Fleeing South Africa: Thousands Displaced as Xenophobic Violence Drives Mass Repatriation

A City Turned Camp

On the outskirts of Durban, South Africa's coastal port city, an open field at Sherwood Park has become the most visible symbol of a deepening humanitarian emergency. More than 3,000 Malawians, including hundreds of children, arrived there in the second week of June after fleeing threats and violence from anti-immigrant demonstrators who had swept through townships around the city. By mid-June, some reports placed the number of displaced persons at the site as high as 10,000, drawn from Malawi, Nigeria, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Ethiopia.

The conditions are harsh. Families sleep on bare ground under makeshift shelters, lining up for food and water distributed by aid organizations. Frustration has mounted over the slow arrival of buses, and on at least one occasion police deployed teargas and rubber bullets to suppress a disturbance when some men refused an order to relocate to a secondary verification center where documents would be checked before repatriation. Mathews Chakwamba, a community leader coordinating relief efforts at the site, described the scene as spiraling out of control. "More and more are arriving," he said. "They all want to go home."

One of the displaced, Gazembe Bwana, 44, arrived from Malawi fourteen years ago and built a career as a tiler. He described leaving behind a home, a relationship, and a decade and a half of labor. "I worked so hard. I created jobs for myself and didn't take anyone else's job," he told reporters. "But now I'm leaving with only one bag. What has happened to me in South Africa is very painful." Another woman, Sayiba John, fled the Nazareth township with her husband and three children after being told to leave under threat of violence. Her Grade 2 daughter was forced to abandon her school examinations.

The Groups Behind the Violence

The current crisis traces directly to the activities of two organized anti-immigrant movements. Operation Dudula, whose name means "force out" in Zulu, has harassed, intimidated, and in some cases physically attacked foreign nationals since at least 2021, blocking migrants from accessing public health clinics and schools. In November 2025, the South Gauteng High Court issued an injunction prohibiting the group from barring migrants' access to healthcare facilities. A newer formation, March and March, emerged as the driving force behind the 2026 escalation, organizing demonstrations across Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban throughout April and May.

Human Rights Watch documented multiple attacks during the demonstrations. A 43-year-old Cameroonian shop owner in Durban, who has lived in South Africa for nearly two decades and is married to a South African citizen, described being attacked on April 17 by approximately ten men who broke down his shop door. "They whipped me and my three colleagues who are not South African with golf sticks and sjamboks, and sprayed pepper spray on us," he recounted. "They also used stun guns on us. We ran outside the shop, while unable to see clearly. They followed us outside and whipped us. No one came to assist us." Human Rights Watch also documented a case in which a Malawian national died after police beat and tortured him and placed him in the trunk of a car when he could not produce documentation.

Mythobisi Sabelo, one of the street-level protest organizers, framed the movement in economic terms. "There are undocumented foreigners working everywhere in our business field," he told Al Jazeera in Durban. "People here have been trying to find work for a long time and given up." His sentiment reflects the wider grievance being mobilized by anti-immigrant groups: that foreign nationals take scarce jobs and strain stretched public services. Migration researchers and economists, however, argue that evidence does not support these claims, and that the roots of South Africa's economic dysfunction lie elsewhere.

The Economic Backdrop

South Africa carries one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. Broad unemployment, which includes those who have given up looking for work, exceeds 43 percent. Since 2024, deteriorating socioeconomic conditions have fueled the rise of anti-immigrant activism, as vigilante groups have channeled popular frustration toward foreign nationals as scapegoats for poor service delivery, joblessness, and crime. A Pew Research survey from 2018 already found that 62 percent of South Africans held negative views about immigrants, with 61 percent believing they were more responsible for crime than other groups, claims that researchers have consistently debunked.

Analysts note that the structural origins of South African xenophobia are deep. Under apartheid, migrant labor from neighboring countries was tightly regulated for economic utility while integration was deliberately prevented. Critics argue that the bureaucratic framework governing migration in democratic South Africa has retained much of this exclusionary architecture, compounding the dysfunction of the country's asylum and refugee processing system. The convergence of this legacy with contemporary economic despair has created fertile ground for the anti-immigrant movements now driving tens of thousands from their homes.

Repatriation Operations Across the Continent

The scale of displacement has forced at least six African governments to mount emergency repatriation operations. Ghana was the first to act, beginning evacuations in late May; at least 1,000 Ghanaian nationals have since been returned home and provided with psychosocial support. Malawi has been busing hundreds of citizens back from Durban, more than 2,000 kilometers away, in a sustained operation that continued through mid-June. Mozambique and Zimbabwe carried out similar operations, while five Mozambican nationals were killed in the coastal city of Mossel Bay in the Western Cape province, deaths that have been the subject of a diplomatic dispute over the exact death toll connected to the violence. More than 150 Malawians were also bused out of the Western Cape over a single weekend.

Nigeria's response has been particularly high-profile and has carried the sharpest diplomatic edge. An initial group of 262 Nigerian nationals — predominantly women and children, landed at Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos, with Nigeria's foreign ministry coordinating additional flights from Johannesburg. More than 1,000 other Nigerians voluntarily registered with consular services ahead of the anti-immigrant groups' self-imposed June 30 deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave. Nigeria's minister for diaspora affairs, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, stated that retaliatory measures against South Africa were being "considered," adding that the option is "not off the table," though she declined to specify what form they would take.

In previous cycles of xenophobic violence, most notably in 2019, retaliatory attacks on South African businesses in Nigeria followed the deaths of Nigerian nationals, prompting emergency diplomatic interventions. On May 31, Nigerian police spokesman Aliyu Giwa issued a public warning against such reprisals, emphasizing that attacks on South African nationals or businesses in Nigeria would not be tolerated.

International Condemnation and Continental Consequences

The violence has drawn sharp rebukes from international and continental bodies. On April 27, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres expressed concern over the reported xenophobic harassment, discrimination, and attacks. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights called on the South African government to investigate violence against foreign nationals, ensure accountability for perpetrators, and guarantee that affected migrants have access to justice and protection.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned the hostility publicly, calling the attacks a "tragic betrayal" of the African nations that stood with South Africa during its struggle against apartheid. Human Rights Watch researcher Nomathamsanqa Masiko-Mpaka stated that while South Africa's constitution protects the right to protest, "that does not include permission to commit violence," and called on authorities to protect foreign nationals rather than allow vigilante groups to target them with impunity.

Beyond the immediate humanitarian toll, observers warn of lasting damage to South Africa's regional relationships and its role in continental economic integration. The crisis has ignited intense debate within the Economic Community of West African States and among stakeholders in the African Continental Free Trade Area. Analysts caution that South Africa's instability threatens to undermine the AfCFTA framework by raising severe security and operational risks for cross-border traders, professionals, and investors across the continent, making the 2026 xenophobic wave not only a domestic governance crisis but a potential fault line in Africa's broader integration project.

A Recurring Crisis

The events of 2026 are not without precedent. South Africa has experienced sporadic but severe outbreaks of xenophobic violence since 2008, when 62 people were killed in a nationwide eruption of attacks that targeted Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Somalis, and South Africans caught in the violence. Major waves followed in 2015, when anti-immigrant violence began in Durban and spread to Johannesburg, and again in 2019 and 2021–2022. Each cycle has prompted foreign governments to repatriate nationals, diplomatic protests, and pledges by South African authorities to restore order. Each time, the underlying structural conditions, high unemployment, institutional dysfunction, and the political exploitation of nativist grievance, have remained largely unaddressed.

For those living through this latest displacement, the historical pattern offers little comfort. South Africa's constitution guarantees human rights, dignity, and equality to all within its borders, not only citizens. Yet as buses loaded with families and their single bags departed Durban's makeshift camps, the promise of that guarantee appeared remote. "All I want to do is get home," said Amadi, a Nigerian man who spent a decade working at a coffin-making company in South Africa before the violence drove him out. For him, and for thousands of others now scattered across transit camps, airport terminals, and overloaded buses heading north, home, however far away, is simply the safer choice.