubling because it unfolds at a moment when migration has become a central political fault line across many parts of the world. In Europe, North America and elsewhere, right-leaning political movements have increasingly framed migration as a threat to jobs, identity and public order.
Against that background, it is particularly disturbing to see similar patterns of scapegoating and collective punishment directed at African migrants within Africa itself. A black African society turning with hostility on other Africans weakens the moral force of continental solidarity and casts doubt on how deeply Pan-African ideals have taken root in practice.
Modern states are governed through law and the union of peoples imagined by Pan-African thinkers such as George Padmore and W.E.B. Du Bois can endure only if African states domesticate, understand and implement the African Union’s legal and policy instruments in ways that translate continental solidarity into lived reality.
Two instruments are especially relevant here: the 2018 Free Movement Protocol and the Migration Policy Framework for Africa and Plan of Action (2018–2030).
The Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment, adopted by the African Union on 29 January 2018, was intended to translate African integration into lived reality.
It provides for the progressive realisation of three core freedoms for nationals of member states: entry, residence and establishment. The Protocol is grounded in principles of non-discrimination and gradual implementation.
It also addresses the treatment of migrants more directly by prohibiting mass expulsion, regulating deportation and repatriation and protecting property lawfully acquired in a host state.
These provisions matter because they affirm that migration governance must be rules-based rather than arbitrary, violent or collective in nature.
What has unfolded in South Africa sits uncomfortably with both the spirit and the letter of that framework.
South Africa has experienced repeated waves of xenophobic violence since 2008, including major outbreaks in 2015, 2019 and 2021–2022, often targeting African migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Human rights reporting and civil society monitoring show that this hostility is not episodic but recurrent, taking the form of harassment, extortion, denial of access to healthcare, evictions, looting and physical attacks.
In that context, the intimidation of foreign nationals and their exclusion from services or livelihoods directly undermine the idea that Africans should be able to move, live and work across the continent in safety and dignity.
States retain the sovereign right to regulate migration but they are equally obliged to prevent mob violence and the collective targeting of foreign nationals.
The Migration Policy Framework for Africa and Plan of Action (2018–2030) reinforces the same continental logic. Adopted in 2018 as the revised AU framework on migration governance, it offers policy guidance to member states and regional economic communities on managing migration in a way that is safe, orderly and dignified, while protecting the rights of migrants regardless of status.
Among its core concerns are migration governance, labour migration, border governance, irregular migration, forced displacement, migration data and the human rights of migrants, all underpinned by principles of fair treatment and non-discrimination.
Seen against that framework, xenophobic incidents in South Africa amount to a direct challenge to the African Union’s own policy vision and to the credibility of continental integration itself.
When migrants are scapegoated for unemployment, denied access to public services, threatened by vigilante groups or subjected to physical attack, what is repudiated is not only basic human dignity but also the humane and rules-based migration governance that African states have formally endorsed.
The violence in South Africa thus harms not only those immediately targeted but also the legitimacy of Africa’s broader project of integration, solidarity and shared citizenship.
What the South African incidents reveal, ultimately, is more than a failure of public order. They expose a deeper deficit in legal understanding, public education and institutional enforcement.
The relevant African and national legal frameworks are not absent; the deeper problem is that they are insufficiently understood, unevenly applied and too easily displaced by populist rhetoric and vigilante action.
Yet the duty to regulate migration and to protect the rights and safety of all persons within the state’s jurisdiction rests with the central government, not with self-appointed enforcers.
If such conduct is tolerated, the idea of a union of African peoples, on which so many of the African Union’s aspirations depend, will slowly unravel.
Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah writes on African development and socio-economic transformation.