By Theresa Rézeau 

Henry Ossawa Tanner painted the Flight into Egypt again and again.

In his 1923 version, the Holy Family moves through darkness. Their bodies are partially absorbed by the blue-grey atmosphere surrounding them, illuminated by a strange, suspended light. Tanner (1859–1937), an African American painter born in Pittsburgh who spent much of his adult life in France, returned to biblical subjects throughout his career. There is little of the spectacle traditionally associated with biblical painting. No multitude witnesses their departure. No architecture promises sanctuary ahead. Three figures simply move through the night.

They are escaping.

The Gospel of Matthew tells us why. After the Magi departed, Joseph was warned in a dream that Herod intended to kill the child. He took Mary and Jesus and fled to Egypt. The story has been painted for centuries, yet Tanner returned to it with unusual persistence, producing at least fifteen versions of the subject between 1899 and 1932.

His 1923 painting refuses to make movement synonymous with freedom.

The family has escaped immediate danger, but escape is not the same as security. They have crossed into movement without knowing what awaits them at its end. Tanner gives us no arrival. The painting holds them within the journey.

That distinction matters when speaking about migration now. Movement changes geography, but it does not necessarily change the conditions through which a life must be negotiated.

This is the condition described here as Ghetto Gospel: continuation without guarantee. The word gospel means good news, but there is no attempt here to make deprivation beautiful or suffering redemptive. The phrase names something more uncomfortable: the testimony produced when people continue moving, working and building lives inside structures that offer no certainty that those lives will become secure.

Across parts of South Africa today, hostility towards foreign nationals has again become visible through intimidation, attacks, protests and actions directed at migrants and migrant-owned businesses. These tensions are often reduced to a conflict between South Africans and foreigners. Beneath that opposition, however, lies a more difficult question about what happens when people searching for stability enter environments in which stability is already scarce.

South Africa’s economic pressures give this tension a measurable scale. In the second quarter of 2026, Statistics South Africa recorded an official unemployment rate of 33.6 percent; among people aged fifteen to thirty-four, it reached 47.4 percent. Behind those percentages are millions of individual negotiations over work, income and the possibility of building an ordinary life.

Scarcity on this scale can intensify competition, but it does not predetermine what people do with that pressure. Poverty does not produce xenophobia automatically, and economic hardship cannot excuse violence against those perceived as outsiders.

For many people, access to stable formal employment remains limited. Informal economic activity therefore becomes essential: small shops, street trading, transport, repair work and other forms of enterprise through which households sustain themselves when salaried employment is unavailable.

These spaces can be intensely competitive. Livelihoods may depend upon narrow margins and limited pools of customers. Migrant entrepreneurs enter these environments alongside South Africans already negotiating the same pressures. Different businesses employ different strategies, networks and supply arrangements, and no single model describes migrant enterprise as a whole.

What matters is that competition takes place within an economy in which opportunity is already severely constrained.

This is where the idea of the ghetto becomes useful, but also dangerous.

Historically, the word belongs to specific histories of forced segregation. Its early European usage became associated particularly with the compulsory confinement of Jewish communities, most famously in Venice. Over centuries, the term accumulated other meanings and was later applied to racialised and economically marginalised urban districts elsewhere.

Using the term here does not erase those histories. Instead, it raises a further question: can the ghetto also describe a condition produced when access to opportunity, security and mobility becomes radically uneven?

A ghetto is then not simply somewhere on a map. It becomes a way in which life is organised when choices contract, institutions fail to distribute opportunity adequately and people are forced to compete within systems whose capacity has not grown with the demands placed upon them.

Understood this way, the condition can travel.

Migration does not necessarily dissolve the structures that made movement necessary. A person may cross a border and still encounter unemployment, insecure housing, weak services, economic exclusion or social suspicion. Geography changes while precarity assumes another form.

Tanner’s travellers offer an image of that condition. Their movement is necessary, but necessity does not make it liberating. They remain close because the journey demands it, and their vulnerability is shared without being removed.

Tanner himself understood something about the search for another place. He became one of the most significant African American painters of his generation and eventually established his life largely in France after encountering the racial prejudice that constrained him in the United States.

His experience should not be collapsed into the biblical flight he painted, nor should either be treated as equivalent to migration in contemporary South Africa. The histories are different. But Tanner’s repeated return to the Flight into Egypt gives movement unusual psychological weight. Across more than three decades, he returned to people leaving one place without certainty about the next.

That uncertainty also shapes migration across southern Africa.

People leave Zimbabwe, Mozambique and other countries for South Africa for different reasons: employment, family, education, political circumstances or the hope of greater stability. Others arrive from countries further away. Their motivations and legal circumstances differ, just as the communities into which they arrive differ.

Arrival itself resolves none of those complexities.

A person entering a township or informal economy does not enter empty space. They enter existing networks of work, trade, family, frustration and survival. The South African trader struggling to keep a business alive and the migrant opening a shop nearby may both be responding to insecurity. Yet because their livelihoods meet at close range, structural scarcity can begin to acquire a human face.

The causes of scarcity may be vast, while its target can be standing metres away.

Long histories of inequality, unemployment, failures of governance, uneven public services and the continuing spatial consequences of apartheid cannot easily be confronted at street level. A neighbouring shopkeeper can.

Economic explanation must therefore remain distinct from moral absolution. Scarcity can create conditions in which scapegoating becomes easier to mobilise, but violence remains a human choice rather than an inevitable economic response.

Public rhetoric plays an important role in that process. Crime, drug trafficking, fraud and pressure on public services can become attached rhetorically to entire migrant communities without establishing the responsibility of the individuals being targeted. Once nationality itself becomes evidence of suspicion, a person ceases to be encountered primarily as a neighbour, shopkeeper, worker or parent. They become a symbol onto which much larger fears can be projected.

Language can change before violence does. Individual acts become collective characteristics, anecdotes become categories, and complex institutional failures acquire identifiable human targets.

This is why xenophobia cannot be understood only as dislike of foreigners. It also concerns the political and social organisation of proximity.

People can share the same street without sharing the same sense of belonging. They can depend upon the same customers while believing that the other person’s survival threatens their own. They can experience similar forms of economic vulnerability while being encouraged to interpret one another as competitors rather than as people shaped by the same inadequate system.

The ghetto, in this sense, is not defined by closeness alone. It emerges when closeness exists without sufficient security, trust or institutional support.

This does not mean that every conflict within such an environment has the same cause. Nor does it mean that local grievances should be dismissed simply because xenophobic rhetoric may attach itself to them. Informal economies involve genuine disputes over regulation, competition, rents, supply, policing and access to services.

The danger begins when those disputes are converted into judgements about who is entitled to belong.

A foreign-owned shop can then cease to be understood as a business and become evidence of invasion. A migrant worker can cease to be understood as an individual and become evidence of displacement. Nationality becomes explanation.

At that point, the structural problem has been inverted. Instead of asking why an economy cannot provide sufficient opportunity, attention turns towards the person competing for the little opportunity available. Proximity has transformed scarcity into suspicion.

The contradiction inside the title now becomes clearer. If gospel means good news, what can possibly constitute good news within conditions like these?

Not suffering itself, and not the romantic language of resilience so often imposed upon people required to endure it.

There is a language frequently applied to people living under extreme constraint that praises their ingenuity, endurance and ability to survive. Sometimes that admiration is deserved. But resilience can become a comfortable word for those observing suffering from elsewhere. It can turn institutional failure into an inspiring story about the people required to endure it.

The gospel is the testimony: evidence that life continues without making the structures that produced such precarity acceptable.

Ghetto Gospel is continuation without guarantee.

It exists in the migrant who opens the shop again after intimidation, but also in the South African trader trying to keep a family business alive. It exists in people who queue for work that may not come, in families sharing income across borders and in communities constructing ordinary life within economic systems that repeatedly fail to provide ordinary security.

None of this makes violence inevitable. Structural pressure creates conditions, but human beings still make choices within them. Institutions make choices too: about policing, immigration enforcement, economic policy, public language and whether those threatened with violence are protected.

The future is therefore not predetermined by an unemployment rate.

Prolonged insecurity nevertheless has consequences. When economic frustration repeatedly encounters rhetoric that identifies outsiders as the problem, distrust can harden into social habit. Businesses close. Families move. Communities retreat into defensive identities. People begin to read nationality before character.

Eventually, the border is no longer only at the edge of the country. It appears between neighbours.

The image returns to Tanner’s Flight into Egypt.

The figures are still moving through the night. Tanner does not tell us what kind of reception awaits them, whether they will be recognised as strangers, whether they will find work or how long their exile will last. He paints the interval between danger and whatever comes next.

That interval may be the most important part of the painting.

Migration is often narrated through departure and arrival, as though crossing the border completes the story. Tanner gives us something less resolved. His travellers remain between places, carrying what forced them to leave while depending upon a world they cannot yet know.

That is where Ghetto Gospel resides: not in the glorification of hardship, but in the testimony produced by lives required to continue within uncertainty.

Tanner leaves his travellers on the road.

The question for the societies through which people move is what happens when they arrive.