Homeward bound: The first group of 300 Ghanaians departing from OR Tambo International Airport, east of Johannesburg, to Ghana on Wednesday. Photo: Ghana High Commission, South Africa
The voluntary repatriation of nearly 300 Ghanaian nationals from South Africa on Wednesday represents what migration scholar Loren Landau describes as an unprecedented moment in post-apartheid South Africa.
This is not simply because of the scale of the operation but because another African government has stepped in to remove its citizens from a democratic African state amid rising anti-immigrant tensions.
“This is a sort of unprecedented political rebuke,” said Landau, a professor of migration and development at the University of Oxford and research professor at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“Clearly, the Ghanaian government is concerned about the safety of their citizens, although I think the main motivation for this is probably a way of sending a highly visible message to the South African government and to other countries about their dissatisfaction with the way South Africa is addressing these issues.”
