Rizky Amelia
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — For several weeks, Bishop Raphael Bahebwa has not been able to show his face. The 26-year resident, who arrived in South Africa as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, says he is in hiding because of threats he received after speaking publicly about the rights of foreigners in the country. "I am in hiding now because they say they are going to kill me for speaking about the rights of foreigners," he told Al Jazeera.
Bahebwa has spent more than a quarter of a century watching anti-foreigner sentiment flare in the country he came to call home. In his account, each cycle of hostility has followed a recognisable pattern: rhetoric hardens, rumours circulate, and then violence follows. What distinguishes this year, he says, is the sense that the tempo has accelerated, and that a deadline — not a distant political trend — is now driving events.
That deadline was declared by March and March, an anti-immigration movement that has organised protests across South Africa this year. The group has called on undocumented foreign nationals to leave the country and has warned of further demonstrations if its demands are not met by September 30. For migrant communities, the ultimatum has rekindled memories of previous campaigns and of a policing response they perceive as indifferent to their safety.
For Bahebwa and other refugees, the distinction the movement draws between documented and undocumented migrants offers little reassurance. He and others describe encounters on the streets that rarely begin with a request to see anyone's papers. The hostility, they say, is not selective: it attaches to people for how they look, where they work and which neighbourhood they walk through, rather than for the status of their documents.
The political backdrop has sharpened the anxiety. South Africa votes in local government elections on November 4, and migration has become an increasingly prominent issue in the campaign. Public mobilisation on the question has therefore not stayed confined to the streets, and refugees say the atmosphere surrounding the September 30 deadline is inseparable from the approach to the polls.
Months of that anxiety were spent on the pavement. For several months, Bahebwa was among hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers who slept outside the Department of Home Affairs' Durban Refugee Reception Centre on Che Guevara Road. Most were from the DRC and Burundi, with others from Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania. Many said they had fled their own communities out of fear of anti-foreigner attacks, and arrived at the government office seeking protection. Instead, they say, the pavement became their home.
For roughly four months, men, women and children slept outdoors, exposed to the elements and reliant on civil society organisations and volunteers for food and other necessities. Conditions deteriorated to the point where access to food and medication became irregular. One man who had tuberculosis died while living at the camp; Al Jazeera has not independently established the circumstances of his death. The makeshift settlement was also close to the hostility its residents said they had fled, a geography that made the nights outside the centre doubly precarious.
The confrontation that had been warned about arrived on September 3. Members of March and March approached refugees and asylum seekers living outside the centre, violence broke out, and police intervened. At least four people were reported injured. Days later, at another protest, officers stood between the two groups and formed a barrier as tensions climbed.
March and March has described its mobilisation as a campaign against undocumented immigration, crime and deteriorating conditions in South African communities, and has argued that the government's response to immigration enforcement has been insufficient. Its leaders have repeatedly rejected claims that the campaign is xenophobic, insisting that the target is undocumented migration rather than foreign nationals generally. The dispute over framing matters because it determines who bears responsibility when words on a poster are matched by sticks in a street: the movement's leaders describe enforcement pressure, while residents describe an open invitation to assault anyone perceived as an outsider.
Bahebwa said documented and undocumented migrants alike have been swept up in that hostility. Earlier this year, six refugees working in salons around Durban's Warwick Street Market were beaten by men carrying sticks, according to the public-interest news outlet GroundUp, and two were hospitalised. Bahebwa said the victims also struggled to obtain help from the authorities afterwards. "Police said we can't open cases because we are foreigners. We had nowhere to go," he alleged. Police have not publicly responded to that specific allegation.
By mid-September, the government moved to clear the makeshift camp outside the refugee centre. The residents were offered a choice: return to the communities they had fled, or accept temporary accommodation at the Lindela facility in Gauteng, hundreds of kilometres from Durban. Lindela is a government-run immigration detention facility used to hold people facing deportation, a detail that fed the residents' deepest misgivings.
The choice divided the camp. Some feared being transferred to a facility historically associated with detention and repatriation. Others felt they could no longer endure life on the pavement, having lost months to exposure and insecurity. On September 15, 274 people were transported by bus from Durban to Lindela, while about 150 others chose to remain in Durban and began trying to find alternative accommodation.
For those who stayed, leaving the pavement did not resolve the problem that had driven them there in the first place. Kafuti Muyumba, a small business owner from the DRC and a representative of the refugee community, said many were afraid to return to neighbourhoods where they had built businesses and lives, and that livelihoods had collapsed during the months of upheaval. "Even the police allow March and March violence. They came with sticks and say we are attacking them," Muyumba told Al Jazeera.
Muyumba was blunt about the historical scale of the problem: "This is not the first time we are experiencing xenophobia. In 2008 and then in 2015 we also experienced this." In 2008, xenophobic violence spread through townships and informal settlements, killing dozens and displacing thousands, with further outbreaks against foreign nationals in subsequent years. For him, those memories are what make the rhetoric surrounding September 30 difficult to dismiss — and his trust in the police is thin: "We don't trust the police. They are not being fair with us. Some of them are also saying we must go."
Police have said there are no plans to change their normal policing approach because of the September 30 deadline. Whether that posture holds under the pressure of another deadline, and whether the movement's warnings of further demonstrations are carried out, leaves the roughly 150 refugees who remained in Durban negotiating for housing in a city where, as of this reporting, they say they have nowhere safe to go.
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