Ghetto Gospel

By Theresa Rézeau 

Across parts of South Africa today, xenophobic violence is no longer an abstract concern but a recurring and visible reality. It appears in the closure of migrant-owned businesses, in targeted attacks on foreign nationals, and in the growing normalisation of rhetoric that frames certain groups, particularly migrants from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, as sources of crime, moral disruption, and social instability.

These tensions do not arise in isolation. They are embedded within a broader national context defined by deep structural inequality, persistently high unemployment, and fragile systems of governance that struggle to absorb both citizens and newcomers into a stable economic order. What is often described simply as xenophobia is, in practice, something more complex. It is a politics of proximity in which people living under shared conditions of constraint are brought into competition within spaces that cannot expand sufficiently to hold them.

The ghetto is often understood as a fixed place, a bounded geography marked by exclusion and limitation. It is imagined as a neighbourhood or district shaped by history, policy, and economic neglect, where opportunity is constrained and movement restricted. Yet this understanding, while historically grounded, risks narrowing the concept too quickly.

The ghetto is not only a place that can be located on a map. It is a condition. It is a way in which life is structured when access is uneven, when systems fail to distribute opportunity, and when proximity becomes unavoidable rather than chosen. It defines not only where people are situated, but how they are positioned within networks of power, recognition, and survival.

In the contemporary world, this condition does not remain static. It moves. Not as architecture, but as circumstance. Not as a visible boundary, but as a persistent limitation that travels with those shaped by it. Migration does not always dissolve the structures that produced it. More often, it carries those structures forward and reproduces them in new environments under altered but recognisable forms.

This dynamic is most visible not in moments of departure, but in what follows. Movement does not end at arrival. It continues in the reorganisation of life within environments that are already under strain. The question is not only where people go, but what they enter, and what those environments are able, or unable, to hold.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the economic realities of South Africa. The official unemployment rate stands at 31.4 percent, while youth unemployment remains acute, often exceeding 45 percent and reaching as high as 57 percent depending on the measure. These figures reflect a broader structural condition in which access to stable, formal employment is severely limited. For many, the formal economy is not simply difficult to enter. It is effectively absent. In its place, the informal economy has become foundational. It is composed of small retail shops, street vendors, transport services, and micro-enterprises through which daily survival is negotiated.

These economic spaces are not expansive. They are saturated. Livelihoods depend on narrow margins, limited customer bases, and fragile supply chains. Competition is immediate and continuous. Success depends less on long-term growth and more on the ability to sustain daily operation within constrained conditions.

It is into this environment that migrants arrive. Many come from neighbouring countries such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as well as from further afield, including Nigeria. Their movement is driven by necessity. It is shaped by the search for work, stability, and the possibility of a future that cannot be secured elsewhere. Yet arrival does not guarantee resolution. Migrants enter economic ecosystems already under pressure, where existing populations are themselves navigating instability.

Migrant entrepreneurs often bring distinct economic strategies. These include access to cross-border supply chains, pooled capital within extended networks, and a willingness to operate in high-risk environments where regulation is inconsistent. These strategies can enhance efficiency and competitiveness, but they can also disrupt local economic balances. In informal retail sectors, migrant-run businesses often operate longer hours and at lower price points. This increases their appeal to consumers while intensifying competition for local traders.

This competition is not abstract. It is lived daily. It is experienced in the struggle to secure customers, maintain income, and sustain livelihoods. In many townships, tensions have surfaced in targeted actions against migrant-owned shops. These tensions are most visible in sectors where competition is direct. For local traders, this is not neutral market interaction. It is experienced as displacement within an already fragile system.

The issue is not simply presence. It is saturation. Too many livelihoods depend on systems that cannot sustain them all.

What this saturation looks like in practice is not abstract. It is visible in the everyday organisation of space within townships and informal settlements. Small retail shops positioned metres apart compete for the same limited pool of customers. Informal traders line the same streets, selling identical goods with minimal differentiation. Transport routes overlap. Access to electricity, water, and municipal services remains uneven.

In such environments, economic life does not unfold across expanding markets but within tightly compressed circuits of exchange. A single new entrant into this system is not absorbed invisibly. Their presence is immediately felt. It alters price, availability, and access. What might appear, from a distance, as ordinary economic activity becomes, at ground level, a continuous negotiation of survival within limited space.

Within these conditions, perception becomes a powerful force. Some tensions are not purely imagined. Certain migrant networks have been associated, fairly or unfairly, with specific forms of criminal activity such as drug distribution and fraud. Whether these associations are statistically representative matters less than how they shape perception. In environments under strain, perception simplifies complexity. It categorises and transforms individuals into symbols of broader anxieties.

This is where rhetoric intensifies. Migrants, particularly from Nigeria, are increasingly described in collective terms. Crime and social disruption are attributed broadly, often without differentiation. Language shifts from description to consolidation. It gathers diffuse frustrations into identifiable targets.

At the same time, responses from within migrant communities add complexity. Some acknowledge tensions openly and frame local reactions as the result of prolonged frustration and weak enforcement. This does not justify violence, but it shows that the conflict is not experienced as one-dimensional.

What emerges is not a simple opposition between locals and foreigners. It is a convergence of pressures. Economic strain, institutional fragility, uneven enforcement, and the absence of effective integration all shape the situation. Within this convergence, proximity becomes charged. People who share similar vulnerabilities are positioned as competitors within the same constrained environment.

This is where xenophobia takes root most forcefully. It emerges not only from difference, but from conditions that make difference feel threatening. It reflects how strain within shared spaces can redirect frustration toward those closest at hand.

The ghetto, in this sense, is not only a space of exclusion. It is a condition in which too many lives are organised within systems that cannot adequately support them. It gathers people into shared environments without expanding the capacity required to sustain that coexistence. The result is not simply closeness. It is strain.

When systems fail to redistribute opportunity and trust erodes, pressure accumulates. Eventually, it seeks release. That release is often misdirected. Those who are most visible and most proximate become the focus.

Yet proximity does not eliminate solitude. Even within dense, shared environments, individuals remain responsible for sustaining their own position within systems that offer little protection. Economic life may be collective in appearance, but its burdens are often carried alone. In this sense, solitude is not the absence of others, but the absence of support.

In Flight into Egypt, Henry Ossawa Tanner renders movement under uncertainty with quiet intensity.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937),Flight into Egypt (1923)
Oil on canvas.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Public domain. 

A small group travels through the night, their forms partially dissolved into shadow, guided by a soft, almost suspended light. There is no sense of arrival, no clear destination, only continuation. The figures remain close, bound not by choice but by necessity. What emerges is not escape, but passage. Movement persists, yet it does not resolve the conditions that made it necessary.

Tanner’s scene is not one of dramatic flight, but of sustained motion within constraint. The figures advance together, yet their vulnerability is shared rather than relieved. The space around them does not open. It absorbs them. In this sense, the painting does not present migration as transformation, but as continuation. A carrying forward of uncertainty, of exposure, of dependence on fragile conditions that cannot be fully secured.

This continuity is central to the concept of Ghetto Gospel. By Ghetto Gospel, I do not mean resilience as performance, nor suffering as something to be romanticised. I mean a condition in which life continues within structures that do not fully support it, and where proximity itself can generate tension. It is the discipline of continuation without guarantee.

This persistence is not always visible. It exists in quiet forms. It is found in the decision to keep working, to keep trading, and to remain within systems that offer no certainty.

There is a tendency, in moments of visible conflict, to search for resolution in moral clarity. To identify perpetrators and victims, to separate right from wrong, and to restore order through judgement. Yet the conditions described here resist such simplification. They are not defined by a single cause, nor resolved by a single intervention. What they reveal instead is a structural imbalance between movement and capacity, between the number of lives seeking stability and the systems available to sustain them. Within this imbalance, tension is not an anomaly. It is an outcome. And the question is not whether it will emerge, but how it will be directed, and at whom.

If these conditions persist, the consequences will not remain contained within moments of visible conflict. They will deepen into patterns. Repeated cycles of tension, release, and instability may become normalised over time. Informal economies will continue to absorb more people than they can sustain, trust between communities will erode further, and the line between competition and hostility will grow increasingly thin. What begins as local tension risks becoming structural fracture.

To hold this pressure differently would require more than enforcement.

And still, the image remains. The figures continue forward. Not resolved, not secure, but still in motion. Within even the most constrained conditions, life does not disappear. It persists. And in that persistence lies the final tension. Not whether movement continues, but whether the structures that must hold it can endure.