The news arrives with the grim inevitability of a Roman dispatch from a distant, crumbling province: Ghana is evacuating 300 of its citizens from South Africa. Anti-immigrant protests, the modern echo of tribal migrations and the fall of civil order, have forced this ignominious retreat. One cannot help but feel the chill of historical recurrence.

The protests in South Africa are not merely economic grievances dressed in xenophobic garb; they are the death rattle of a society that has forgotten the virtues of cosmopolitan order. South Africa, the Rainbow Nation of Mandela’s dream, now descends into the very darkness it once claimed to have escaped. The 300 are not just numbers: they are the canaries in the coal mine, the warning that the continent’s most industrialised state is rotting from within.

Ghana’s gesture is noble but pathetic, a band-aid on a haemorrhage. What does it tell us when a nation must extract its own people from a land that once promised liberation? It tells us that the cycles of history are brutal and indifferent.

The fall of Rome was not a single event but a long twilight of failed integration and rising insularity. South Africa’s anti-immigrant fervour is the same fire. The Afrophobia, the attacks on foreign shopkeepers, the street justice: it is all the barbarism that the Enlightenment sought to banish.

And yet here it is, reborn in khaki and anger. Ghana’s evacuation is a pitiful salvage operation, but it is also a lesson. The modern nation-state is a fragile construct.

When economic stagnation bites, the first thing to be discarded is the stranger. The second is the law. The third is hope.

Let us not pity the 300 alone. Let us pity the South Africa that forces them to flee. For in driving out the stranger, a nation drives out its own soul.

The hard question remains: when will the next evacuation be, and from which failing state?