Belfast-on-the-Indian-Ocean

Ten thousand Malawians languish in a park in Durban amid xenophobic violence. The similarities with the horrors in Belfast aren't accidental.

Belfast City Hall/ Itub CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia

Durban City Hall A3albOwn work/ CC BY 3.0 Wikimedia

The two buildings above are almost exactly the same: the same Edwardian Baroque, the same dome, the same allegorical statues of commerce and industry along the façade. Durban’s pediment says “unity, patriotism, and Great Britain.” In 1903 Durban’s architect, Stanley Hudson, set about copying Belfast’s new city hall, and in 1910, the year the Union of South Africa was founded, he unveiled the result, more or less stone for stone. The empire had a house style for civic confidence, and a limited imagination. Hence Belfast-on-the-Indian-Ocean.

The resemblance has outlasted the stonework. This month masked men in Belfast marched to migrants’ doors and burned families out. In Durban, as many as ten thousand people driven from their homes are penned in a single field while the state gets on with deporting them.

There is an older echo. In 1921 Belfast’s hall became the provisional seat of the parliament of a newly partitioned Northern Ireland. The building through which Durban could see like a state was itself a monument to drawing borders around who belongs.

None of the present violence is improvised. Writing about Belfast this week, Richard Seymour calls it distributed violence: never quite ordered from above, never quite spontaneous, its work of incitement and arson smeared across a loose network of agitators and after-the-fact apologists. It’s part of a reactionary international. In Belfast that includes Elon Musk, whose posts researchers judged instrumental to the riots. In Durban it is March and March, an astroturfed outfit with a well-funded media operation and the backing of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.

The official account, in both countries, is that this is about numbers. Too many migrants, too few jobs, public services worn thin. It is a convenient story and a false one. Migrants are about 4% of South Africa’s population. They did not produce its 44% unemployment, its captured state, its political assassinations or its hunger, any more than refugees dug the potholes in County Antrim.

As Progressive International observes, scapegoating does one thing dependably: it turns public anger away from the people who caused the misery, and public attention away from anyone with a plan to end it. Seymour’s question for Britain is the question for South Africa. Why is ethnic purification always the answer offered to social ruin, and why do the people at the very bottom so often refuse to be complicit in it?

In 2025 a coalition of grassroots organisations, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute, won a judgment against Operation Dudula in the Gauteng High Court. The court barred the group from demanding people’s documents, harassing foreign nationals and blockading schools and clinics, and restated the otherwise obvious point that only the state, and not a man in a borrowed uniform, may ask you who you are. The organisations doing this work pay for it.

Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest movement of the poor, has been on the front line throughout, and its members have been threatened with assassination and with necklacing. Yet still they march and organise.

Its founder, S’bu Zikode, has spent two decades being told he is about to be killed. He has spoken out plainly against the pogrom regardless, and has been threatened with death for it. None of this is new to him.

The demand the Progressive International is making of Pretoria is not complicated. Act against the people organising the violence. Enforce the court orders that already exist. House and support those who have lost everything. And drop the double act of condemning the mob while ventriloquising its grievances. A government that recites the marchers’ talking points about migrants and jobs, and that has arrested more than forty thousand migrants this year, is not fighting the fire. It is fanning it.

The South African state is sensitive to how it looks abroad. That is the one piece of good news, and very nearly the only reason a sentence like this one is worth writing. What is happening in Durban is being filed, by officials and by much of the press, under migration. It is not a migration crisis. It is a crisis of organised cruelty, conducted by people with names and addresses and party affiliations, and tolerated by a government that could stop it and has chosen not to.