South Africa's xenophobic wave targets migrants as economic despair fuels scapegoating

In the townships of South Africa, a country burdened by the world's deepest inequality and a generation of stagnant promise, a grassroots movement called March & March has turned economic despair into a campaign against foreign-born neighbors. Migrants from across the continent — many documented, some long naturalized — find their shops looted, their livelihoods sealed shut, their presence treated as the cause of suffering they did not create. It is an old and recurring human story: when institutions fail and hope contracts, the stranger becomes the explanation. What unfolds in Katlehong and D