Who belongs in South Africa?

• South Africa continues to struggle with the legacy of spatial apartheid, manifesting in two extremes: property-driven displacement and rising xenophobia.
• In Cape Town, exclusionary property markets displace locals, while in Durban, nationalist movements target migrants for expulsion.
• Both phenomena reflect a colonial logic that continues to define who is permitted to inhabit specific spaces and who belongs in the country.

Spatial Apartheid in Cape Town

• On July 2, the Constitutional Court ruled that the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government failed their duty to provide affordable housing.
• The ruling follows a decade-long activism campaign regarding a disused school site in Sea Point, which was sold to a private school in 2016 for R135 million.
• Sea Point real estate prices have surged to 1.5 times the citywide median, fueled by a 200% increase in Airbnb listings since 2022.
• Displaced residents, both local and migrant, are pushed into under-resourced peripheral townships originally designed for racial segregation.

Xenophobia and Coerced Co-habitation

• The Durban-based "March and March" movement has organized regular protests demanding the removal of all undocumented migrants.
• Anthropologist Kenneth Tafira characterizes the resulting friction in peripheral areas as "coerced co-habitation," where competition for scarce resources drives conflict between excluded citizens and migrants.
• Researchers, including William Mpofu, argue that contemporary xenophobia functions as a continuation of colonial racial hierarchies.
• Various political parties, including the DA, ActionSA, and the Patriotic Alliance, have engaged with anti-migrant movements, highlighting how nationalism remains fundamentally nativist in its approach to borders and rights.