Professor Ziyad Motala's recent article, South Africa's Colonial Hangover: Demonising Africans While Courting Western Parasites, published on IOL, raises important questions about immigration, race, identity, and the lingering effects of South Africa's history. (Motala, a South African, is a professor of law at Howard University in Washington DC). The article argues that South African public discourse often directs hostility toward poorer African migrants while being welcoming toward Western expatriates and foreign property investors. It contends that this reflects deeper social, economic, and historical attitudes about class, race, and migration, and criticises government policy regarding housing, short-term rentals, and foreign ownership.

These are matters that deserve serious consideration. However, they also demand analytical precision, intellectual consistency, and a degree of caution commensurate with their sensitivity.

Unfortunately, Professor Motala's argument falls dolefully short on all three counts.

At the heart of his thesis lies the suggestion that South Africans who welcome Western visitors while expressing concern about African migrants are exhibiting a residual colonial mentality. The implication is that differing attitudes toward different categories of foreigners are primarily rooted in racial prejudice.

That conclusion is neither persuasive nor self-evident.

Distinctions

The difficulty is that the article repeatedly conflates entirely different categories of people engaged in entirely different forms of economic activity.

A tourist is not an immigrant.

An investor is not a job seeker.

A temporary visitor is neither a permanent resident nor a job seeker.

A foreign executive transferred to a South African branch office brings expertise and is not an undocumented economic migrant.

These distinctions are neither trivial nor semantic. They are fundamental to any serious discussion of immigration policy and economic impact.

A tourist typically arrives with resources earned elsewhere and spends them locally. Hotels, restaurants, tour operators, retailers, transport providers, and countless other businesses benefit from such expenditure. The tourist's presence increases demand for South African goods and services and supports employment throughout the economy.

Similarly, foreign investors bring capital, expertise, and commercial relationships that almost always expand productive capacity and create opportunities for South African workers and entrepreneurs.

African migrants perform a different role. They enter the domestic labour market as participants rather than temporary consumers. They compete, cooperate, innovate, and contribute within the economy itself.

This observation is neither criticism nor condemnation. Many migrants make invaluable contributions to their adopted countries. Throughout history, migrants have frequently been among the most industrious and entrepreneurial members of every society.

Nevertheless, it remains true that tourists, visitors, investors, and labour-market participants represent distinct economic categories with distinct effects.

To treat them as interchangeable, as Professor Motala has attempted to do, is to obscure rather than illuminate the debate.

Different Types of Migrants

The issue is not whether the foreigner is African or Western; the issue is whether different forms of migration and economic participation should be analysed according to their actual characteristics rather than their racial identity.

Indeed, reducing these distinctions to questions of race creates precisely the divisions that thoughtful public discourse ought to avoid.

South Africa remains a deeply diverse society still navigating the legacy of its history. In such an environment, commentators bear a particular responsibility to avoid framing complex social questions in ways that encourage citizens to view one another through racial lenses.

When legitimate concerns about immigration policy, labour-market pressures, public services, or border management are automatically attributed to racial animus, meaningful discussion becomes difficult. People cease debating facts and begin questioning motives.

Once that occurs, disagreement is no longer treated as a difference of opinion but as evidence of some sort of moral deficiency.

Such an approach rarely promotes understanding. More often it entrenches suspicion and resentment.

History offers numerous examples of societies that have suffered when economic and political disputes were recast as racial struggles. The result is seldom greater harmony. More often it produces polarisation, mutual hostility, and even open conflict between groups that might otherwise have found common ground.

South Africa can ill afford such an outcome; Professor Motala should know this.

Formidable Challenges

Our challenges are already formidable. Economic stagnation, unemployment, failing infrastructure, energy insecurity, deteriorating municipal governance, and persistent poverty affect South Africans of every race and background.

These problems cannot be solved through an ongoing allocation of historical blame.

Nor can they be explained solely through reference to colonialism.

History matters – it matters profoundly. The legacy of colonialism and apartheid continues to shape aspects of South African society and will do so for many years to come.

Yet history does not eliminate contemporary agency.

The failures of state-owned enterprises are not products of colonial administration.

The collapse of municipal services is not a consequence of nineteenth-century imperial policy.

Corruption, cadre deployment, lack of maintenance, procurement fraud, and institutional decay are overwhelmingly contemporary phenomena requiring contemporary solutions.

To acknowledge this reality is not to deny history; it is simply to recognise that responsibility cannot be exercised if accountability is perpetually deferred.

There is a deeper concern embedded within Professor Motala's analysis.

By attributing so many present-day tensions to inherited colonial attitudes, the argument risks diminishing the capacity of contemporary individuals and institutions to shape their own destinies. It subtly transfers responsibility from present actors to historical forces.

Successful Societies

Yet successful societies are built not upon grievance but upon agency.

They flourish when citizens believe they possess both the freedom and the responsibility to improve their circumstances, hold leaders accountable and strengthen the institutions upon which prosperity depends.

Those institutions are neither Western nor African; they are universal.

The rule of law, secure property rights, honest government, equal treatment before the law, freedom of speech and enterprise, and constitutional restraint have proven indispensable wherever human beings have sought to build prosperous and peaceful societies.

These principles transcend race.

Indeed, one of the most encouraging features of modern South Africa is that citizens from every community increasingly recognise this reality. Across racial, linguistic, and cultural lines, millions of South Africans share common aspirations: safe communities; functioning schools and hospitals; reliable water, electricity, and sewerage; economic opportunity; and a government that serves rather than exploits, provides rather than extracts.

These aspirations unite far more than race divides.

For that reason, public debate should strive to identify common interests rather than reinforce inherited antagonisms.

South Africa does not need a politics of competing victimhood.

It does not need a discourse that interprets every disagreement through the prism of race.

It needs a renewed commitment to reasoned debate, individual responsibility and institutional reform.

Most importantly, it needs a public conversation that recognises the humanity and dignity of every individual without reducing them to representatives of racial categories.

True Divide

The true divide in South Africa is not between African and Western, black and white, indigenous and foreign.

It is between ideas that foster prosperity and ideas that undermine it. Between institutions that work and institutions that fail, between accountability and excuse.

The future belongs not to those who most effectively cultivate grievance, but to those who most effectively build trust, opportunity, and freedom.

That is a goal around which all South Africans can unite, and one to which Professor Motala could usefully commit himself.

Dr Brian Benfield, retired professor, Department of Economics, University of the Witwatersrand, is a senior associate and Board member of the Free Market Foundation.