South Africa has become a hostile place for illegal immigrants, as the deadline set by demonstrators for them to leave the country approaches. This is reported by the BBC.
“I am very scared and traumatised,” said Esnat Joseph, a 36-year-old woman from Malawi, to the BBC as she tried to comfort her crying one-year-old triplets.
She fled her home in an informal settlement in the port city of Durban, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and sought refuge on an open field where up to 7,000 foreigners – mainly Malawians – began gathering with their belongings two weeks ago.
“The people came to my home and said: ‘You must leave. We do not want you to be here any longer, so you must go back to your country.’ There were ten of them, and they were armed,” she said, describing how the group of South African men were armed with machetes and whips.
“They cut my husband on the head and on the neck. They held him by the neck as if they wanted to kill him. Thanks be to God, he survived, but he is in hospital.”
Many others on the field, where aid organisations have distributed blankets and food, report such door-to-door threats.
This follows a series of mainly peaceful protests this year, led by the immigration-critical group “March and March”, the opposition party ActionSA and others, which have set 30 June as the deadline for illegal immigrants to leave the country.
Holding sticks in their hands, demonstrators have shouted “Mabahambe” – a Zulu expression meaning “They must go”.
As the countdown continues, President Cyril Ramaphosa warned South Africans that “making vulnerable people scapegoats” was not the solution to the country’s complex economic challenges.
Joseph came to South Africa three years ago and worked as a domestic worker before she had children.
Her legal status is unclear – she says she lost her passport and other documents in a robbery. She aims to return to Malawi on one of the buses organised by the Malawian consulate with the help of donations so that the country’s desperate citizens can leave Durban.
Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe have also organised repatriation by air or bus in recent weeks – so far, around 3,500 foreigners have volunteered to leave.
The South African authorities said that the more than 500 Nigerians who were recently repatriated had been staying in the country illegally, although this was disputed by the Nigerian authorities.
Upon arriving in Lagos last week, after almost nine years in South Africa, Benjamin, a returnee who gave only his first name, said: “South Africans do not like foreigners, especially Nigerians. South Africa is not a place to be – it is a place where you can lose your life at any time.”
The organisers of the protests deny that their actions are xenophobic. They say they are tired of other Africans abusing the system and, as “March and March” leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma put it, “playing the victim card”.
“You come to South Africa with a passport that allows you to stay in the country for 30 days. When it becomes 50 days, when it becomes two years, when it becomes five years, you know that you are breaking the law,” she told the BBC during a demonstration in Durban.
“We cannot allow South Africa to be transformed into a refugee reception centre for all failed African states … every country prioritises its own citizens, and we want the South African government to do the same.”
The country is struggling with rising youth unemployment and economic inequality. South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, at 32.7%, according to Statistics South Africa, which recorded 350,000 job losses in the first quarter of 2026 – the majority involving young people.
Nevertheless, the continent’s most developed economy remains a magnet for residents of poorer countries who risk their lives to travel there and seek work as, for example, security guards and domestic workers.
Demonstrators, such as Mecha Ramorola, also point to the country’s overburdened public services, where South Africans are “competing for scarce resources”.
“We struggle to get our children into school. We struggle to get the elderly into hospitals,” Ramorola told the BBC during a demonstration in the capital, Pretoria.
However, there are fears that these protests could lead to a repetition of the violence that erupted in 2008, when 62 people, including 21 South Africans, were killed in riots that forced thousands to flee their homes. There were also outbreaks of xenophobic violence in 2015, 2016 and 2019.
Last month, the government of Mozambique stated that five of the country’s citizens had been killed in xenophobic attacks in the Western Cape province. South Africa’s Foreign Minister disputed this and said that two Mozambicans had died, and that the circumstances surrounding their deaths were under investigation.
Videos on social media are helping to increase hostility towards foreigners.
In one of them, a Ghanaian man is harassed by demonstrators who tell him to go home, prompting Ghana to summon South Africa’s ambassador to demand better protection for foreign nationals.
Another video that has been widely shared shows the prominent demonstrator Nkosikhona Ndabandaba – known by the nickname Phakel’umthakathi and with 1.4 million followers on Facebook – approaching a man standing by the roadside and asking him about his nationality.
When he replies that he is from the Congo, Ndabandaba – wearing his characteristic Zulu headgear – says to him in a polite tone, but without asking about his residence permit: “30 June is the deadline, but it is not as if you must leave on 30 June. Leave now.”
But foreigners living legally in the country say that they too are being subjected to this. Some have set up camp outside the Durban office of the Department of Home Affairs in order to obtain protection.
“I have my own document confirming my refugee status in South Africa, yet we are all being chased away,” a woman from Burundi, who was there with her four children, told the BBC.
“I truly fear for my life. The children are afraid. There is no respect. When you walk past here, you are insulted. The children are insulted even at school,” she said.
Even going to the shops can be frightening these days, a beauty therapist from Malawi in Cape Town, who has lived in South Africa for 16 years without lawful residence status, told the BBC.
She, her husband and their nine-year-old daughter experienced a frightening incident in a taxi on the way to a shopping centre: “We were sitting in an Uber, just the three of us, and the Uber driver asked us: Where are your papers? Where are you from? You sound different.”
In a special national address earlier this month, the President warned that no individuals or groups have the right to demand proof of nationality from people in public spaces, and said that the government would take action against them.
“There is no room for xenophobia, racism, sexism, Afrophobia or other forms of intolerance in South Africa,” he said, explaining the coalition government’s five-point strategy for addressing the crisis.
These include rejecting asylum applications from people who have travelled through other “safe” countries, introducing a quota for the naturalisation of citizens, and extending the use of digital identity cards to include non-citizens.
Prison sentences will also be introduced for employers who provide low-paid jobs to illegal immigrants.
“You see immigrants being employed in jobs that a South African would normally not take, or that pay less than what the government requires, because, firstly, they are desperate, and secondly, they are vulnerable to exploitation through being cheated out of wages,” said the analyst Prof. Shepherd Mpofu.
Ramaphosa said that efforts would also be made to crack down on corruption within the system.
A 36-year-old woman from Malawi in Johannesburg, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told the BBC that she had come to South Africa on a visitor visa and had bribed border officials to have her passport stamped every second month in exchange for payment without crossing the border.
“I have decided to go home for a while and close my hair salon because of threats,” she said, explaining that she feared for the safety of her young children.
The latest wave of protests comes as political parties seek support ahead of the local elections in November.