Borders Without Visas: What Ruto’s War on Hawkers Reveals About Africa’s Unfinished Business
Here is a question I cannot stop turning over in my mind. When the British sailed into the Gulf of Guinea, up the Nile, and into the Great Lakes; when the French marched into the Sahel and the Congo Basin—whose visa did they present at the border? Whose immigration officer stamped their papers before they cleared forests, redrew kingdoms into colonies, and renamed our ancestors’ rivers after their queens and generals? They needed no passport to take our land, no work permit to extract our gold, cocoa, rubber, and blood. They arrived by gunboat, not by visa application. And a century later, their descendants sit in Paris and London deciding which Africans may enter their countries, under what conditions, and for how long. I ask this not to relitigate history for its own sake, but because history has a way of returning to the table when we least expect it. This month, in Nairobi, it returned wearing a very different face: an African president expelling African hawkers from African streets, using the very language of “protecting our own” that colonial administrators once used to justify keeping us out of our own economies. Before we go to Nairobi, let us pause in Paris in 1789. For generations, French peasants had watched their king and his nobles feast while the granaries emptied and taxes climbed. The people were not first angry at foreigners. They were angry at misrule—at a court that spent lavishly while bread prices crushed ordinary families, at a system that punished the poor for problems the powerful had created. When the masses finally rose, they did not storm the borders looking for immigrants to blame. They stormed the Bastille. They went for the palace, not the peasant next door. That distinction matters enormously for what is happening in Kenya today. On September 2, 2026, Kenya’s President William Ruto stood before small-business owners at State House and delivered a directive that would upend thousands of lives within days. He declared that foreign nationals operating hawking stalls, small kiosks, and informal businesses—many of them Burundians, Congolese, Rwandans, and Ugandans—would no longer be permitted to engage in certain small-scale trading activities, with enforcement beginning September 7. Ruto’s stated reason was that Kenya would welcome investors who create jobs, rather than foreign hawkers competing directly with citizens. The government subsequently introduced a 90-day window for undocumented East Africans to regularize their status. Citizen.digital The human cost was immediate. Hundreds of Burundian nationals rushed to their embassy in Nairobi seeking travel documents after the crackdown began, with long queues forming outside the embassy, where mostly young men carried suitcases and mattresses while waiting for emergency papers. Reuters The traders’ comments needed no translation. One Burundian trader, Eric Niyonkur, said simply, “We feel unwanted here.” Another, Habonimana Jacques, put it more starkly still: the president, he said, had treated them as though they were not human beings. These were not smugglers or criminals. Many sold peanuts, coffee, tea, and doughnuts—the small, dignified trades of people trying to survive. Kenyans who bought from them every morning noticed the emptiness where the vendors used to stand. \” These were not smugglers or criminals. Many sold peanuts, coffee, tea, and doughnuts—the small, dignified trades of people trying to survive.” — Sr. Leonida Katunge What happened next is the part of this story that deserves to be told loudly across the continent, because it complicates assumptions about xenophobia in Africa. Kenyans did not, in large numbers, turn on their foreign neighbours. Instead, many turned their anger toward their own government. Activists, commentators, and ordinary citizens began speaking out, warning that Burundians and other foreigners must not become targets of harassment or collective punishment. Former Chief Justice David Maraga voiced what many were already thinking. He accused Ruto of pursuing a “scapegoat policy,” arguing that Kenya’s economic hardship could not reasonably be pinned on small foreign traders. He went further, criticizing government debt, corruption, and waste, and describing the executive as a major contributor to Kenyans’ economic difficulties. People Daily The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) did not stay silent either. It warned that the crackdown could trigger serious rights violations if enforcement continued without lawfulness, due process, and nondiscrimination, noting that it had received complaints of threats, intimidation, and discriminatory treatment from migrant and refugee communities. Knchr Rights groups and diaspora associations echoed the same message: do not let joblessness curdle into hatred of your neighbour. This is the truth the hawkers’ story keeps trying to tell, if we are willing to listen: the problem was never the woman selling groundnuts on a Nairobi pavement. The problem is a government that has chosen to ignore the elephant in the room: mismanagement of borrowed trillions. Sadly, immigrants, as usual, are blamed for the shortcomings of government. \” The problem was never the woman selling groundnuts on a Nairobi pavement.” — Sr. Leonida Katunge Let us juxtapose Kenya’s story with South Africa’s. South Africa has, for two decades, carried the scars of xenophobic violence—waves of attacks in 2008, again in 2015, and recurring flashpoints during which ordinary citizens turned on their fellow Africans. Migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Nigeria, and beyond have sometimes been killed or injured while authorities struggled to contain the violence. Movements have also organized activities opposing the government’s stance. It is precisely this history that made Kenyans in the diaspora flinch when they saw their own government reach for similar language. Kenyans living in South Africa, through their lobby group KEDASA, urged Ruto to handle the crackdown carefully, warning from their own painful experiences of xenophobia and Afrophobia that “individual unlawful conduct can quickly become collective blame,” a trajectory they said Kenya must avoid at all costs. So here is the mirror: in South Africa, it was often locals who turned on migrants while the state struggled to protect them. In Kenya, the state initiated restrictions on migrant traders, while ordinary citizens—traders, riders, churchgoers, and human-rights defenders—pushed back and said, in effect: not in
