On 19 January 2015, a 14-year-old South African boy, Siphiwe Mahori, was shot and killed in Snake Park, Soweto. Versions of the incident vary. A crowd had gathered outside a Somali (or, as other reports allege, a Pakistani) spaza shop intending to either loot or rob the business. Feeling threatened, the shopkeeper shot into the crowd. His bullet struck the teenager in the neck and fatally injured him. It is not certain how the teenager came to be there. Accounts range from the youth being a robber, a looter or just an innocent passerby. The killing sparked fury. Over the next few days many shops were looted across Soweto. Seven people were killed, and more than 100 arrested.

The riots in Soweto had barely subsided when attacks broke out in KwaZulu-Natal in early April. Foreign shops were looted and torched, and over 1 000 people were displaced from neighbourhoods surrounding Durban and nearby towns. While condemning the violence, political leaders and state officials were quick to assert that xenophobia was not involved.

A few days after violence first broke out in Soweto, the province's Community Safety MEC Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane assured journalists that ‘The actions are pure criminality … For now we won't declare it xenophobic attacks.’ Provincial premier David Makhura similarly attributed the attacks on foreign shops to criminality rather than xenophobia: ‘What we saw in Soweto was not xenophobia, but criminal activity. And crime must be dealt with as crime because crime has no colour, class or gender.

Two years later, when confronted by a planned ‘March Against Immigrants’ in Pretoria held on 24 February 2017, the political refrain remained the same. The marchers’ pamphlet alleged that ‘Nigerians, Pakistanis, Zimbabweans, etc. bring nothing but destruction; hijack our buildings, sell drugs; inject young South African ladies with drugs and sell them as prostitutes.’

The then state president, Jacob Zuma, labelled the protests as ‘anti-crime’ not ‘anti-foreigner’ and doubted that the march against immigrants could be understood as xenophobic. Instead, he believed, South Africans were protesting because foreign nationals ‘open a lot of businesses. It becomes so obvious that the numbers are too big.