“Let’s Roll the Streets of Mzansi”: A Collaborative Ethnography of Anti-Immigrant Violence in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the rise of Operation Dudula, a fervently anti-immigrant movement in South Africa, through a collaborative ethnography conducted by two researchers from vastly different backgrounds: one a migrant and expat from Lesotho with lived experience of xenophobia, the other a white European academic. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024, we reflect on the challenges of gaining and losing access to members of Operation Dudula, managing ethical tensions, and negotiating asymmetrical research dynamics. We argue that collaborative ethnography, when practiced as joint sense-making and co-theorization, can yield distinctive insights into organized anti-immigrant movements and the proliferation of xenophobic violence in postcolonial contexts. This article contributes to ongoing debates on xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa, collaborative ethnographic methods, and the ethics of researching exclusionary social movements by demonstrating that xenophobic violence is a structurally embedded feature of the post-apartheid order increasingly entangled with transnational far-right ideologies; by showing that collaborative ethnography practiced as co-theorization yields distinctive conceptual insights in research contexts marked by racial inequality and moral conflict; and by arguing that the ethical dilemmas of researching exclusionary movements at close range can themselves be rendered analytically productive.