MIL Africa Engine

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Luke Sinwell, Professor of Sociology, University of Johannesburg

Anti-migrant campaigns in South Africa are increasingly being framed as acts of community protection. Protesters present their efforts as a response to community concerns about crime, unemployment and failing public services.

Leaders of these campaigns claim that weak border controls, ineffective immigration enforcement and undocumented migrants have contributed to deteriorating living conditions in many communities.

These campaigns are framed as “clean-ups”, “community protection” or removing “illegal foreigners”. But this is using democratic language to justify othering. It can legitimise the exclusion of migrants by casting them as outsiders, which could increase the probability of violence.

In 2024, the March and March group emerged in Durban. It led “clean up” campaigns to rid the city – and the country – of “illegal foreigners”.

Under these campaigns, vigilantism peaked. Protesters made citizens’ arrests of street vendors suspected of being undocumented. They shut down businesses owned by suspected “foreigners”.

Now, the group has set 30 June 2026 as a deadline for undocumented migrants to leave South Africa. And as the date approaches, anti-migrant mobilisation is intensifying across the country.

Groups are taking advantage of increased socioeconomic hardships. But instead of linking these to deeper structural causes, such as inequality, poor governance and economic stagnation, frustration is being directed towards the 3 million migrants in South Africa (about 5% of the population).

We have spent many years as researchers and activists involved in grassroots politics, social movements and popular struggles in South Africa. Our work has included extensive research on anti-migrant mobilisation, including the recurring episodes of xenophobic violence and exclusion that have shaped South African politics since the mid-2000s.

Drawing on our findings, we argue that the leaders of the current wave of anti-immigrant activity have the same playbook as previous campaigners. They use the language of community protection, active citizenship and people’s power to turn social and economic frustrations into campaigns against migrants.

But the line between “community protection” and organised exclusion is extremely thin. When ideas such as citizenship, safety and accountability are used to draw that line, they can make exclusion appear legitimate while weakening everyday security for everyone.

The danger is that daily life becomes organised around constant boundary-making. This means belonging is closely policed and violence can become a means of enforcing those boundaries.

The rise of anti-migrant mobilisation

The first major xenophobic attacks in democratic South Africa started in 2008 in Alexandra, a working-class township, just a walk away from the ultra-rich Sandton City. The attacks then spread to different parts of the country.

The ruling African National Congress denied that it was xenophobia, claiming it was mere criminality. Xenophobia contradicted the “rainbow nation” image of ubuntu and human rights that the leaders of national liberation had cultivated after taking power.

Since then, xenophobic attitudes and attacks have continued in parts of the country.

Operation Dudula was born in 2020, targeting migrants from other parts of the continent. It is an organised movement with a programme and a leadership. It organises marches, and often dominates mainstream and social media with its messages and presence.

Operation Dudula is a separate organisation from March and March. But the two are closely connected through their anti-migrant mobilisation. Both take real grievances and turn them into a simple message: migrants are the problem.

In this process, democracy becomes the idea that some groups have the right to decide who belongs and who does not.

A key example is the April 2022 events in Diepsloot, North of Johannesburg. Residents protested about violent crime, frustration with policing and government failure. These concerns were real and widely shared. But during the protests, Dudula leaders encouraged people to take matters into their own hands.

Zimbabwean migrant Elvis Nyathi was set alight and killed by a vigilante mob of about 30 local men, after they identified him as an “illegal foreigner”.

Our research suggests that when migrants are repeatedly described as dangerous, it can create conditions where violence becomes easier to justify in the name of “community protection”.

Our argument is that anti-migrant campaigns invoke the notion of active citizenship and reinterprets it to espouse a politics of hatred of the black foreigner.

Thus, migrants become victims of the weaponisation of protest and grassroots democracy. They are scapegoats for the problems faced by South Africans.

Instead of challenging big business, capital and landowners, anti-migrant campaigners fight the man or woman on the street who has nothing, and who has been dispossessed by the economic and political processes that caused them to become migrants.

There is also a wider, global pattern: across many countries, political movements link everyday hardship to anti-migrant ideas, presenting exclusion as common sense or self-defence.

What next

Our research suggests that responding to this issue requires more than reacting after mobilisation and violence occur. It requires addressing the conditions that allow scapegoating to grow.

First, structural problems must be taken seriously by anyone who wishes to address poverty and inequality. People face unemployment, inequality and failing services. If these conditions do not change, anger will be directed towards vulnerable groups.

Second, language matters. Terms associated with anti-migrant campaigns like “illegal foreigners”, “criminals” and “clean-ups” are not neutral. They shape how people think and act, making exclusion seem normal or even necessary. Public debate should focus on concrete evidence, accountability of those in power, and structural solutions.

Third, the answer cannot be to divide poor and working-class people according to nationality. South Africans and migrants often face the same problems of unemployment, poverty and insecure livelihoods. Building solidarity against the system of capitalism (white monopoly capital in particular) is more likely to improve people’s lives than treating migrants as the cause of hardships.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the killing of migrants is a reminder of where othering can lead when it becomes normal to decide who belongs and who does not. Once this logic takes hold, it rarely stays limited to one group. In moments of crisis, it can expand to other vulnerable people. This was seen during the country’s May 2008 xenophobic violence in which 21 out of the 62 people killed were South African.

– South Africa’s anti-migrant campaigns use the language of democracy: why that’s dangerous
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-anti-migrant-campaigns-use-the-language-of-democracy-why-thats-dangerous-284370

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Thato Manamela, South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) post-doctoral researcher, University of Pretoria

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away.

We spoke to the astronomers, Thato Manamela, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, and Roger Deane, director of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and a professor at the universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, about their study.

What you’ve found has been described as a ‘new frontier’ in space research. Why is it extraordinary?

This discovery is extraordinary because of the record distance at which we’ve detected it, over eight billion light-years away. That places it deep into the early universe. This means that we aren’t seeing the galaxy as it exists today. We are seeing it as it was 8 billion years ago. Since the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago, we are looking at a “toddler” version of the universe. At that stage where the maser signal was transmitted by the host galaxy, galaxies were much more “chaotic”, they collided more often and were much more active than the stable, mature galaxies we see nearby today.

It gives us a rare glimpse of galaxy interactions and extreme star-forming environments when the cosmos was less than half its current age. Think of light like a letter in the mail. If a friend sends a letter from overseas, by the time you read it, the news is old. In space, light is the letter. The “news” from this galaxy took 8 billion years to reach us. We see the galaxy as a “toddler” even though, in its own time, it has already grown up or changed.

We detected this megamaser, which operates on a scale of power millions of times greater than a typical galactic maser. Both megamasers and gigamasers are cosmic radio lasers. While a megamaser is a million times more luminous than a standard maser found in the local universe, a gigamaser is a billion times more luminous, making it 1,000 times more powerful than a megamaser.

In just five hours of observing time we found a signal that typically requires hundreds of hours of observation, given its distance and rarity. But gravitational lensing boosted the signal enough to detect it. Additionally, while we were targeting neutral hydrogen, MeerKAT’s wide bandwidth enabled the surprise discovery of the megamaser signal in the same data.

This rapid detection suggests that future surveys with MeerKAT and the upcoming SKA Observatory could uncover many more such distant, extreme objects. Its ability to find this so quickly proves that we finally have the technology to see faint signals from the very distant past. It’s a preview of what the upcoming Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a unique, one-of-a-kind international mega-project, might achieve.

But a highly complementary next-generation facility called the next-generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) is being planned and designed for construction in the US. The SKA Observatory (SKA-Low and SKA-Mid) focuses on low-to-mid radio frequencies. The ngVLA will operate at much higher frequencies. Together, they will form two of the major pillars of next-generation global radio astronomy. The finding gives astronomers a new way to study how galaxies evolved in the early universe.

What technologies or capabilities made this possible?

The discovery was made possible by the sensitivity and wide frequency coverage of the MeerKAT radio telescope. Its ability to detect faint signals over a broad frequency range allows us to search for spectral lines across large cosmic volumes. A spectral line is a cosmic chemical fingerprint. Every atom or molecule emits electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies. Detecting those frequencies tells astronomers what the gas is made of.

In this case, MeerKAT’s wide bandwidth allowed us to detect both the hydroxyl line and neutral hydrogen absorption in a single observation. Previously, with older technology, this would have taken two separate observations.

Equally important are advances in data processing and computing. The data were processed using high-performance computing resources at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA).

Processing such massive amounts of data is like trying to drink from a firehose. MeerKAT collects gigabytes of information every second, resulting in files far too large for a standard computer to handle. To find a signal from 8 billion years ago, which is millions of times fainter than a cell phone signal, we must use robust calibration pipelines. These act like an automated high-tech car wash to scrub away digital noise and sharpen the telescope’s focus. This “cleaning” process requires trillions of mathematical calculations, necessitating the use of supercomputers that work for days to transform raw radio interference into a clear scientific discovery.

Gravitational lensing also played a key role. A massive foreground object, like a star or galaxy, for example, amplified the signal from the distant galaxy, effectively acting as a natural telescope and boosting our ability to detect it.

How does what you’ve found change our understanding of the universe?

It’s rare that a single astrophysical system, a collection of celestial objects, in this case, two galaxies forming a lens system, can change our understanding of the universe. We typically need large sample sizes to do that. But the combination of the recording-breaking distance and the speed of the discovery was impressive.

It suggests that systematic searches – such as those conducted by deep MeerKAT surveys – could convert these once-rare finds into powerful probes of extreme, yet highly obscured star formation in the distant universe. As a result of this observation, the SKA Observatory and other future telescopes won’t just be looking for more of the same; they will be looking for hidden history.

Hydroxyl megamasers are usually associated with galaxy mergers. We expect some galaxy mergers to host pairs of supermassive black holes. Almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre. When galaxies merge, the supermassive black holes at their centres can eventually spiral towards each other, producing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. Finding systems like this helps astronomers study an important stage in galaxy evolution and the environments where these extreme events occur.

By using megamasers to find these pairs, we can study the final stages of how the largest objects in the universe are built. This is a major milestone in a galaxy’s life. By finding these galaxies now, we are catching them at a key evolutionary stage, the final countdown before they collide and release a massive burst of energy that our next generation of detectors will be able to hear.

The strength of the MeerKAT-detected hydroxyl signal after such a short observation time therefore implies that astronomers will be able to detect large numbers of these systems across most of cosmic time.

What does the discovery say about South Africa’s place in data-intensive radio astronomy?

This discovery highlights South Africa’s leading role in radio astronomy. Facilities such as MeerKAT, combined with data-intensive platforms like IDIA, provide world-class capabilities for both observation and analysis. It also demonstrates strong local expertise in handling large, complex datasets.

Discoveries like this rely on advanced data processing, signal extraction and scientific interpretation. These are all key strengths within the South African research community. As we move from using current scout telescopes like MeerKAT to building and operating the world’s largest radio observatory, the SKAO, South Africa is well positioned to remain a hub for data-intensive astronomy. Results like this reinforce the country’s role in shaping the future of the field.

– South African telescope detects record-breaking signal from the early universe
– https://theconversation.com/south-african-telescope-detects-record-breaking-signal-from-the-early-universe-280060