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There are fewer than four million migrants in South Africa, a nation of more than 50 million. But attacks on foreign-owned shops have become regular occurrences that many have attributed to frustration with the country’s high unemployment rate, which sits at about 28 percent.
Many Nigerians work in South Africa, but they are sometimes stereotyped as criminals and are often the target of attacks, including fatal ones. Many South African businesses operate in Nigeria, and on Tuesday angry Nigerians protested outside South African stores in Lagos.
Online, tens of thousands of people on the continent have spoken out against the riots using the hashtag #SayNoToXenophobia, sometimes asking why perpetrators were attacking their African “brothers and sisters.”
The riots this week, said Adekeye Adebajo, a Nigerian academic who leads the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg, are partly the result of the economic frustration many poor South Africans have endured after apartheid.
“The resentment,” he said, “is: ‘We suffered all these years — now that we’re free, we’re not really benefiting from what we fought for.’”
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