Nigeria, April 24 -- Few tragedies are as unsettling as a liberation learning to fear those who once helped sustain it.

In South Africa, that irony is no abstraction. It lives in the uneasy space where continental solidarity collides with recurring hostility toward African migrants, where a freedom once imagined in expansive moral terms sometimes appears to narrow under the pressures of economic frustration and wounded national expectation.

That contradiction should disturb far more than South Africa, because it reaches beyond the politics of immigration into a larger question about memory, belonging, and the moral afterlife of liberation itself. What becomes of a freedom struggle when it begins, even in fragments, to look upon former ...