So June 30 came and went. So did a lot of migrants, many with legitimate documents. The marchers swarmed (some) streets. The cops looked on. Some kids broke into a tuck shop. A man fell to his death in Durban while being pursued by a South African mob.
And now?
What happens when the marches continue and all the migrants have left but there are still no pots of gold in the streets of the rainbow nation?
If the conspiracy holds that this is the work of populist politicians grasping desperately for the last plank of their shipwrecked political careers, there are two words for them: Nigel Farage.
The mouth of Reform UK, he has ridden a tsunami of vileness directed at people arriving on the shores of Mud Island in rubber boats, has claimed they threaten Britain’s women and girls, and promised to send some of them back to the Taliban in exchange for money.
No Winston Churchill we’re dealing with here. Not even Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell, for that matter, but just another venal narcissist who is currently under the squirm to account for his campaign funding, some of which appears to have been funnelled from equally nasty people.
Blaming migrants for your country’s failures is lazy. Haitians eating pets, and fables of jailbreaks of insane, drug-addicted farm labourers, sorry, job-stealers, swarming across the Rio Grande is the last redoubt of politicians who have zero courage, morals, policies or what the rest of the world might call a heart.
Back to the Lucky Country, where three decades of kicking the migration can down the road, but still rubber-stamping Zimbabwe’s corrupt election in 2002 (cue Operation Murambatsvina) has, once again, manifested in terrified people crouching outside their consulates and riding buses back to places they don’t remember.
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