Johannesburg — "Intellectually, xenophobia is not being contested, instead people are looking for scapegoats."
South Africa's Afrophobic anti-migrant protest movement has vowed to keep marching until every undocumented migrant has left the country, despite the campaign's impact on the economy and the country's standing across the continent.
The March and March movement set 30 June as the deadline for all undocumented migrants to leave. In practice, however, it was predominantly working class African nationals - regardless of their status - who were targeted by violent vigilante groups.
In response, more than 160,000 people were helped home by their governments, according to a tally of official repatriation numbers. Yet more returned privately, sent back just wives and children, or relocated to safer parts of the country.
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March and March, which describes itself as a civic organisation, is planning to increase the tempo of agitation in the run-up to local government elections on 4 November. That could be a watershed moment given the weakness of the ruling ANC, with the movement seeking to make migration the key campaign issue.
"We will be making our presence felt," spokesperson Sandile Dube told The New Humanitarian. "We are fixing the country, and we can only stop when every South African job is occupied by a South African."
Yet that sentiment overlooks how integral South Africa's roughly three million migrants - officially under 4% of the population - are to the country's economy (there is no consensus on the number of undocumented).
Maggie Mpharana lives in the Diepkloof area of Soweto. She rented out her garage a decade ago to Harun Gebrelasse, a Somali trader, who turned it into a small convenience store, known locally as a spaza shop.
He paid a monthly rental equivalent to $180, and employed her teenage son when he wasn't in school. But in June, anti-migrant vigilantes beat up Gebrelasse and looted his shop - despite the fact he held a valid visa and business permits. Two days later, they came back and - during an altercation - torched the store. "I don't understand how that is fixing the country," said Mpharana.
Migrants making it in South Africa
Spaza shops are interwoven into the fabric of urban neighbourhoods in South Africa. They are on every street corner, stay open all hours, sell household items in affordable micro-quantities and, crucially, provide credit to regular customers. It's a slice of the economy that's entirely Black-owned, distinct from the commercial malls and formal retail spaces located a long bus-ride away from most urban precincts.
It is estimated that the country's 150,000-200,000 spaza shops generate nearly three million jobs and contribute just over 5% to South Africa's GDP. They also circulate money through the local economy as part of a value chain that links manufacturers, wholesalers, and transporters.
Their owners are overwhelmingly Somali or Ethiopian - like Bayene, who came to South Africa from southern Ethiopia overland in 2011 along an arduous and dangerous migration route to claim asylum.
He worked in the spaza shop of a relative who had sponsored his journey until he was able to open his own store in Soweto in 2015 - a typical first-generation migrant story of hard work and sacrifice that can be found the world over. But now he's not sure whether to quit.
Along with other shop-owners, Bayene has been negotiating with private security companies for protection. Many traders, however, have chosen to close down - or say they have been forced to. He alleged that March and March's latest tactic is to threaten landlords that their property will be torched unless they evict their foreign tenants.
"My landlord doesn't want to kick me out, he's protecting me," Bayene told The New Humanitarian. "But some landlords, to save themselves, [have complied]."
Dube said that although March and March does not condone violence, "South Africans have now been educated to know that to rent out a backroom or a house to an illegal foreigner is a crime".
Shuab (who gave only his first name) is a Somali national who runs a wholesale business - one of five in Soweto supplying hundreds of spaza shops in the area. "For the last three months, business has been down; right now it's much worse," he said. "I'm even keeping the stock of some of the shop-owners that ran away."
Shuab arrived in South Africa in 2010 as a refugee. With the support of the close-knit Somali community, he was able to open his first shop in 2018 - which was then torched and looted during political unrest in 2021.
Two years later, he managed to open his wholesale business - a 2,000-square metre warehouse stocked full of fast-selling household items. Out of his 10 employees, six are South African, whom he says worry they could lose their jobs if he was forced to close.
Shuab regards March and March as different from previous bouts of Afrophobic violence. "This is organised, but we don't know who is behind it," he said.
Previously, protesters would loot, then things would quickly return to normal. "But with these people, you can't negotiate," he added. "Whether you are legal or illegal, so long as you are not South African, they will tell you to close."
March and March reflects a false narrative commonly repeated in South Africa. It's plastered over social media, expressed in radio call-in programmes, news broadcasts, and conversations on taxi buses: fellow African citizens bring crime, dirt, decay, don't pay taxes, and exhaust social services. It doesn't seem to matter how evidence-free those claims are.
"This is about restoring order"
Last month, the City of Johannesburg - whose inner-city has long been a byword for neglect - demolished container shops at Marble Towers, a hub for informal traders selling Chinese fast fashion and beauty products. The aim was to enforce municipal safety bylaws. "This is about restoring order," said Mayor Dada Morero. "We remain committed to reclaiming the city one precinct at a time."
Yet the area around Rahima Moosa Street, commonly known as Jeppe, attracts cross-border resale traders from throughout southern Africa. They spend close to $600 million a year - twice the turnover of Sandton, the richest mall in Africa - but March and March has had a chilling effect on that business. One Zambian bus operator said passengers were down by at least 30%.
Tanya Zack - who has researched the Jeppe Street economy for years - describes the city's enforcement action as the legitimisation of exclusion.
"The city is destroying irregular stalls, but that's not matched with a vision for what it wants," she told The New Humanitarian. "It's never recognised the value of a migrant-led economy. There's no word on regularisation, no planning; it's purely law enforcement. It's a terrible loss for the central role Jo'burg can play in the region."
That's an argument that struggles for impact among many South Africans. Journalist and commentator Mondli Makhanya sees clear parallels between South Africa's nativist wave, and the rightward lurch in many other parts of the world.
"Let's accept: reason, logic and facts are the losers in this debate," he wrote recently. "The voices of the populists are the ones being heard."
Abel (who gave only his first name) is one who would be hard to convince over the merits of migration. He lives close to Shuab's warehouse but views the businessman's apparent success through the prism of his own perceived disadvantage.
"These spaza shops are in the wrong hands," he said. "They are going to foreigners who are not paying taxes, and using our resources. But if I were to try and open one, the government would drown me in paperwork. The government is our father but is not looking after its children - instead it's looking after the children of its neighbours."
Community diversity
But proximity also builds understanding. In the communities The New Humanitarian visited around Soweto, people tended to say that March and March did not reflect their views - that any agitation came from a rent-a-mob typically recruited from the hostels that house young men from KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), the movement's birthplace.
"Yes, if you are here illegally, it's wrong," said Happiness Tuso, as she chatted with neighbours on a quiet street in Naledi. "But I don't believe what [March and March] is doing is right. In this street, we have a lady from Mozambique who braids hair, that man is from Lesotho, and he washes cars. We know them, and the ones we know, we trust."
Her friend, Ntombi, was more scathing. "People from outside [South Africa] came with nothing but have managed to build something. We don't really have an excuse - this is our home," she said. "We put too much blame on the government, but it's not right for us to be dependent on government. You can open a business in your own house - I have my own little [hustle]."
Both women had an additional gripe. Because Tuso has a dark complexion, and Ntombi wears a hijab, they are both stopped in the city-centre by vigilantes who assume they are not South African. "It's embarrassing, especially when you're with your children," said Tuso. "You have to prove yourself by speaking [in vernacular], but my children speak bad Zulu (the urban lingua franca)."
South Africa's structural problems
South Africa's xenophobia has been nurtured by the country's deep structural problems and decades of policy failures, said William Gumede, founder of the non-profit Institute for Social Dialogue. "If all non-South Africans are kicked out, it's not going to deliver jobs, employment, and services," he told The New Humanitarian.
South Africa has been burdened for decades by a crippling unemployment rate. In the first quarter of 2026, just over 60% of young people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed, and it's around 41% for those aged 25 to 34.
That's partly a reflection of a deeply flawed schooling system. Just over 80% of 9 and 10-year-olds cannot read for meaning, constraining future work and education opportunities. Benchmarked against international peers, South African learners consistently come last in maths and science surveys, with hundreds of public schools not teaching the subjects at all.
"Education cannot solve unemployment alone, but weak education almost guarantees that unemployment becomes hereditary," notes Linda du Plessis, senior deputy vice chancellor of the University of the North West.
Critics of South African business accuse employers of deliberately hiring exploitable foreign nationals who do not know - or cannot demand - their rights under the country's labour laws, and accept less than the minimum wage.
The counter-claim by employers is that they struggle to find South African candidates with the right skillsets - which schools in neighbouring countries do seem able to produce - and as a result have called on the Department of Home Affairs to issue waivers to allow them to hire foreign citizens legally.
"We employ people based on training, capabilities"
Jassat Esat runs a textile factory with a workforce dominated by locals, but with machinist and technical staff positions generally filled by people from the region. "I fully understand the demand for us to employ locals," he told The New Humanitarian. "But we employ people based on training, capabilities, and their work ethic."
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He fears that the textile industry, facing stiff competition from cheap second-hand clothing, will be further damaged as staff leave as a result of a now-entrenched xenophobia, backed by immigration raids.
Agriculture is especially dependent on labour from the region. In KZN's sugar belt, one farmer reported he had lost up to 80% of his cane-cutting workforce virtually overnight. The same concerns are aired in the horticulture, fruit, and vegetable sectors, which already face narrowing profit margins and climate uncertainty.
The structure of the agriculture labour market has historically been skewed to workers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho. Employers say they have struggled to retain South Africans for what is seasonal, back-breaking work, typically on remote farms. Growing mechanisation - and the demand for greater skills - will reduce demand still further.
Gumede believes that South Africa's xenophobia has done potentially irreparable harm. Not only has the country become diplomatically isolated across much of the continent, but it threatens trade links worth $42 billion annually.
"Around 30% of our exports go to the rest of Africa. If you add informal trade, it could be 35%," he said. "We're fighting the rest of Africa, while we're also destroying our economy."
Foreigners as scapegoats
Dube of March and March is confident that employers are beginning to respond to the demand to hire locally - backed by the fear of legal sanctions - but he also acknowledges the economic disruption his movement has caused.
"There is no way you can't be worried about the shake-up of the economy, but I'm also worried about crime," he said. "You can't say because of economic benefits you leave a crime - you cannot leave the drug pushers and human traffickers."
Blaming foreigners for South Africa's stagnation is low-hanging fruit for politicians. It's a sentiment increasingly shared by a middle class that fears job losses and competition in an economy growing by barely 1%.
The political fragility of the ANC, after 30 years in power, has allowed populist parties to fill the vacuum - and they are expected to make significant gains in November's local government elections.
"Intellectually, xenophobia is not being contested," said Gumede. "Instead, people are looking for scapegoats. It's a tragedy."
Edited by Andrew Gully.
Obi Anyadike, Senior editor, Africa
Oscar Nkala, Investigative journalist who works across Africa on issues of migration, environment, climate change, and the impact on people and livelihoods
