This piece was a shortlisted finalist for the Canon Collins 2026 essay competition. The annual competition invites essays that demonstrate thought leadership and offer fresh perspectives on issues affecting southern Africa.

Some of my earliest memories are not of places but of words.

One of those words was kwerekwere.

I heard it long before I understood it. It drifted through school corridors and playground conversations, sometimes wrapped in laughter, sometimes sharpened into an insult. As a child, I knew nothing about immigration policies, borders or xenophobia. I only knew that whenever the word was directed at me, it carried a message that was impossible to misunderstand, it said to me “you are not one of us”.

I was two years old when my family moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa. South Africa is where I learned to read and write, where I made friends, where I attended school and imagined a future for myself. It is the country whose streets, accents and seasons shaped my understanding of the world. It is, for all practical purposes, home. Yet there were moments growing up when none of that seemed to matter as much as the place printed on a birth certificate. The older I became, the more I realised that borders do not always exist where we think they do. We imagine borders as fences, checkpoints and lines drawn across maps, but the most enduring borders are often invisible. They appear in conversations. They reveal themselves in assumptions. They emerge when someone asks where you are really from, as though your first answer could not possibly be enough. They surface whenever a person is reduced to their nationality before they are recognised as a human being.

My earliest encounter with this reality came when I was six years old. Xenophobic violence had erupted in parts of South Africa. Years later, newspapers would describe the attacks in terms of immigration, politics and public unrest. My memory is much simpler. I remember sleeping at the beach with my family because it felt safer than sleeping at home. I remember the uneasiness of the adults around me and the strange awareness that something had changed, even if I could not yet understand what it was. Children rarely understand the reasons behind fear, they simply absorb it. Looking back, what unsettles me most is not the violence itself but the ideas that made it possible. Violence does not begin with burning shops or broken windows. By the time those things happen, something deeper has already taken root. It begins in the stories people tell about who belongs and who does not. It grows whenever human beings are transformed into problems to be solved rather than neighbours to be known.

In recent years, South Africa has once again witnessed a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment. Foreign nationals are routinely blamed for unemployment, crime and failing public services. Faced with complex social and economic challenges, it is often easier to point to visible outsiders than to confront more difficult realities. Yet what I find particularly striking is how little legality seems to matter. Public debates often suggest that the issue is documentation, that hostility is directed only at those who lack the proper papers. Yet lived experience tells a different story. Refugees carrying valid permits, students lawfully enrolled at universities and long-term residents who have spent years contributing to their communities often find themselves subjected to the same suspicion. Recent anti-immigrant campaigns and protests have only reinforced this reality, demonstrating how quickly legal status can become irrelevant once a person is marked as an outsider.  The issue, it seems, is no longer legality. The issue is belonging.

When I was younger, I believed documents had power. Adults treated them as though they did. Passports were carefully stored. Permits were renewed. Birth certificates were tucked away in drawers and folders. Documents opened doors, crossed borders and settled questions. Or so I thought. As I grew older, I realised that documents answer only certain kinds of questions. They can tell people where you were born. They can confirm your legal status. They can prove that you are permitted to be somewhere. What they cannot do is convince someone that you belong. That lesson reveals itself in small moments: a question asked with just enough suspicion to make you uncomfortable, a joke that everyone else laughs at, the pause that follows your surname, the look that says, before a single word is spoken, explain yourself. You learn that some people are not interested in whether your papers are in order. They are interested in whether your existence is.

Perhaps this is why xenophobia remains such a persistent problem. It is not fundamentally about borders or paperwork. It is about the boundaries we draw around empathy. South Africa knows this history better than most nations. Its democratic foundations rest upon the rejection of exclusion and the affirmation of human dignity. It knows what happens when identity becomes a measure of worth and belonging becomes something that must be earned. And yet, time and again, there is a temptation to repeat the same mistake with different targets. When I think back to being called a kwerekwere on the playground, I do not remember the children who said it. What remains is the lesson the word attempted to teach: that some people belong naturally while others must justify their place. I reject that lesson.

I still carry documents. Most migrants do. They prove where we were born. They prove our legal status. They prove that we have permission to cross certain borders. For years, I thought that was what mattered. But the older I become, the more I realise that the most important things about a person have never been capable of documentation. No passport records kindness. No permit measures dignity. No birth certificate captures grief, love, sacrifice or hope. The things that make us human have never fitted neatly into government files. And yet those are the very things we so often fail to see in one another. Perhaps that is the real tragedy of xenophobia. Not that it asks people for papers. It is that, even after the papers are produced, it still struggles to see the person holding them.

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