At least 74 Zimbabweans fled Mossel Bay in early June following the killing of foreign nationals. One of them told us his story.

By May 2026, Langton Gumira liked his life -- but it hadn't always been that way.

He and his wife were two of an estimated one million Zimbabweans who had fled to South Africa in the mid-2000s.

When Langton and his wife arrived in 2006, the situation in Zimbabwe had become desperate.

Inflation had passed 1,000%, the shops were empty of food, fuel and electricity were only sporadically available, and hundreds of thousands were still living with the consequences of the previous year's Operation Murambatsvina -- the Mugabe government's campaign of forced evictions.

"No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark," the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire famously wrote.

Gumira says something similar, if less poetic.

"I loved my country. I loved Zimbabwe. But it was not a place we could survive."

And so they fled -- for the first time, but not the last.

Arriving in Johannesburg, Gumira and his wife found a place to stay in the Johannesburg suburb of Malvern, east of the CBD. They were then in their mid-30s, and Gumira had experience working in the restaurant industry from when he was a boy.

He found a job at a restaurant...