In 1962, a man with no legal country arrived in Addis Ababa. He was a fugitive from an apartheid regime that viewed him as a terrorist, traveling under an assumed name with a makeshift Ethiopian passport granted to him by order of Emperor Haile Selassie.
That man was Nelson Mandela.
In Ethiopia, he didn’t find border walls, bureaucratic hostility, or angry mobs accusing him of stealing local jobs. Instead, he was housed, given military training by the Ethiopian Kolfe Police Force, and handed 5,000 British pounds to fund the African National Congress (ANC) armed struggle. Ethiopia, a nation fiercely proud of its centuries-old independence, looked at a black man from the southernmost tip of the continent and saw a brother whose freedom was directly tied to their own.
Now, fast forward to modern South Africa. Over the past decade, a dark and recurring wave of xenophobic violence—often referred to locally as afrophobia—has swept through townships and cities. Immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Ethiopia have been targeted, their shops looted, their bodies burned, and their presence blamed for systemic economic failures.
It forces a heavy, uncomfortable historical counterfactual: What if Ethiopia had treated Nelson Mandela the way modern South Africa treats African immigrants today?
The Alternate 1962: A Closed Border, A Crushed Struggle
If 1962 Ethiopia had operated on the logic of modern xenophobia, Mandela’s arrival would have triggered suspicion, not solidarity.
Imagine an alternate history where Ethiopian officials greeted Mandela with disdain, viewing him as an “illegal foreigner” or a drain on national resources. He might have been detained at the border, processed through a corrupt immigration system, or deported straight back into the hands of the South African Special Branch.
Without the military tactics he learned at the Kolfe camp, uMkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC) would have lost its foundational strategy. Without his Ethiopian passport, Mandela could not have traveled across Africa and Europe to build the international coalition that eventually broke the back of Apartheid.
If the rest of Africa had adopted this hypothetical “Ethiopia First” isolationism, the liberation of South Africa would have been delayed by decades—or crushed entirely.
Amnesia in the Rainbow Nation
The current entitlement driving afrophobic attacks in South Africa stems from a profound collective amnesia. There is a dangerous narrative among certain political factions and citizens that South Africa’s freedom was a self-contained victory, won solely within its borders.
History violently contradicts this. The frontline states bore the physical and economic brunt of South Africa’s liberation:
- Tanzania and Zambia hosted thousands of ANC freedom fighters in exile, sharing their meager post-independence resources and facing deadly military raids from the South African Defense Force.
- Angola fought conventional wars against the apartheid military, losing thousands of its own citizens to shield South African revolutionaries.
- Nigeria instituted an “Apartheid Tax” on its civil servants’ salaries to fund the liberation movement and provided countless scholarships for exiled South African youth.
Africa did not view South Africans as refugees or burdens; they viewed them as extensions of themselves. To watch South Africans today demand the expulsion of fellow Africans under slogans like “Put South Africans First” is a tragic inversion of Pan-African solidarity.
Deflecting from Internal Failures
Xenophobia is always an exercise in deflection. It is easier for populist politicians to blame a Zimbabwean shopkeeper or an Ethiopian merchant for structural unemployment, severe housing shortages, and failing infrastructure than it is to hold a corrupt ruling class accountable for decades of economic mismanagement.
When local mobs turn on immigrants, they are punishing the very people who stood by them during their darkest hours. The small-scale traders fleeing poverty in neighboring countries are the children and grandchildren of the Africans who sang anti-apartheid anthems and watched their own national budgets stretched to fund the ANC’s offices in Lusaka, London, and Dar es Salaam.
Remembering the Debt
South Africa owes a massive historical debt to the African continent. This debt cannot be paid in cash, but it must be paid in dignity, protection, and brotherhood.
When Nelson Mandela returned to Ethiopia in 1990, just months after his release from 27 years in prison, it was one of his very first international trips. He went to say thank you. He understood that his freedom, and the freedom of his people, was incubated in the soil of independent Africa.
If modern South Africans want to truly honor Mandela’s legacy, they must dismantle the entitlement that breeds hatred toward their neighbors. They must remember that when their greatest leader had nowhere else to run, Africa opened its arms, handed him a passport, and called him a brother.
