Prof. Egara Kabaji
Writer, Educationist, and Researcher at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology;
Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA); and Chancellor of Mount Kigali
University, Rwanda.
Introduction
Deconstructing the Myth of the “Stranger”
Distinguished colleagues, scholars, students, and citizens of our beloved continent, I am delighted
to be here and talk about this important subject. When we gather under the evocative title
“Strangers Among Us,” we are called to interrogate the foundational premises of citizenship,
sovereignty and human belonging in post-colonial Africa. Who precisely is a “stranger”? By what
moral or political authority do we accept the arbitrary lines carved into African soil by nineteenthcentury European colonial cartographers and declare that the brother or sister standing on the other
side of an artificial border is an “alien,” an “outsider,” or a competitor for survival?
I think I am moving ahead of myself. Let me start from home: East Africa. In our universities
across East Africa, we teach a foundational course titled East African Literature. Observers
occasionally ask why our academic institutions insist on requiring students to examine the creative
output of an entire geographic region partitioned into distinct nation-states. My response has
always been uncompromisingly clear: we teach regional and continental literature because
literature reveals a profound truth that partisan politics perpetually seeks to obscure, we are one
people.
When our young scholars read the literary masterpieces of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda,
Burundi, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they undergo an intellectual
awakening. They uncover shared cultural traditions, identical historical traumas, common socioeconomic anxieties, and unified human aspirations. Most importantly, they discover that the rigid
political borders drawn upon geopolitical maps do not exist within the creative imaginations of our
people.
Yet, across the African continent today, we witness an alarming paradox. While ordinary traders,
artists, scholars, and workers actively construct a borderless continent from below, populist
political leaders and “violence entrepreneurs” systematically weaponize economic anxieties,
scapegoating foreign African nationals for systemic state failures. From the mass expulsions of
West Africa in 1969 and 1983 to the deadly, recurring xenophobic attacks in post-apartheid South
Africa, bad politics has repeatedly sowed seeds of division, violence, and displacement.
Today, speaking as a scholar, a creative writer, and Vice President of the Pan African Writers
Association (PAWA), and a chancellor of a university outside my country of birth, I want to offer
a message that is both an urgent historical critique and a Pan-African imperative: we must reject
the toxic politics of exclusion, defend our regional integration protocols and build an imaginative,
federated Africa where no African is ever branded a stranger on African soil. Let me delve into
history to explain my optimism.
The Pan-African Ideal vs. The Borderless Imagination
The vision of a borderless, united Africa is not a utopian fantasy; it was the foundational imperative
of our continental liberation struggle. At Ghana’s independence in 1957, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame
Nkrumah famously declared, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total
liberation of the African continent”. In his landmark 1963 treatise, Africa Must Unite, Nkrumah
recognized that colonial state boundaries were artificial constructs designed to divide and conquer,
arguing forcefully that Africans must tear down the barriers separating them to optimize their
collective resources for the benefit of all.
This borderless ideal finds expression in our regional integration architectures. In East Africa,
when we stand to sing the East African Anthem, we are not executing a mere ceremonial gesture;
we are giving voice to a sacred collective aspiration that there is something far greater than
individual nation-states. When we carry the East African passport, we hold an official instrument
confirming that our human identity is not confined within the borders of the country in which we
happened to be born.
I hold a personal dream, a prayer that I will witness a full political federation, a sovereign United
States of East Africa, where crossing from Kenya to Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, South
Sudan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo is as ordinary and unhindered as moving from one
county or district to another. This conviction is forged directly from my lived autobiography.
Allow me to let you into my lived experiences.
Educational Debt and Solidarity:
As a young student at Vihiga High School and then Chavakali
High School, I was taught literature by Ugandan and Rwandan teachers. When the dictator Idi
Amin unleashed a reign of terror in Uganda, forcing intellectuals and professionals into exile,
many fled to Kenya and became our educators. A political tragedy in one African nation directly
enriched the education of children in a neighboring state. Those Ugandan teachers did not become
less African because they crossed an international border, nor did we become less Kenyan by
learning from them.
Pedagogical Reciprocity:
Decades later, I accepted an assignment to teach literature in Kigali,
Rwanda, almost as an act of worship, a conscious repayment of an honorable historical debt. I later
joined the faculty at Kabale University in Uganda to mentor young writers, and today I serve as
Chancellor of Mount Kigali University in Rwanda. When I serve in Kigali or Kabale, I do not view
myself as a foreigner working abroad; I see myself simply as an East African working alongside
fellow East Africans.
The Narrative Transformation Model (NTM):
Creative writing inherently operates acrossborderless horizons. My poetry anthology, Wonders and Worries, was adopted in Rwandan
primary schools; my dystopian novel, Beyond the Dark Clouds, drew inspiration from Rwandan
history; and my novellas, Letter to God and The Slave Child, are set in Uganda. When writing a
crucial chapter of my novel Shadows of Love set in Juba, South Sudan, a city I had not physically
visited, I relied on trusted friends working in South Sudan to serve as my eyes and ears. Under the
Narrative Transformation Model, writers transform lived human reality into artistic narrative.
Because human reality does not stop at border checkpoints, the African writer possesses a
boundless reservoir of shared memories, languages, and landscapes across the continent.
• Indeed, our cultural history demonstrates that literature and art have long served as shared
social infrastructure. In 1970, the East African Literature Bureau was established precisely
to produce and distribute literature across regional lines, treating creative storytelling as a
vehicle for building a unified cultural space. Even when the original East African
Community collapsed in 1977 due to political failures, ideological posturing, and personal
egos of national leaders, the East African dream survived stubbornly in our creative
writing, our shared Kiswahili cadence, and our cross-border friendships.
The Political Economy of Exclusion: Bad Politics and Historical Expulsions
Why, then, does the shadow of xenophobia continue to darken our continent? To understand
contemporary hostility toward foreign African nationals, let me analyze the political economy of
exclusion, specifically, how post-colonial leaders facing domestic economic stagnation, severe
inflation, or electoral pressure systematically deploy protectionist rhetoric to scapegoat
immigrants.
The tragic trajectory of West Africa in the late twentieth century offers a stark historical lesson on
the dangers of political demagoguery:
Ghana’s 1969 Aliens Compliance Order
Following the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in February 1966, Ghana entered a period of
economic difficulty marked by debt, foreign-exchange shortages and rising unemployment. When
Kofi Abrefa Busia’s Progress Party government took office in 1969, it faced mounting pressure to
address unemployment and what many Ghanaians perceived as foreign domination of parts of the
retail trade.
On 18 November 1969, Busia’s government announced the Aliens Compliance Order, requiring
immigrants without valid residence permits to regularise their status or leave Ghana within
fourteen days. Although the order was framed as an immigration-compliance measure, its
enforcement resulted in the mass departure of migrants, particularly Nigerians and other West
Africans. More than 500,000 Nigerians were reported deported by the end of 1969, although
estimates of the total number affected vary.
The consequences extended beyond migration. Foreign traders had established commercial
networks and supplied goods in local markets, while migrant workers played a significant role in
agricultural production. Research conducted after the order documented the departure of tens of
thousands of foreign workers from cocoa farms, while historical accounts describe rising prices
for some imported goods in certain towns. The departure of migrant labour also increased wage
costs for cocoa farmers.
The episode illustrates the dangers of treating economic hardship primarily as a problem caused
by outsiders. A government may seek to protect its citizens’ employment and commercial
opportunities, but abrupt mass expulsion can disrupt established supply chains, deprive productive
sectors of labour and damage relations with neighbouring countries. Ghana’s experience demonstrates that immigration enforcement, economic policy and regional solidarity cannot be
considered in isolation.
Nigeria’s 1983 “Ghana Must Go” Decree
The history of mass expulsions in West Africa did not end with Ghana’s 1969 Aliens Compliance
Order. Fourteen years later, Nigeria undertook an even larger expulsion of migrants, demonstrating
how economic hardship and political pressure could undermine the ideals of African solidarity and
regional integration.
Following the oil boom of the 1970s, Nigeria entered a period of economic difficulty marked by
falling oil revenues, unemployment and shortages. On 17 January 1983, the government of
President Shehu Shagari announced that undocumented foreigners and unskilled migrants without
the necessary authorisation to remain in the country had to leave. Although the measure was
framed as an immigration-enforcement exercise, it triggered a mass exodus involving Ghanaians
and hundreds of thousands of other West African migrants.
The episode became known as “Ghana Must Go”, a name that entered popular memory through
the distinctive bags in which departing Ghanaians carried their belongings. The number of people
affected remains disputed. Nigeria’s Interior Minister reported in February 1983 that
approximately 1.2 million West Africans had left, including about 700,000 Ghanaians. Other
estimates were higher, and historical research cautions that the precise total cannot be established
with certainty. The returning migrants faced difficult journeys and considerable hardship, while
Ghana, then under the government of Jerry Rawlings, had to contend with the consequences of a
large influx of returning citizens.
The expulsions of 1969 and 1983 belong to a wider history of economic resentment, restrictive
nationality policies and strained relations between neighbouring West African states. Although the
two episodes should not be reduced to a simple chain of retaliation, together they expose a
recurring contradiction in postcolonial African politics: governments have often invoked national
economic interests while taking measures that undermine regional cooperation and the free
movement of African people.
The lesson is not that states have no right to regulate immigration. It is that mass expulsions can
impose severe human and economic costs, disrupt established livelihoods and damage relations
between neighbouring countries. When migrants become convenient targets for economic
frustrations, the consequences extend beyond national borders and can endure long after the
immediate political crisis has passed.
Post-Apartheid South Africa: Institutional Scapegoating and Street Vigilantism
The zero-sum economic logic that drove the West African expulsions of 1969 and 1983 is
structurally identical to the triggers of contemporary xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa.
Empirical research from Xenowatch, a monitoring platform operated by the African Centre for
Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand- reveals that xenophobic
violence is not an accidental or sporadic phenomenon, but a longstanding, systematic feature of
post-apartheid society. Between 1994 and late 2021, Xenowatch recorded at least 873 verified
incidents of xenophobic violence, resulting in 612 deaths, 1,184 physical assaults, 122,298 forced displacements, and over 6,300 looted or destroyed foreign-owned businesses. The violence is
overwhelmingly concentrated in economically marginalized townships and informal settlements
on the urban peripheries of major metropolises like Johannesburg (Gauteng), Cape Town (Western
Cape), Durban (eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal), and Gqeberha (Eastern Cape).
A rigorous diagnostic analysis reveals three interconnected layers of causality driving this
continental crisis:
DIAGNOSTIC LAYERS OF XENOPHOBIC CAUSALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA
1. Underlying Conditions: Deep socio-economic deprivation, extreme poverty, inequality, severe
competition for housing and public services, and pervasive anti-immigrant sentiment.
2. Proximate Causes (Political Engine): Governance deficits, absence of local state policing,
systematic political scapegoating by public figures blaming migrants for state failures, and local
violence entrepreneurs profiting from displacement
3. Precipitants and Triggers: Digital xenophobia and online outrage campaigns
(#PutSouthAfricansFirst), populist vigilante movements (Operation Dudula), and violent protests
targeting foreign-owned spaza shops.
Socio-Economic Deprivation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy
Residents in marginalized townships face chronic unemployment, inadequate housing, failing
public infrastructure, and rampant crime. In these high-pressure environments, the presence of
foreign African nationals operating community-based retail shops (spaza shops), hair salons, or
transport services is perceived through a flawed, zero-sum lens. Microeconomic friction is
displaced into a hate-filled nationalism, where citizens view migrant participation in the informal
economy as “illegitimate competition” that must be eliminated.
Governance Deficits and Political Scapegoating
Macro-level poverty alone does not automatically cause street violence; it requires political
mobilization to ignite. When government authorities fail to deliver basic services, manage
infrastructure, or curb crime, political leaders frequently deploy political scapegoating to deflect
public anger away from their own governance failures.
As a South African respondent candidly observed during research interviews: “I think the main
drivers are politicians. Because they want to rule, they look for different ways of gaining public
attention and support and one of the reasons would be blaming outsiders for the problems faced in
this community. It is all about power.”
This top-level political rhetoric is reinforced by institutional xenophobia—where state officials,
health workers, and police officers harass migrants, conduct unlawful detentions, deny legal
services, or actively stand by while foreign-owned shops are looted. Furthermore, official state
responses have been plagued by denialism—persistently labeling anti-immigrant hate crimes as
“merely routine criminality”—thereby granting de facto impunity to perpetrators and instigators.
Violence Entrepreneurship and Digital Xenophobia
Where official governance is weak or absent, informal leadership structures and special interest
groups step into the vacuum, operating as “violence entrepreneurs”. Far from being spontaneous,
anonymous mob violence, xenophobic attacks are frequently organized by local business factions
or civic leaders who hire unemployed youth to attack, displace, and loot foreign nationals to
eliminate commercial competition or consolidate local political power.
In the digital age, this physical violence is hyper-accelerated by digital xenophobia. Platforms like
X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and WhatsApp have been transformed into algorithmic outrage
engines. Anti-immigrant hashtags such as #PutSouthAfricaFirst, #23SeptemberCleanSA, and
#ForeignersMustGo have flooded cyberspace, recycling fabricated videos and misinformation to
manufacture a sense of existential crisis.
This digital mobilization birthed vigilante movements such as Operation Dudula (“Pushback” in
isiZulu). Transitioning from online campaigns to street violence, Operation Dudula launched
campaigns to forcibly evict African migrants from townships, harass foreign traders, and even
march armed to national border posts. As political parties face contested elections, populist leaders
increasingly adopt single-issue xenophobic platforms, promising mass deportations and the
stripping of refugee rights to capture disaffected voters.
Ground-Level Pan-Africanism: Citizens Outpacing Politicians
Yet, despite this toxic political rhetoric, the most inspiring lesson of modern Africa is that ordinary
citizens have already achieved the very integration that politicians struggle to articulate.
If you travel across our continent today, you will witness organic Pan-Africanism in action:
• Cross-Border Commerce: Small-business owners, artisans, and traders from Kenya run
thriving enterprises in Bujumbura, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, and Goma.
• West African Entrepreneurship: Nigerian merchants, educators, and tech innovators
build livelihoods across Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire.
• Cultural and Linguistic Connections: In my home city of Nairobi, every time I take my
vehicle to a local car wash managed by hardworking young men from Burundi, I take
immense delight in speaking Kirundi with them, a language closely related to
Kinyarwanda, which I fell in love with while teaching in Kigali twenty-five years ago. In
those spontaneous interactions, there are no “strangers”, there are only Africans sharing a
conversation, a language, and an economic transaction.
And then, above all, there is the unifying power of African music. I have never hidden my
profound, lifelong love for Congolese rhumba. For generations, Congolese musicians have
entertained, comforted, and united hearts across East, Central, West, and Southern Africa. Their
guitar hooks and poetic lyrics crossed international borders decades before contemporary
politicians began delivering speeches on regional economic integration treaties. Rhumba music
fills our urban centers, our rural homesteads, and our celebrations from coastal Mombasa to inland
Bukavu.
When populist commentators demand that foreign artists or migrants be restricted, I respond
without hesitation: do not tell these Congolese musicians to leave on the foolish assumption that I
will suddenly confine my cultural appreciation strictly to local artists. I will continue to listen to
rhumba because the music reminds us of a fundamental truth that shortsighted politics tries to
make us forget we are one people!
Indeed, international and regional protocols, such as the ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement
of Persons, Residence, and Establishment (1979), the East African Community Common Market
Protocol, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), were explicitly designed to
guarantee the free movement of human capital, goods, services, and talent across member states.
These treaties are not diplomatic giveaways; they represent a conscious effort to restore the natural,
historical state of our continent. True continental prosperity under AfCFTA will remain a hollow
dream if regional bodies fail to enforce the safe, free, and dignified movement of African human
beings alongside commercial goods.
A Call to Action: Reclaiming the Pan-African Horizon
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen,
As we look toward the future of our continent, we must recognize that we stand at a critical
historical crossroads. We can either succumb to the insular demagoguery of populist politicians
who promise prosperity by building border fences and expelling their neighbors, or we can reclaim
the radical, borderless vision of Kwame Nkrumah and build a continent grounded in structural
solidarity.
FOUR STRATEGIC PAN-AFRICAN IMPERATIVES FOR AFRICA’S YOUTH AND
LEADERS
1. Deconstruct Partisan Scapegoating: Actively reject political narratives that blame
vulnerable African migrants for systemic state failures, unemployment, inflation, and
housing shortages.
2. 2. Defend and Enforce Regional Protocols: Demand full national compliance with EAC,
ECOWAS, and AfCFTA protocols to guarantee the safe, unhindered movement of African
human capital alongside goods.
3. Combat Digital Hate and End Impunity: Prosecute ‘violence entrepreneurs’ and
instigators of hate crimes, while establishing transnational digital youth coalitions to
counter online xenophobia.
4. Pursue Radical Socio-Economic Transformation: Address the deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities, service delivery failures, and governance vacuums that provide
fertile ground for xenophobic manipulation
Conclusion
When we look into the eyes of the African worker in our markets, the professor in our lecture halls,
the artist on our stages, the trader in our border towns, or the youth in our car washes, we do not
see strangers. We see ourselves. They are our kin, our intellectual benefactors, our commercial
partners and our co-creators in the grand African story.
We have seen the devastating human cost when xenophobia is allowed to fester, houses burned,
retail shops looted, families displaced, and innocent lives stolen simply because someone carried
a different passport or spoke with a different regional accent. When we attack or exclude a fellow
African, we do not protect our nation; we mutilate ourselves. We tear down the very cultural,
intellectual, and economic ecosystem that has sustained our societies through historical crises.
Let us reject political demagoguery. Let us defend the free movement of human beings across our
borders. Let us teach our children that their homeland is not defined merely by the soil of their ancestral village, but extends across the vast, magnificent expanse of a federated, borderless
Africa.
barriers that separate us, and build an imaginative, united, and welcoming Africa where no human
being is ever branded a stranger.
Thank you very much.
_________________________________
References
1. Kabaji, E. (2026). Our Shared East African Story is Bigger than Borders, published in The
Standard newspaper. September 12th, 2026.
2. Akpalu, A. (2026). The Political Economy of Exclusion: From Busia’s Aliens Order to
Contemporary Xenophobia, A Call to Ghana’s Youth. Modern Ghana.
3. Dratwa, B. (2024). Xenophobia: A Pervasive Crisis in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (GJIA).
4. Misago, J. P., Bule, K., and Mlilo, S. (2021). Xenophobic Violence in South Africa: An
Analysis of Trends, Causal Factors and Responses. A Xenowatch Quinquennial Report, African
Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand.
5. Research Report. (2026). Political Scapegoating and Xenophobic Attacks Across Africa.
Synthetic Research Report and Source Metadata.
