Nigeria, April 29 -- The deeper truth is less dramatic, harder to weaponise and more enduring: in the everyday life of South Africa, migrants and locals are not enemies. They are partners in survival.

Three weeks ago, the coastal city of East London, now renamed KuGompo, woke to a familiar and unsettling scene: a confrontation that has come to define South Africa in the eyes of too many - a country turning on its fellow Africans.

The spark was almost absurd in its smallness. A Nigerian national, Chief Solomon Ogbonna Eziko, was ceremonially crowned an "Igbo king." It was meant to be symbolic, cultural, and contained. Instead, it metastasised. Political parties, traditional leaders and civic organisations mobilised under the banner of "d...