THE BIG READ: The names on a record sleeve tell us an important story

On 17 August, southern Africa’s heads of state and government met in Durban. Inside the venue, they told President Cyril Ramaphosa they were hurt and upset by the treatment of their citizens.

Outside the hall, marchers from the vigilante movement March and March carried a banner with the words “It’s Time to Fetch Your People”, giving the governments inside until 30 September to collect their nationals. Fifty-three years ago, a South African went to Accra. Nobody sent him, and nobody came to fetch him.

Hugh Masekela left South Africa in 1960, after Sharpeville, and would not return for 30 years. By early 1973 he was in Accra, Ghana, at the Napoleon club of Faisal ­Helwani, a ­Lebanese-Ghanaian, where Hedzoleh Soundz were on the stand.

“Hedzoleh” is Ga for freedom. Together they made the album Masekela Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz at EMI’s Lagos studio in July 1973, six of its eight compositions theirs, not his.

Miriam Makeba, of the same generation, lost her passport in 1960 and her citizenship in 1963 for testifying at the UN, and Guinea sheltered her, as it had him. A revoked passport removes the ground a musician stands on, and what another country offers is not a courtesy but a replacement for what was taken.

In March 1974, at Wally Heider’s studio in Hollywood, Masekela and Hedzoleh were joined by two Crusaders, both black Texans, Joe Sample and Nesbert “Stix” Hooper, then cutting Southern Comfort, to record a song Masekela had written the night before. It is called Stimela, about the coal train that carried men from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola into the mines of Johannesburg to work in other people’s ground, an arrangement Jonathan Crush dates not to apartheid, but to the Kimberley diamond fields.

The men on that train were not visitors to the economy. They were one of the things it was built from, and Masekela was born inside it, in Witbank, where the miners cursed the train that had brought them.

Consider what that recording is. A song about men moved across borders to labour in a country not their own, written by a man who could not cross the border home, played by West Africans and descendants of West Africans carried across an ocean to labour in a country not their own.

Stimela is about men an economy used without needing to know, and the men who played it could have gone the same way, session hands from Accra on an exile’s American record. The sleeve of I Am Not Afraid does the opposite. It lists the Ghanaians one by one, each with his instrument: Stanley Kwesi Todd, Richard “Jagger” Botchway, Nat “Leepuma” Hammond, James Kwaku Morton, Samuel Nortey, Isaac “Okyerema” Asante, Acheampong Welbeck.

Nobody had to do that. A song about men reduced to their labour, played by men a sleeve chose to name. That is the debt.

Thirty years into freedom, the debt has curdled. On the Human Sciences Research Council’s 2025 survey, the share of South Africans wanting no immigrants reached 42%, and the share welcoming all fell from 43% in 2008 to 15%.

March and March had already named 30 June as a deadline for undocumented migrants to leave, and by the end of that month their governments had helped over 2,700 people home. Of the day’s 120 marches, 108 were peaceful. A man was shot dead in Alexandra while foreigners’ spaza shops were looted, and in the weeks after mobs went door to door, driving families from their homes. The conflict monitor ACLED counts 148 fatal attacks on migrants since 2022.

The peaceful marchers are not a mob. Jacob Dlamini, the South African historian at Princeton, has spent three books dismantling the reflex that sorts the past into pure villains and victims. The marchers are the children and grandchildren of people whom the state spent decades brutalising, and the Zimbabwean trader is not a saint by virtue of being attacked.

The marchers’ grievance is real, but its object is not. The government’s own survey finds about three million migrants, some 5%, and Census 2022 counted fewer still, 3.9% and falling.

Stats SA’s chief demographer believes foreign nationals told enumerators they were born here, the fear grown severe enough to corrupt the count that would refute it. Public infrastructure spending has fallen 43% in 17 years. The marchers are aiming at one person in 20 for the consequences of that.

In June Ramaphosa told the country: “We know that South Africans are not xenophobic.” On 14 August, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he told the country it could not “preach integration at summits and practise exclusion in our streets”.

Thabo Mbeki has made the same case – that shelter created a debt. He is right. The memory of a debt, though, is a weak instrument, and one version of his argument will not survive scrutiny: that Africa once kept faith with itself and South Africa alone has fallen from grace.

Three years before Hedzoleh Soundz assembled in Accra, Ghana passed the Aliens Compliance Order on 18 November 1969. It fell hardest on the roughly 191,000 Nigerians there. On 17 January 1983, Nigeria’s Shagari government ordered undocumented foreigners out, and of the two million who left, up to 1.2 million were Ghanaian.

Emmanuel Akyeampong has written the history of Ghana’s Lebanese, whose grandchildren, born there, were still not Ghanaian. The obstacle was not only colonial law but Pan-Africanism itself, taking the citizen and the black man to be the same person. The removals of 1969 and 1983 did not fail that idea; they enforced its definition of the citizen. The 1969 order also drove out two-thirds of Ghana’s 12,000 Lebanese. Masekela, though, was playing on Helwani’s stage within four years. There was never a golden age to fall from. Generosity and expulsion ran alongside each other.

If South Africa were uniquely faithless, the problem would be national and the remedy shame. It is not unique. What it is doing is not a character flaw, but a machinery.

Precedent, though, is not permission. Ghana’s expulsions did not excuse Nigeria’s, and neither excuses South Africa’s. The difference now is knowledge. South Africa saw 1969 and 1983, and its exiles were sheltered by both countries in between.

The state is meant to hold the monopoly on violence. Apartheid turned it inwards, on the people it governed, and its end should have brought the violence down. Instead it changed hands, from the state’s to the street’s, and settled on the migrant, the one person the state does not shield.

When the state gave up violence, why did the street take it up? I put that question to Dlamini, and his answer corrected it: it is less that the street adopted apartheid’s violence than that it was immersed in apartheid’s logic, a violence so total, criminalising almost every aspect of life, that it made the idea of consequence meaningless. “Yes, humans embodied it,” he said. “They continue to embody it.”

The machinery chooses its target by subtraction, which is Amartya Sen’s argument in Identity and Violence. Alida Mpombo, who has sold second-hand clothes in Yeoville since 2009, told GroundUp she can no longer renew her family’s asylum papers. Violence needs her to be one thing, a Congolese, and the blame arrives presorted by nationality – a sign it is administered, not merely felt. Ethiopians and Somalis are blamed for the spaza shops, Malawians for jobs, Nigerians for drugs and Zimbabweans for nearly everything.

The state’s part is not only neglect. Since 2008 the attacks have brought few arrests and fewer convictions. A Hate Crimes Act signed in May 2024 still has no commencement date; in November 2025 a high court found the state’s failure to implement its own anti-xenophobia plan unconstitutional.

In Yeoville, Operation Dudula had turned immigrants away from the clinic until a court interdict forced it open, and GroundUp reports that since March and March began marching there in April, they are being turned away again. Impunity is why the violence walks freely.

Masekela returned home in 1990 and died in Johannesburg in 2018, aged 78 – 30 years a foreign national in other people’s countries, 28 a citizen of this one. In 2014 he asked Oliver Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean, to give the first lecture in his name, and a Soweto audience sang along to his Shona without necessarily understanding the words. The country changed around him, and by the end was doing to Zimbabweans and Malawians and Mozambicans – and not only to them – something close to what had been done to him. No law required it.

He kept singing about the coal train until the year he died. It is a song about people carried across borders to work, and about a country that took their labour and gave them nothing to belong to. He wrote it in one night in Los Angeles, with seven Ghanaians and two Texans waiting to play it. It was never only about the mines. DM

Kofi Adjepong-Boateng is based at the University of Cambridge; he is a research affiliate at MIT’s history section.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R39. The e-edition of DM168 is now free for readers who are signed into their Daily Maverick account. Click on the cover of the newspaper below to access the e-edition.