On Thursday, September 3, a demonstration against undocumented migrants once again turned violent in Durban. About a hundred members of the March and March movement carried out what they called a « clean-up campaign » against an encampment that had stood for thirteen weeks outside a Home Affairs office, home to several hundred foreigners, most of them from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Five Congolese nationals, including two children, were injured in the clashes, and police had to use stun grenades to disperse the crowd. This episode is only the latest in a long series of incidents that have shaken the country for nearly a year and a half.
To understand how things reached this point, one has to go back to March 2025, in Durban again. That is where a former radio presenter and civic activist, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, founded March and March. From the outset, the movement presented itself as a legitimate civic organisation, distancing itself from openly xenophobic groups. Its website borrows the visual language of mainstream civil society, with T-shirts, polished communication campaigns and repeated use of the South African flag, building the image of a patriotic movement rather than an anti-foreigner one.
Much of March and March’s success lies in the country’s social climate. With unemployment above 31%, part of the population is looking for simple explanations to complex problems, and undocumented immigration becomes an easy target. The movement claims it is not targeting foreigners as such, but calling for stronger border control, a review of asylum policies, and action against businesses employing undocumented workers. This seemingly legalistic rhetoric has ended up attracting political parties such as ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance and the IFP, who have taken part in some of its demonstrations.
In May 2026, the mobilisation shifted into a higher gear. Ngobese-Zuma set a June 30 deadline for all undocumented migrants to leave the country, even calling for a state of emergency on illegal immigration. This marked the starting point of the largest anti-immigration mobilisation South Africa had seen since the 2008 violence, which killed more than 50 people at the time. In the weeks that followed, groups armed with sticks and machetes attacked foreigners in the Johannesburg neighbourhoods of Hillbrow and Yeoville, targeting Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Mozambicans and Congolese alike, based solely on their nationality.
The toll of this wave of violence remains difficult to pin down precisely. South African police cite at least four migrants killed, a figure several African governments consider a significant undercount. More than 200,000 people have left the country, according to an AFP tally based on official repatriation figures, while other estimates already put the number of repatriated migrants at 25,000 by late June.
Faced with this crisis, reactions from the African governments concerned have remained measured, caught between diplomatic outrage and caution. The DRC has been particularly affected, with nationals attacked in Pretoria, Durban and Johannesburg, some forced to flee their homes. Congolese Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner had to address the National Assembly in early May to try to reassure public opinion, while implicitly acknowledging the limits of her leverage over Pretoria. A Congolese residence in South Durban was reportedly ransacked entirely, with several compatriots injured badly enough to require medical care.
On the South African side, Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has adopted an ambiguous stance, flatly refusing to call it xenophobia while acknowledging that immigration poses a real problem for the country. Pretoria has even turned the accusation back on its neighbours, calling on other African countries to address the economic and governance crises pushing their own citizens to emigrate in the first place. The municipal elections scheduled for November 2026 are surely not unrelated to this calculated caution from those in power.
Nearly three months after the June 30 deadline, the situation is therefore far from resolved. The encampment on Che Guevara Street in Durban, the scene of Thursday’s incident, is concrete proof of that. Hundreds of people continue to live there in precarious conditions, caught between the fear of going home and the fear of remaining exposed to the violence of a movement that, in barely a year and a half, has managed to make immigration the country’s number one political issue.