By Theresa Rézeau
To be a child of Africa today can mean carrying pride and grief simultaneously.
Pride in a continent of extraordinary cultural inheritance: its languages, spiritual traditions, music, philosophies, artistic histories and traditions of survival. Grief because a continent that produced powerful visions of liberation and solidarity can also become a place where Africans learn to fear other Africans.
In South Africa in 2026, that contradiction became painfully visible.
Anti-migrant movements intensified campaigns against foreign nationals, while protests on 30 June demanded the removal of undocumented migrants. Violence and intimidation had already displaced people, closed businesses and created fear among migrant communities. Some foreign governments began helping their citizens leave South Africa.
It is tempting to approach such events only through politics.
But a quiet work by Moses Tladi asks another question.
What does it mean to belong somewhere?
In Rural Domestic Scene, Tladi gives us none of the spectacle associated with political crisis. There are no demonstrations, borders or crowds. Rendered in coloured pencil on card, the scene is modest: rural dwellings, figures, trees and the rhythms of ordinary life.
Nothing announces itself as monumental.
That is precisely its power.
Moses Tladi (1903–1959) was a pioneering Black South African landscape artist. He moved to Johannesburg as a young man in search of work and developed his art while employed as a gardener. In 1931, Tladi became the first Black artist to have work exhibited at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, appearing in the first Exhibition of National Contemporary Art.
His landscapes are often quiet, but his own relationship with home was anything but politically neutral.
In 1956, Tladi and his family were forced from their home in Johannesburg and relocated to Soweto under the racial dispossession of apartheid. His artistic career, which had brought him national recognition during the 1930s, never recovered in the same way.
That history changes the way his landscapes can be seen.
Home is not merely architecture. It is the ability to remain somewhere long enough for a life to take root: to work, cultivate, raise a family and recognise a piece of the world as somewhere one belongs.
For Tladi, political authority could decide that such belonging was no longer valid.
Decades later, South Africa is a democracy, apartheid is gone, and the circumstances confronting African migrants today are profoundly different. The histories should not be collapsed into one another.
But one question survives both.
Who gets to call a place home?
Africa’s history has never fitted comfortably within the borders that now divide it. Long before contemporary nation-states emerged, people moved through trade, marriage, migration, pilgrimage, warfare and displacement. Languages travelled. Religions travelled. Objects and ideas travelled with them.
Modern borders gave those movements new political meanings.
Cross a line and a neighbour can become a foreigner.
That word has legitimate legal meaning. States have borders, immigration laws and obligations to their citizens. A serious discussion of xenophobia does not require pretending otherwise.
Nor does Pan-Africanism require the erasure of nations.
South Africa has the right to determine who may lawfully enter and remain within its territory. Its government has the responsibility to administer immigration policy, protect public institutions and respond to citizens’ concerns.
But the rule of law and xenophobia are not the same thing.
A state determining immigration status through lawful processes is fundamentally different from private citizens deciding who appears foreign enough to be challenged, intimidated or expelled.
Once that boundary weakens, nationality can begin to be inferred from an accent, a name or a face. The border is no longer encountered only at the edge of the state. It enters ordinary human encounters.
The consequences are carried by individual lives.
In 2026, Ghana organised the evacuation of nationals from South Africa following anti-foreigner violence, harassment and intimidation. By late July, more than a thousand Ghanaians had already been evacuated, with further returns under way.
Behind such numbers are lives interrupted.
A person can spend years building something in another country and still discover how quickly belonging can become conditional.
A shop can close.
A child can leave a school.
A neighbour can become suspicious.
A future imagined in one country can suddenly have to be reconstructed in another.
Political language can compress an entire human life into a category: migrant, foreigner, undocumented person, citizen. Each term may carry legal or administrative meaning, but none contains a biography.
Tladi’s drawing restores something that political vocabulary can remove.
Ordinariness.
The people inhabiting his landscape are not presented as demographic categories. They exist within the small architecture of daily life.
That may be one reason Rural Domestic Scene feels so different when viewed against the events of 2026. It reminds us that belonging is experienced before it is debated.
It is experienced through repetition: the road taken home, the neighbour recognised, the place where someone works, the landscape that gradually becomes familiar.
And yet another vision of Africa was being articulated at exactly the same time.
On 3 June 2026, I sat inside Guildhall in London listening to African leaders, investors and business figures speak about a continent whose future increasingly depends upon connection. The Africa Debate brought together more than five hundred leaders from government, finance, business and development, with Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama among the keynote speakers. Trade, infrastructure, investment, regional markets and new forms of partnership dominated the conversation.
Sitting there, I found myself thinking about movement.
So much of the future being imagined in that room depended upon things crossing borders: capital, goods, technology, expertise and opportunity. Africa was being discussed not as a collection of isolated economies but as a continent whose strength could depend upon deeper connections.
President Mahama spoke of an Africa seeking fair partnerships and a greater role in shaping its own economic future. The ambition was continental as much as national.
Yet beyond that room, Africans elsewhere were experiencing movement very differently.
Some were leaving homes because remaining had become frightening.
The contrast was difficult to ignore.
We speak increasingly of African integration as an economic necessity. We want trade to move. We want investment to move. We want knowledge, technology and opportunity to cross borders with fewer obstacles.
But what does integration mean if capital is encouraged to cross African borders more freely while human belonging becomes more suspicious?
This is where Child of Africa resides.
Pan-Africanism has always contained an aspiration larger than geography. It proposes that histories shaped by colonialism, displacement, liberation and cultural exchange might produce forms of solidarity extending beyond the nation-state.
That aspiration does not require Africans to pretend that their countries have identical interests.
They do not.
It does not require borders to disappear.
Nor does it demand a romantic version of African history. Pre-colonial societies experienced warfare, territorial rivalry, enslavement, hierarchy and exclusion alongside exchange, cooperation and extraordinary cultural flourishing. Colonialism transformed and intensified many divisions, but it did not invent human conflict.
A shared inheritance has never meant an uncomplicated one.
The question is what should be done with that inheritance now.
For younger Africans, the answer may become increasingly complex. Many inherit several languages, cross-border families and diasporic histories. Technology allows music, film, fashion, humour and ideas to move between Accra, Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Harare, Kinshasa and London with extraordinary speed.
Culture crosses borders more easily than people do.
A young person can feel intensely Ghanaian, South African, Zimbabwean or Nigerian while inhabiting a cultural world created by people across the continent.
That does not abolish national identity. It complicates it. And perhaps that complication is where the future lies.
Tladi’s drawing sits quietly inside this tension.
Rural Domestic Scene cannot determine immigration policy. It cannot tell a government where a border should be drawn or who should be permitted to cross it.
Art is not required to perform those tasks.
What it can preserve is recognition.
Tladi knew what it meant for political authority to alter a person’s relationship with home. In 1956, he and his family were forced from a place they had occupied because the racial order of apartheid had determined that they could no longer remain there.
The circumstances facing African migrants in South Africa today are different, and the distinction matters.
But the human question remains.
What happens when another person decides that the place where you have been building a life is no longer yours?
Return to Rural Domestic Scene.
There is no grand vision of Africa in it. No political programme is offered and no argument about borders is resolved.
There are people, land and the evidence of lives being made.
Beneath the debates over migration, sovereignty and national identity lies something older than all of them: the human attempt to find a place in the world and call it home.
The deepest question facing a continent is therefore not whether borders matter.
They do.
It is whether borders must teach the people living on either side of them to stop recognising one another.
Tladi gives us no answer.
He gives us a home.
