From Solidarity to Scapegoating: Pan-Africanism and Afrophobia in South Africa’s Township Classrooms

Esma Karadağ 

18 May 2026

Credit: stock.adobe.com / Monkey Business

In late April and early May 2026, South Africa was convulsed by a new wave of deadly violence against African migrants. Nationals from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique were targeted; their governments lodged formal protests with Pretoria; the UN Secretary-General condemned the attacks.

Perpetrators are often reported as coming from impoverished townships, where youth unemployment remains exceptionally high. They are children of the very communities that once sheltered ANC exiles, that once sang Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika as an anthem of continental solidarity, that once produced Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, and the Pan-Africanist imagination of a united, free Africa.

How did we get here? The answer, I found, begins in the classroom.

What the Classroom Revealed

For my doctoral research, I interviewed thirty-seven in-service high school history teachers across three South African provinces — the Western Cape, Gauteng, and KwaZulu-Natal — working in schools that ranged from well-resourced former Model C institutions (historically white public schools that retained fee-charging rights and stronger resourcing after 1994) in the suburbs to under-resourced township schools where classrooms are severely overcrowded and resources are almost nonexistent.

I expected Black students in township schools (heirs to Sobukwe, Biko, and the PAC) to be the most engaged with Pan-Africanism, and those in middle-class schools to be the most distant from it.

The opposite was true.

In middle-class schools, Black students actively embraced Pan-African identity. They connected South Africa to the broader continent and the diaspora, shaped by South Africa’s Fallist movements and the global reach of Black Lives Matter, and engaged questions of economic decolonisation. Their teachers described them as students who came to history class already curious about Africa's place in the world and their own place within it.

In township schools, the picture was strikingly different. Teachers (almost all of them veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle, deeply committed Pan-Africanists) reported that their students showed little to no meaningful engagement with Pan-Africanism. Worse: those same students regularly used derogatory slurs about fellow Africans. Teachers described spending lesson after lesson defending the very humanity of other Africans against their own students’ contempt.

One teacher put it simply: ‘The students are not inclined towards Pan-Africanism whatsoever.’

These were all Black students. The difference was class.

A Historical Reversal

This finding demands context, because it inverts everything we know about the history of these schools.

During the apartheid era, township schools were the epicentres of Pan-African consciousness in South Africa. It was here, and in the community halls and reading groups surrounding them, that Biko was read, the PAC’s vision debated, and a politics of continental solidarity built. The struggle against apartheid was explicitly Pan-African in character, sustained in no small part by the very countries whose nationals are now being attacked in South African streets. Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique: these were not foreign nations to the liberation movement. They were its backbone.

The teachers I interviewed had lived this history, with several as activists themselves. One recalled trying to make his students understand that the Zimbabweans and Mozambicans in their streets were not invaders but, in a very real sense, kin. ‘We are also the quechas’, he told them, using the term (amaquecha, a derogatory slang word for African migrants, as he put it) that his own students directed at foreigners, and turning it back on themselves. ‘All of us came from somewhere.’ Several addressed me as ‘comrade’ because I was asking about Pan-Africanism.

But his students, by his own account, were largely unmoved.

Something had changed. In just over three decades, South Africa had built a democracy without resolving the poverty that made solidarity feel like a luxury its poorest citizens could not afford.

What Filled the Space

Pan-Africanism did not fade from township classrooms. It was crowded out by conditions that made continental solidarity feel abstract, even insulting, to young people living with very concrete deprivations.

Teachers distributed simplified government handouts because there was nothing else. During Covid, while middle-class students pivoted to online learning, working-class students simply disappeared from education altogether. The digital divide was not a metaphor. It was a wall.

Into this space came something else: a nationalism of scarcity, in which migrants are read not through the lens of African solidarity but through the lens of competition. For millions of Black South Africans, the freedom promised in 1994 has not materially arrived.

The teachers understood all of this. They fought it, lesson by lesson, with the only tools they had: their own memories, their own life stories as counter-narrative.

The Question We Have Not Asked

South African politicians and commentators are, right now, reaching for familiar explanations. Unemployment. Porous borders. Criminal networks. Failed immigration policy. These are not wrong answers. But they are incomplete ones.

The current violence is also the outcome of an educational failure, three decades old and largely unacknowledged. The post-apartheid state promised that schools would build a shared society out of a fractured one. But that promise was never adequately resourced, never coherently delivered, and never meaningfully connected to the lived realities of the students it was supposed to reach most. In middle-class schools, a sense of continental belonging found fertile ground, carried there by digital access, engaged teachers, and students with the security to think beyond their immediate circumstances. In township schools, it arrived too thin, too late, and too abstract to compete with the politics of everyday survival.

Ghana’s Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa put it with particular force: ‘We issued you passports when you were stateless’. He reminded South Africa that Ghanaian taxpayers had funded the scholarships and travel documents of ANC freedom fighters rendered stateless by Pretoria. The UN Secretary-General, speaking on Freedom Day itself, made the same point: South Africa’s liberation was built on African solidarity. They are right. But solidarity is not only a matter of diplomatic memory. It is something that has to be taught, sustained, and, crucially, made to feel relevant to people whose own liberation remains unfinished.

South Africa’s township schools once knew how to do that. The question worth asking, as the smoke clears, is why they were never given the means to do it again.

Author bio

Esma Karadağ is an African Studies scholar at the Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University. She completed her doctorate at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, and is affiliated with the African Studies Centre, Leiden University and the Africa Foundation, Ankara.