Claire Ceruti and Luke Sinwell
Families sleep outside embassies and consulates wrapped in blankets against the winter cold. Beside them are plastic bags, suitcases and the few possessions they managed to carry from homes they may never return to. They are commonly described as people “returning home” or being “repatriated”. But these phrases conceal a harsher reality. People are not leaving because they have freely chosen to. They are leaving because organised intimidation, violence and fear have made remaining in South Africa impossible. This is not voluntary return. It is forced displacement.
The response from comrades in Siyafana Sonke Action Campaign has been immediate and inspiring. People have cooked meals, collected blankets, donated clothing, organised transport, accompanied frightened families, negotiated with embassy officials and spent long nights ensuring that women and children could at least sleep behind embassy gates rather than on the pavement. These are profoundly human acts. They express the solidarity, compassion and dignity that should characterise any socialist movement.
The question is not whether this work matters. It does. The question is: what political role such work should play? Humanitarianism responds to immediate suffering. It asks: how do we ensure people survive this moment? In moments of crisis, that response is essential. No socialist believes that people should wait for liberation before they receive food, shelter or safety. But organised solidarity begins from a further question: how do we organise together to transform the conditions producing this suffering?
Solidarity is not simply an ethic of care. It is a political practice through which people build relationships, democratic organisation, political confidence and collective power. Humanitarian action is necessary, but it must be linked to revolutionary organising aimed at transforming the social and political conditions that produce the crisis. It must never become a substitute for that struggle. This distinction matters not only politically but practically: humanitarian responses can quickly become overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, whereas organised solidarity can turn immediate acts of defence and care into the foundations of a movement capable of changing the conditions that make such intervention necessary.
Every day more people arrive at embassies than volunteers can support. Governments fail to provide adequate assistance. Embassies and consulates become overwhelmed. Volunteers step into the gap. We negotiate with officials. We celebrate when a few more people are allowed through the gates or when blankets arrive on a freezing night. These victories matter deeply to the people whose lives they affect. But they also force us to ask a difficult question.
Who are we saving?
If volunteers continually substitute for governments that refuse to protect migrants, are we simply helping the state manage the consequences of its own failures? The South African state has failed to protect people living within its borders from organised violence and intimidation, responding too often too slowly, too inconsistently, or not at all. Across the region, governments have likewise failed to create the political and economic conditions in which people can live with security and dignity. Now, as people are once again driven across borders, embassies and consulates are often unable or unwilling to provide meaningful protection to those arriving at their doors.
Humanitarian solidarity is essential in such moments. People need food, shelter, legal assistance and protection. But humanitarianism cannot become the politics of managing abandonment. No movement can permanently fill the gaps left by states that refuse to fulfil their obligations, nor should emergency relief become a substitute for confronting the structures that produce the crisis. The question is not whether we save people. It is whether saving people in the present can become the basis for organising the collective power needed to change the conditions that make rescue necessary in the first place.
That means moving from humanitarianism to organised solidarity: from responding to the consequences of state failure to confronting the state, the political forces that legitimise exclusion, and the economic system that continually produces insecurity and dispossession. We do not organise simply to keep people alive within an unjust system. We organise so that people can collectively change it.
We use the term Afrophobia deliberately. While “xenophobia” is the more familiar label, the violence is directed overwhelmingly at poor Black African migrants, not at foreigners in general. Europeans and wealthy expatriates are not being hunted from townships or sleeping outside embassies. Naming the crisis accurately reminds us that this is not simply hostility towards outsiders. It is a political project that divides African working-class communities while leaving untouched the structures of capitalism, colonialism and state failure that produce poverty, inequality and desperation.
This is why humanitarianism alone cannot be the horizon of our politics. If we attempt to meet every need created by this crisis, we risk becoming an unpaid substitute for governments that have abandoned their responsibilities. We begin by saving migrants, but, we may end by saving the state from confronting its own failures.
None of this means abandoning care. Quite the opposite. The first days of this crisis demanded exactly what comrades did: cooking food, distributing blankets, accompanying frightened families, finding emergency shelter and refusing to leave people alone in their hour of need. That is solidarity. But organised solidarity cannot end there.
From Managing Crisis to Building Power
As the crisis deepens, another question becomes unavoidable: Where should we invest our collective time and energy if we want to prevent this from happening again? Our time, our energy and our organisational capacity are finite. Every hour spent responding to displacement is an hour we cannot spend preventing it. Every night spent compensating for the failures of governments is time not spent strengthening the organisations capable of challenging those failures. Imagine if the hundreds of hours now spent responding to displacement were also invested in communities where Afrophobic mobilisation is taking place.
Imagine comrades standing alongside residents in Thembelihle, Ratanda, Makause, Tsakane, Kliptown and other working-class communities — not simply delivering relief, but organising community dialogues, political education, neighbourhood meetings, demonstrations and campaigns capable of challenging the politics of hatred before families are forced to flee.
Imagine arriving not simply with food parcels but with a political argument: that the problems facing working-class communities are not caused by someone who crossed a border to find work, but by a system that produces unemployment, inequality, failing public services and insecurity.
Those borders themselves are products of colonial conquest and division, reinforced by a global economic system that allows capital to move freely while workers are encouraged to fight one another. Perhaps this is the deeper form of care. It is the difference between helping someone after they have been driven from their home and helping build the collective power that makes it possible for them to remain there safely. This is not an argument against humanitarian work. It is an argument against allowing humanitarianism to become our politics.
Humanitarian work can sometimes lead us into quiet negotiations with officials who have already failed. We measure success by persuading an embassy to open its gates for another night or convincing reluctant bureaucrats to fulfil responsibilities that were always theirs. Sometimes those negotiations save lives, and they should never be dismissed. But they do not shift power.
Organised solidarity asks different questions: Who is organising where the terror is taking place? How do we strengthen those struggles? How do we help communities resist forced displacement rather than simply making displacement more humane? How do we ensure that migrants are not forced to choose between sleeping outside an embassy and fleeing the country altogether?
These are political questions because this is not, at root, only a humanitarian crisis. It is a political crisis. It is produced by organised Afrophobia, by a state unwilling or unable to defend those living within its borders, by governments across the region that have failed millions of their own citizens, and by a capitalist system rooted in colonial dispossession, exploitation and the artificial borders imposed upon Africa. No amount of humanitarian assistance can resolve those conditions. Only organised political struggle can. The choice facing socialists is not between care and struggle. We need both. Nor is it between humanitarian work and organisation.
The question is whether our acts of care become moments of organised solidarity that build collective power, or whether they remain acts of humanitarian relief that leave the structures producing the crisis intact.
