Photo: Malawi citizens seeking to return home wait to be processed by border officials in Durban, South Africa, June 25, 2026. REUTERS/Rogan Ward.
Tim Akano, a Pan-African institution builder, public intellectual, and Geopolitical Risks Analyst; Founder/CEO, New Horizons Africa Group… writes this open letter to the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, regarding the ongoing Xenophobic attacks on migrants from other countries on the continent:
” Your Excellency, President Cyril Ramaphosa,
My mathematical truth says it all: South Africa (SA) − Africa (A) = South (S) = Basement (B). SA − A = S = B.
I write to you with a burning urgency that will not wait for diplomatic courtesy, because Africa itself cannot wait.
The June 30 deadline — conjured by mob arithmetic and street vigilantism — is hours from detonation.
Thousands of Nigerians, Congolese, Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans and Ghanaians are huddled in makeshift camps, boarding evacuation flights, and fleeing a country whose very name declares them family.
I have written on this wound before. My earlier essay on xenophobia reached your distinguished predecessor, President Thabo Mbeki, who responded publicly with the clarity of a statesman — correctly situating South Africa’s unemployment crisis where it rightly belongs: in the unresolved, but resolvable, structural ruins of an apartheid infrastructure built of steel-fibre-reinforced concrete, and not in the tired bodies of African migrants who came seeking dignity, not charity.
That President Mbeki came down from the fence and spoke as an African statesman is commendable. That we are here again, worse than before, is a tragedy that must end with your voice, Your Excellency
This is not the time to sit on the fence.But I do not come to you today merely with a political argument.
I come with a mathematical truth so simple, so devastating, that I am astonished it has not been shouted from every pulpit and parliament on this continent.
Remove Africa from South Africa, and what remains? South.Just South. A compass direction. A void. A word that points only downward — to the bottom, to the basement, to the abyss.
South Africa is the only nation on earth that carries the name of the entire continent as its surname. That is not an accident of cartography. That is a covenant.
When the architects of your nationhood chose that name, they were making a declaration to history: this nation belongs to Africa, and Africa belongs to this nation.
To now violently expel Africans from South Africa is to commit an act of self-erasure so profound it borders on civilisational suicide. You cannot hold Africa in your name while hunting Africans in your streets.
Source: ThisDay
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