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South Africa has entered winter with a familiar and dangerous combination of pressures.

Last week, groups of people marched through the Johannesburg CBD looking for foreigners and demanding that they prove whether they were legally in the country. In a video that went viral, a man bedecked with fur armbands typically associated with Zulus and wearing a South African flag as a cape was seen accosting a person before slapping him.

The incident has raised concerns that South Africa could again be approaching a period of xenophobic violence as has happened in the past. In 2008, more than 60 people were killed in anti-foreigner pogroms. In 2015, seven people were killed in similar unrest.

Those were not the worst episodes of widespread public violence in post-apartheid South Africa. In 2021, riots broke out across the country, concentrated in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, leading to the deaths of more than 350 people and causing millions of rands in property damage.

But several of South Africa’s major outbreaks of unrest have shared two features. They have occurred in the colder months, and they have coincided with periods of pressure on food prices and household living costs.

The 2008 unrest broke out on 12 May, just as temperatures were starting to fall. Food price inflation was also high. In April 2008, headline inflation was 11.2%, while food inflation was 16.1%. In March, headline inflation had been just over 10.0%, while food inflation stood at 15.8%.

The pressure had been building for months. Overall inflation for 2007 was 7.1%, but had risen to 9.0% by December that year. It remained above 9.0% for the first two months of 2008, breached 10.0% in March, and stayed high into the winter and for most of that year. Overall inflation in 2008 was 11.5%, the only time annual inflation has exceeded 10.0% in a single post-apartheid year.

A similar pattern was visible in 2015, when anti-foreigner violence broke out in April, again as South Africa headed into the colder months. Headline inflation was more subdued, at 4.0% in March and 4.5% in April, but food inflation was again running ahead of the headline rate, at 5.8% in March and 5.0% in April.

Then came 2021. The July unrest followed a prolonged period of depressed economic activity after the Covid-19 lockdowns and the resulting economic shock. Through 2021, inflation began creeping up, from 3.2% in January to 5.2% in May, before remaining near 5.0% in June and July. Food inflation in June (in the middle of winter) was nearly 7.0%, with similar numbers recorded in the previous three months.

Those inflation figures may not appear extreme by South African historical standards. But perceptions matter. When households already feel poorer, even moderate price increases can deepen anger. The political effect of inflation does not depend only on what the data say. It also depends on whether people feel their food, transport, and basic survival costs are escaping them.

South Africa now stands at a similar confluence.

The country is heading into winter. Inflation has been fairly subdued in recent years, but that period could be coming to an end because of pressures arising from the ongoing Middle East crisis.

The governor of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), Lesetja Kganyago, has warned that the country has been hit by “the biggest jump in fuel-price inflation in the history of inflation targeting”. He also warned that rising food prices present a greater risk, with higher fuel costs affecting diesel and fertiliser, both important inputs in food production.

Kganyago said the SARB may have to start raising rates soon, but that the bank was “studying the data very carefully, both to assess how these variables are playing out and to see if there is early evidence of underlying inflation starting to move”.

That warning is important because fuel and food are not abstract macroeconomic indicators. They are the daily pressure points of household survival. Fuel feeds into transport costs. Diesel feeds into logistics and farming. Fertiliser affects food production. Once those pressures move through the economy, they hit the poorest households first and hardest.

At the same time, South Africa has suffered almost two decades of stagnation in incomes and living standards. That means many households are entering this winter without much of a buffer. A rise in food and fuel prices does not land on a stable society. It lands on a country already marked by frustration, poverty, weak growth, and low trust in government.

The political risk is sharpened by the return of visible anti-foreigner sentiment in Johannesburg. Of the three major unrest episodes discussed here, two were sparked by rising hostility towards foreign nationals. If economic pressure rises while organised anti-foreigner mobilisation grows, the danger is not imaginary.

There is also a longer public order problem. Violent protests in South Africa have increased over the past twenty years, driven by stagnant living standards and incomes. In 2005, the rate of public violence was 1.9 per 100 000 people. It reached a peak of 7.4 per 100 000 people in 2019. In 2025, the latest year for which figures are available, the rate was 2.8 per 100 000 people, the lowest in more than ten years, but still part of a broader upward trend this century.

The point is not that unrest is inevitable this winter. It is not even this newspaper’s assessment that unrest is probable.

The point is that the risk is rising.

South Africa has seen this pattern before. Winter arrives. Food and fuel pressure builds. Incomes are stagnant. Public anger searches for a target. Politicians and police underestimate the warning signs until a localised spark becomes a wider crisis.

This winter may pass without major unrest. But households, firms, communities, and authorities would be reckless to assume that it will.