A one-year-old baby died outside the Alexandra Clinic in Johannesburg in July 2025. His Malawian mother had been turned away by vigilante enforcers who had assumed control of who could enter a public health facility. That death is not an abstraction. It is the sharpest possible illustration of what happens when the state cedes its duty of protection to mobs.
On 30 June 2026, anti-immigrant protests swept across South Africa. Demonstrators carrying sticks and spears enforced an unofficial deadline set by anti-migrant groups: undocumented foreigners must leave. In Durban, the country’s third largest city, a Zimbabwean family that had operated a carpentry workshop for ten years was threatened with being set on fire if they did not return home. They abandoned their tools and the life they had built, joining thousands of others displaced by escalating hostility.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.fairplanet.org/story/as-xenophobic-violence-resurfaces-south-african-government-watches-on/.
Sharon, the workshop owner, described the ordeal in a message to FairPlanet. “We just had to leave behind most of our tools and the life we were building for ourselves,” she said. “The trauma of seeing our fellow Africans being attacked simply because we are not South Africans is unbearable. A taxi ride that takes 40 minutes sometimes feels like four hours because one has to endure listening to insults from South Africans and smile in silence so they don’t see that you are a foreigner.”
The June demonstration came nine weeks after members of anti-immigrant groups, the March and March movement and the Abahambe movement, held placards during a protest on 28 April, calling on the government to act against illegal immigration. Protesters blame immigrants for crime, housing shortages, and unemployment, which rose to 32.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 from 31.4 per cent in the last quarter of 2025.
The data tell a different story. South Africa is home to over 65 million people, with over three million migrants, the majority from neighbouring countries such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Immigrants work primarily in domestic service, construction, retail, transport, factories, farms, mining, and hospitality. Many run informal businesses such as hair salons, phone repair shops, and fruit and vegetable stalls. Available evidence suggests that South African-born workers remain the clear majority in every major sector. According to a 2018 World Bank report, one immigrant worker generates approximately two jobs for local citizens. Those contributions have not shielded migrants from violence.
In April, a video circulated showing South Africans attacking a Ghanaian national and demanding he leave the country. Such incidents are not isolated. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, Xenowatch, an open-source system tracking xenophobic violence in South Africa, recorded 255 xenophobic incidents, including 57 deaths, more than 6,000 displaced people, and over 800 shops looted. The pattern extends back decades: foreign nationals have been beaten, displaced, killed, and their businesses looted since 1994, with persistently low arrest and prosecution rates.
Prince Devison Nze, executive director of Human Rights and Justice Group International, described the scale of the harm. “Xenophobic attacks in South Africa are a major human rights issue because they violate the rights to life, dignity, equality, security, and freedom from discrimination of migrants and foreign nationals,” he said. These attacks breach the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Perpetrators, Nze emphasized, “should be prosecuted” for the criminal acts they commit.
By contrast, vigilante groups have moved in where the state has stepped back. Operation Dudula, which launched in Soweto in 2021 and now operates across the country, has called for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and actively turns foreigners away from public services, including the clinic where that baby died. Humphrey Quaye, head of the Pan-African Progressive Front, told FairPlanet that the government’s inaction is not accidental. “When a government fails to arrest, prosecute, and decisively condemn vigilante groups that usurp state functions, it signals either complicity or incapacity,” he said.
Although South Africa has publicly stated a firm stance against violence targeting foreign nationals, it has refused to label the attacks as xenophobic, framing them instead as broader migration tensions. Frank Onyekwelu, president-general of the Nigerian Citizens Association South Africa, said his organization has engaged the government multiple times through dialogue without results. His church in Johannesburg was attacked in June, with musical equipment stolen. “Nationality is not criminality,” he said.
The violence has strained diplomatic relations across the continent. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights condemned the attacks in April and urged the South African government to “take decisive measures to dismantle and prevent the operation of vigilante groups engaging in unlawful enforcement activities.” Ghana demanded that the African Union discuss the issue at its next summit, citing a “serious risk to the safety and well-being” of Africans in South Africa. Nigeria evacuated 268 citizens on 11 June; Ghana repatriated 297 on 26 May.
Sharon’s family is now home but struggling. “Home is good because we are safe,” she said. “The only problem is inadequate funds to bring back our tools from South Africa and get new materials to start work.”
Quaye warned that repatriation is emergency symptom management, not a solution. “If we only ever bring our citizens home when they are attacked and send them back when the dust settles, we are complicit in a cycle of abuse,” he said. He called for African nations to negotiate what he termed “a Dignity Protocol,” establishing enforceable minimum standards for the treatment of African migrants across the continent.
Nze issued a stark warning: if xenophobic attacks continue unaddressed, they could escalate into mass displacement, loss of life, and collapsed community relations, creating a humanitarian crisis difficult to contain. “The South African government is still applying a cosmetic approach to the whole issue,” he said. Whether that cosmetic approach can hold, as diplomatic pressure mounts and more families like Sharon’s are forced to choose between safety and survival, is the question that now confronts the region.