Afrophobia Must Be Named

I was born in South Africa. Africa is not a cause I adopted or a vocabulary I picked up in a seminar. It is the ground I come from, and the place where my family chose a side.

My aunt, Esther Barsel, was born in Raguva, Lithuania, in 1924 and brought to South Africa at the age of three. She joined the Communist Party of South Africa at fourteen and became a courier between the banned liberation movements and the activists still working in the open. In 1964 she was tried alongside Bram Fischer, and she served three years of hard labor at Barberton Women’s Prison. For part of that time her cell stood beside the one holding Nelson Mandela before he was moved to Robben Island, and a short distance away my uncle, Hymie Barsel, was held in solitary confinement.[1] Long afterward, when Chris Hani returned from exile, she became his private secretary. She gave the whole of her life to the freedom of other people.

Between the prison and that later service came some twenty years under a banning order. A banning order was not a sentence passed by a court. It was an administrative decree, signed by the Minister of Justice without trial and renewed at will, built to erase a person from public life. A banned person could be confined to a single magisterial district, forbidden to attend any gathering, barred from being quoted or published, and required to report to the police. It was civil death by signature. When Esther’s own daughter married, she needed police permission simply to attend, and when that permission was granted she was forbidden to speak to the guests. The state would let her watch her child marry and would not let her say a word at the wedding.

My uncle Hymie was a Litvak in speech and tradition. He had stood trial for treason alongside Mandela, and the security police tortured him. The damage to his body never healed, and in the end it killed him. A doctor had once taught him that antisemitism could not be defeated while any other racial hatred was tolerated, that the prejudices are one fabric and must be cut together. Hymie believed it. He gave his health, and finally his life, for the civil rights of black South Africans he had been told were no concern of his. He refused that lie. So do I.

My aunt and uncle were not exceptions. They were part of a flood. The Jews of South Africa came overwhelmingly from Lithuania, out of the Pale of Settlement where pogrom and, in living memory, the Holocaust had taught them exactly what a state becomes when it ranks human beings by blood. They looked at apartheid and knew the machine on sight, so they fought it far past their numbers. Jews were two in every hundred white South Africans. They were more than half of the whites put on trial for treason in 1956,[2] and every one of the whites seized with the high command at Lilliesleaf farm was a Jew. Joe Slovo came out of Lithuania to help found the armed wing of the movement. Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb for the same cause. By some reckonings the Jewish presence in the resistance ran to twenty-five times their share of the population. This was not charity, and it was not guilt. It was recognition. My aunt carried Lithuania in her, and my uncle carried the same Litvak inheritance. They brought the memory of one people’s persecution to the fight against another’s, because to them the two were a single fight.

I am their heir. On July 30, 1986, the South African Security Police arrested me. My offenses were these: I fed black children in the ghettos, I taught them to read, I pressed my university to admit black students, and I handed out the literature of the African National Congress. On November 25, 1986, I fled the country. The work did not end at the border. In the years since I have served as Honorary Consul for Togo, as an Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs of the African Union, and as an adviser to African movements on questions of sovereignty and self-determination. I am a child of Africa, and I have spent my life trying to deserve the name.

I am also a gay man, and I learned early what it costs to be judged by an identity rather than by a life. When I was a child, a young man in my own circle took his life under the weight of that judgment. There was no public word then for what had been done to him. The hatred had no name, and a thing without a name is hard to point at, harder to measure, and nearly impossible to hold anyone to account for. He died inside that silence. Years later the prejudice was given a name, homophobia,[3] and later still we named transphobia, the contempt aimed at people whose gender does not fit what others demand of it. Once a hatred can be named, it can be argued with, counted, and resisted. The word did not create the cruelty. The word made the cruelty visible.

These are not separate stories. They teach one thing. A hatred you will not name is a hatred you cannot fight.

On June 7, 2026, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed South Africa about migration and used a word he had never spoken in public before. He said there was no place in the country for xenophobia, racism, sexism, Afrophobia, or any other form of intolerance.[4] He spoke while anti-migrant formations were ordering foreign Africans to leave the country by the end of the month, and while families were being driven from their homes.[5] I have been a steady critic of his government, and nothing I have written about its failures has changed. But a true statement does not lose its truth because of who makes it. On this one point he was right, and the point is larger than the man.

The word Afrophobia deserves a permanent place in our language, and the reason is not ceremony. It is that the words we already hold do not do the work.

Racism is a container. We keep it because it is convenient, but we learned long ago that it does not, by itself, let us see anything clearly, so we reached inside it and named the parts. We named antisemitism, because hatred of Jews carries a specific history and a specific machinery that the general word could not capture.[6] We named hatred of Asians when we saw that it too behaved in its own particular way. The word racism could mean any of these and so named none of them. Each hatred became answerable only once it was lifted out and given a name of its own.

Africans are the people we left inside the container.

Xenophobia does not rescue them, because xenophobia locates the harm in foreignness, and most contempt for Africans has nothing to do with borders. It falls on Africans in their own cities and on the idea of Africa itself, wherever the person happens to stand. The Nigerian engineer presumed unqualified, the Congolese student presumed slow, the Zimbabwean trader attacked in a country he calls home, the African who crosses the sea to Europe in search of refuge and is received with contempt: these are not interchangeable instances of generic racism, and they are not fear of the foreign. They share one content, contempt aimed at African identity, carrying old assumptions of backwardness and incapacity. A specific hatred requires a specific name.

To refuse that name is not a neutral act. It decides that the suffering of Africans, and the centuries of history behind it, are not distinct enough to deserve a word of their own. That judgment is itself an instance of the contempt in question.

We know how the naming is done, because we have done it for others. When another community insisted that the hatred against it be recognized, the machinery followed in sequence. A commission produced a defining report. Scholars adopted the term and refined it. Monitors began to count incidents that had gone uncounted. The United Nations set aside a day on its calendar, anchored to the memory of a massacre, appointed an envoy to confront the prejudice, and pressed its member states to write protections into law. None of that required a new invention. It required only the recognition that a particular people faced a particular hatred deserving a name of its own. Africans face such a hatred. The machinery already exists. What is missing is the will to extend it to them.

The objections are familiar. Some say a new label fragments society. The opposite is true, because naming an injustice does not create it but makes an existing harm legible, and what can be named can be measured and answered. Others say our current words already cover these cases. If they did, we would not need a paragraph of explanation every time we try to describe anti-African discrimination, and the need for the paragraph is the proof that the word is missing. Others call this identity politics. It is the reverse, since the same reasoning that justified every name we have already granted justifies this one, and to grant those and withhold this is not principle but selective attention. A last objection holds that the term is a foreign import. It is not. A sitting African president has now spoken it from the seat of his own government. This is Africa naming a wound of its own.

Those who invoke intersectionality should be the first to accept the word. If prejudices truly overlap and compound one another, then prejudice against Africans cannot be the single category permitted to stay nameless. The vocabulary of recognition keeps expanding, as it should, with new names added as new harms come into focus. There is no honest reason for this one to be the exception. A framework that claims to map every form of exclusion and then leaves this one off the map is not a framework. It is a preference in the costume of one.

Afrophobia must be expressly included in every serious discussion, curriculum, declaration, policy, and program addressing racism or bigotry. To omit it is not a neutral oversight. It excludes Africans from the vocabulary of protection and excludes Africa from the moral map. No institution can credibly claim to oppose racism while treating anti-African contempt as an unnamed residual category.

Every remedy begins with a diagnosis. You cannot legislate against a harm you will not name, gather data on a category you refuse to define, or hold anyone to account for conduct that officially does not exist. The silence is not the absence of a problem. The silence is the problem, because it guarantees the harm goes uncounted and therefore unanswered.

Johnny Clegg, himself the grandson of Jewish immigrants, built South Africa’s anthem of shared humanity on a fact of science set to a Zulu beat: that every person alive is a scatterling of Africa, descended from the same ancient ground. To despise Africans is to despise the origin of all of us.

I did not arrive here through theory. I arrived through an aunt the state tried to erase by decree, an uncle whose body was broken for people he was told were not his concern, a country that arrested me for feeding its children and teaching them to read, and a friend who died because the thing that killed him had no name. We found the will to name homophobia. We found it for transphobia. We have found it, again and again, for every hatred we decided mattered. Afrophobia must be named in public, openly and exactly, because only what we are willing to name are we ever willing to repair.

That is not identity politics. It is moral consistency.

[1]On Esther Barsel’s life in the freedom struggle and Nelson Mandela’s tribute to her, see “Madiba mourns the death of Esther Barsel,” Nelson Mandela Foundation, October 8, 2008, nelsonmandela.org.

[2]Of the twenty-six whites arrested in the 1956 Treason Trial, fourteen were Jewish, while Jews were roughly two to three percent of South Africa’s white population.

[3]George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), which brought the term “homophobia” into general use.

[4]“Address by President Cyril Ramaphosa on migration, Union Buildings, Tshwane,” The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa, June 7, 2026, thepresidency.gov.za.

[5]“We will do better, Ramaphosa promises, while another anti-foreigner protest looms,” Daily Maverick, June 7, 2026, dailymaverick.co.za.

[6]The term “antisemitism” was given currency by Wilhelm Marr in Germany in 1879, recasting older religious hatred of Jews in racial language.