South Africa deployed thousands of police officers and soldiers across the country as huge anti-migrant protests broke out on Tuesday — the date set by vigilante groups as a deadline for all illegal immigrants to leave the country, or face dire consequences.
Reuters counted no less than 120 protest marches on Tuesday, with thousands of participants. Twelve of those marches turned violent and required police intervention, resulting in some 900 arrests.
One of the biggest marches took place in the city of Durban, where thousands of demonstrators dressed in Zulu garb and chanted “Abahambe,” which means “They must go!” in the most widely used Zulu dialect. Some of the demonstrators brandished clubs and whips or Zulu spears and shields:
“We know they live there. We know these buildings well. They have to leave. We’ve told them they must leave before 30 June. We’re telling them politely. We’re not going to kill them. They just have to leave,” one demonstrator told RFI as a crowd stopped outside an apartment building where migrants were thought to be living.
“At first I thought protesting wouldn’t change anything. Then I saw it was making a difference because undocumented migrants were leaving,” another protester said.
At least four deaths had been reported as of Wednesday morning, one of them a foreign national who reportedly flung himself from the eighth floor of a building in the port city of Durban because he feared he had been targeted by vigilantes. Thousands of other migrants fled the country before the June 30 deadline, sometimes with assistance from their home countries.
According to eyewitnesses, many businesses shut down ahead of the marches to reduce the risk of vandalism, and some landlords evicted their foreign tenants to avoid being targeted, leaving those tenants to sleep on the streets. South African media reported protesters looted some of the shacks in Soweto where migrants had been living.
One of the leading organizers of the protests, a group called March and March, said it could not be held responsible for violence or property damage because it could not “be in every single community” telling the protesters “how to behave.”
“For the next six months, we are asking for our national resources to be used to take the illegal immigrants out of this country. From building to building — they must go,” said March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese.
“We want mass deportation. For the next six months we want the government to get rid of the people who have not left,” she said.
A Malawian migrant named Jackson Makungwa told the UK Guardian he has been living in South Africa illegally for the past two years because he could not renew his work permit. He decided to leave after a fellow Malawi was attacked by a gang of seven men. He said he had a child with a South African mother whom he was forced to leave behind because he could not obtain travel documents for the baby.
“It’s not like I want to be illegally in the country, but the system doesn’t allow me to be here legally,” he said.
Other migrants told the Guardian they were fired from their jobs by employers who grew fearful as the June 30 deadline approached. Some said they were evicted by their nervous landlords even though they were legal, documented immigrants.