The Anatomy of a Campaign: Who Is Behind South Africa’s Anti-Migrant Marches — a Dossier
For the reader coming to this fresh, here is the whole picture in one place: who these movements are, who leads them and from which platform, what their marches have left behind, and which laws — South African, African and international — their documented conduct breaks. It is built from court judgments, official statements, parliamentary and academic sources, and the press of the countries whose citizens have died. It names names where the public record names them, separates what is proven from what is merely alleged, and never assigns guilt that only a court can assign.
Three rules govern every line that follows. First, we separate the verified (a court finding, an official statement, a government confirmation) from the alleged or contested (a claim not yet tested or independently confirmed) — and we label which is which. Second, we observe the presumption of innocence: naming a documented act is not a verdict, and only a court of law can determine criminal guilt. Third, we identify people by their public office, role and documented conduct — never by their ethnicity, language or “tribe.” To explain hatred by attributing it to a people would be to commit the very sin this dossier documents.
A necessary word of proportion, too: South Africa is home to an estimated 2.2 million African immigrants, and the overwhelming majority will never be attacked. Naming this campaign is not a charge against a nation or its people — most South Africans reject it — but against a specific, organised, and increasingly bold political movement, and against a state that its own courts have found to be falling short of its duty to protect.
First, Where This Comes From
None of this began in 2026, and to understand the marches you must see the long shadow behind them. South Africa’s modern economy was built, under apartheid, on migrant labour — workers drawn from Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and beyond into the mines and farms under tight contracts. As one analysis puts it, the state wanted African labour but never African belonging. That contradiction never fully healed. Layered onto decades of unemployment, inequality, failing services and a dysfunctional asylum system, it produced a recurring, lethal pattern: in moments of economic pain, the foreigner becomes the explanation. The marches of today are the newest, most organised expression of a very old wound.
A timeline, from the first shock to today
The Named Dead — and the Discipline of Naming Them
A dossier that deals in deaths must treat each one with exactness, never inflation. Below are deaths recorded in the public record. We name those whose names are documented; we mark clearly what is officially confirmed and what remains reported or disputed.
Who They Are: a Profile of Each Group
What follows is the core of the dossier — each movement, its leadership, its documented record, and the official response. Where a march is still to come, it is marked clearly as pending and no outcome is invented.
Origins & Leadership
Formed in Soweto in 2021; “Dudula” means “to force out” in isiZulu. Founder: Nhlanhla “Lux” Dlamini (left the movement in mid-2022). President from June 2023: Zandile Dabula — who, in a significant development, resigned as president and member on 14 May 2026, citing internal divisions and the movement’s premature turn to party politics. Deputy Chairperson: Dan Radebe; secretary-general Zodwa Booi has fronted the organisation’s response. No successor has been publicly confirmed, and the movement insists it remains operational. It says it targets illegal immigration, crime and unemployment; its critics, and now a court, describe its methods as unlawful.
Note on the record: the November 2025 High Court judgment named Dabula and Radebe as leaders at the time of the case. Her later resignation does not lift the interdict, which binds the organisation and its office-bearers regardless of who leads it. (An earlier “resignation” video that circulated in December 2025 was an AI-generated fake, debunked by Africa Check; the May 2026 resignation is genuine and was announced at a media briefing.)
Documented Record
The Johannesburg High Court recorded that on 6 April 2022 the then-leader addressed a Diepsloot crowd, after which a mob killed Zimbabwean national Elvis Nyathi. The court also recorded raids on buildings and shelters (including the Tsietsi Mashinini Centre, Soweto, Feb 2022), and the blocking of migrants from clinics and schools — conduct it found unlawful.
The Court Case & Official Response Adjudicated
- Case
- Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia & Others v Operation Dudula & Others [2025] ZAGPJHC 1102
- Court / Judge
- Gauteng High Court, Johannesburg · Judge Leicester Adams
- Judgment
- 4 November 2025
- Ruling
- Dudula’s conduct declared unlawful and unconstitutional; interdicted from demanding IDs, harassing, assaulting, evicting, blocking clinics/schools, and hate speech. Dabula and Radebe named.
- On the State
- The court rejected the claim that police and Home Affairs colluded with Dudula, but found the government had failed to implement its National Action Plan against xenophobia, and ordered it to do so.
- Government
- President Ramaphosa had denounced Dudula as “illegal vigilantism” (April 2022); the SAHRC has called such groups unlawful. Dudula is appealing.
Origins & Leadership
A newer, citizen-led anti-immigration movement that registers itself as a non-profit. Founder / leader: Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma (“MaNgobese-Zuma”). National convener: Nozibusiso Khambule. Regional figures: Khulekani Makhathini (south-central Durban); Nkosikhona “Phakhel’umthakhathi” Ndabandaba. It demands faster deportations, tighter borders, more funding for the Border Management Authority and Home Affairs, and that locals be prioritised for jobs.
Documented Record (April–June 2026)
Human Rights Watch records that in April–May 2026 the movement organised demonstrations against undocumented migrants, during which foreign-owned shops were targeted. A 43-year-old Cameroonian shopkeeper in Durban reported being attacked on 17 April 2026 by men he believed affiliated with the movement. Regional leaders acknowledged “shutting down” foreign-owned businesses (the movement insists peacefully). These accounts are reported; specific criminal responsibility is for the courts.
The 30 June Durban March Pending / Disputed
- Application
- Notice served 15 June 2026 under the Regulation of Gatherings Act (by national convener Nozibusiso Khambule)
- Local authority
- eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality (Durban) — an ANC-led council, in an IFP-led province
- Who decided
- City Manager Musa Mbhele — an administrative official, not a party politician
- The dispute
- The movement says permission was refused on “national security” grounds without written reasons. The municipality and Metro Police (Col Boysie Zungu) say it was not denied — only a route change was requested (ending at Durban City Hall, not the Point precinct).
- Mediation
- KZN SAPS leadership — Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, Maj-Gen Phumelele Makoba, Maj-Gen Vukani Mgobhozi, Maj-Gen Anthony Gopaul — met organisers; both sides pledged peaceful conduct.
- Politics
- KZN Premier Thami Ntuli (IFP) shared a platform with the movement at a 25 June summit — criticised by rights groups for “legitimising” it. The MK Party blamed the ANC and IFP for “playing politics.”
- March date
- Scheduled 30 June 2026 — three days after this dossier. It has not yet occurred; no outcome is recorded here.
Other Anti-Migrant Formations
Around the two main movements sits a looser network. “Concerned Citizens and the Voters of SA” called a nationwide shutdown on 4 May 2026. Other names that recur in reporting include Put South Africans First and various local “Dudula” offshoots. Figures associated with the broader anti-migrant current include media personality Ngizwe Mchunu. Some organising for 30 June involved figures such as Malusi Zondi (Economic and Cultural Envoy) and the Black Business Federation’s Wonder Jaca.
The Political Backdrop — Who Leans In, Who Pushes Back
Leaning in: the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), whose manifesto pledges to prioritise South Africans over foreign nationals; elements within the IFP and the Patriotic Alliance. Pushing back: the EFF (which laid the murder charge over the Malawian child’s death), the ANC’s official pro-pan-African policy, and a broad civil-society coalition — KAAX, SERI, CoRMSA, the SA Human Rights Commission, SECTION27 and others. It matters, for fairness, that this is not one bloc: some of South Africa’s loudest voices stand against these movements.
Which Laws the Documented Conduct Breaks
Set against the documented conduct — the demanding of papers, the assaults, the blocking of clinics and schools, the burning of the named dead — stands a dense architecture of law, at three levels. Where conduct is proven, these are the provisions it offends.
🇿🇦 South Africa · The ConstitutionOpen
The Bill of Rights protects everyone in the country, not only citizens. Engaged here: section 9 (equality), 10 (dignity), 11 (life), 12 (freedom and security of the person), 27 (access to health care), 29 (education), and 17 (the right to assemble — but only peacefully and unarmed). Armed, violent, or discriminatory gatherings fall outside that protection.
🇿🇦 South Africa · Statute & Common LawOpen
Immigration Act, section 41: only immigration officers or the police — never private citizens — may demand identity documents, and only with reasonable suspicion in public spaces (as the 2025 judgment clarified). Regulation of Gatherings Act, 1993: governs march notices and the limited grounds on which a gathering may be restricted. Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act: criminalises hate speech and hate-motivated crime. PEPUDA bars unfair discrimination. And the ordinary criminal law: murder, assault, arson, malicious damage to property, robbery and intimidation.
🇿🇦 South Africa · The Standing Court InterdictOpen
Since 4 November 2025, Operation Dudula and its leaders are under a binding High Court interdict. To repeat the prohibited conduct — demanding papers, harassing, assaulting, blocking clinics or schools, hate speech — is now also contempt of court, a separate offence. Newer groups are not named in that order, but the same constitutional principles bind everyone.
🌍 African Union LawOpen
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter) guarantees non-discrimination (Art 2), equality before the law (Art 3), life (Art 4) and dignity, forbidding cruel and degrading treatment (Art 5). Critically, Article 12(5) expressly prohibits the mass expulsion of non-nationals aimed at national, racial, ethnic or religious groups — the very logic of a “deadline to leave.” The Kampala Convention protects those displaced within a country. The African Commission has already called on South Africa to investigate and hold perpetrators accountable.
🌐 International Human-Rights LawOpen
South Africa is bound by the ICCPR (life, dignity, non-discrimination, peaceful assembly), the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) — whose monitoring committee has specifically pressed South Africa on xenophobia — and the 1951 Refugee Convention, whose principle of non-refoulement forbids returning people to danger. The Universal Declaration underpins them all. The UN Secretary-General voiced formal concern on 27 April 2026.
⚖️ International Criminal Law — the Gravest ThresholdOpen
This is raised with deliberate caution. Under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population — through murder, persecution, or the forcible transfer of a population — can constitute a crime against humanity. Whether South Africa’s pattern ever crosses that threshold is a grave legal question that only a competent court could determine, and only if proven. It is named here not as an accusation but as the outer boundary of where such campaigns, unchecked, can lead.
The Failure of Policing: Who Is Responsible?
If a court declares a movement unlawful and the marches simply continue, one question becomes unavoidable: where are the police, and who answers for their absence? Responsibility runs along a chain of command, and an honest dossier must trace it — naming offices, not scapegoats, and separating what a court has found from what critics allege.
The chain of command
- Executive head
- President Cyril Ramaphosa — ultimately responsible for the security cluster; he established the Madlanga Commission into criminality in the justice system.
- Police Minister
- Senzo Mchunu — placed on special leave amid separate syndicate-and-corruption allegations; Prof Firoz Cachalia serves as Acting Minister of Police.
- National Commissioner
- General Fannie Masemola — placed on precautionary suspension (April 2026) over unrelated corruption charges. The two most senior policing posts are thus vacant or contested.
- Provincial (KZN)
- Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi — the commissioner whose 2025 allegations of criminal infiltration of the police triggered the Madlanga Commission.
- Local level
- Station SAPS and metropolitan police (e.g. eThekwini Metro Police) — the officers who do, or do not, act on the ground.
- Oversight
- IPID (Independent Police Investigative Directorate) for police criminality; the SA Human Rights Commission; and Parliament’s police committee.
A service in its own crisis
The failure is compounded by a simple, sobering fact: the South African Police Service is presently consumed by its own integrity crisis. With the Police Minister on leave, the National Commissioner suspended, and the Madlanga Commission probing alleged criminal infiltration of the police itself, a service fighting for its own credibility is poorly placed to shield anyone else. Add chronic under-resourcing and uneven training, and the picture is of a state that has not so much chosen to abandon migrants as allowed the machinery of protection to seize up around them. Worryingly, on 8 June President Ramaphosa pledged to “intensify” the identification and deportation of undocumented foreign nationals — language the International Commission of Jurists warned risks echoing the very movements the state should be restraining.
Predictive Analysis: the Political and the Legal
No one can foresee a single march. But the forces at work have a direction, and an honest dossier should name the likely paths — while stating plainly that these are informed projections, not certainties.
- The 30 June march will most likely proceed in some form; the route compromise and police pledges point to that, though localised disorder at known hotspots remains a real risk.
- With local elections on the horizon, expect more parties to court anti-migrant sentiment, which surveys show is rising — even as the EFF, ANC policy and civil society resist.
- The deeper drivers — unemployment, inequality, failing services — are unresolved, so the movements will not lack fuel.
- Diplomatic strain with Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi and Ethiopia will grow, testing SADC and AU integration and the spirit of AfCFTA.
- Government will stay caught between frustrated citizens and its constitutional and continental obligations — and may keep choosing ambiguity.
- The November 2025 interdict binds Operation Dudula; fresh breaches invite contempt proceedings — but enforcement has been weak, and an appeal is pending.
- Newer groups such as March and March are not named in that order; expect civil society (and the SAHRC, which has signalled a Durban case) to seek similar interdicts against them.
- Prosecutions over specific deaths — including the murder charge concerning the Malawian child — will be a key test of whether accountability is real.
- The “national security” basis for restricting the 30 June march may itself be litigated, balancing the right to assemble against public-order powers.
- International scrutiny (UN, African Commission) will intensify; the gravest international-law thresholds remain distant and, rightly, a matter only a court could ever decide.
Grievance Is Not a Licence — and Africa Is Watching
Let me be careful and fair, because this subject punishes carelessness. The frustration that feeds these movements is not imaginary. Unemployment in South Africa is brutal; services have failed; the asylum system is broken; and ordinary people, in genuine hardship, are easily told that the stranger is the cause. A grievance can be entirely real and the response to it still be a crime. Both halves of that sentence must be held, or one ends up either excusing violence or denying pain. This dossier refuses to do either.
But here is what I will not soften. To set a “deadline” for human beings to leave, to demand papers from a stranger in the street, to block a sick child from a clinic, to burn a man named Elvis Nyathi in front of laughing cameras — these are not immigration policy. They are the oldest evil wearing a new flag. And the cruellest irony cuts deepest for us as Africans: the very nation whose freedom was won with the shelter, the funding and the blood of the whole continent now, in its poorest corners, turns on the children of those who sheltered it. The Mozambican, the Zimbabwean, the Malawian, the Nigerian, the Ethiopian — these were the front-line states and the comrades of the struggle. This is not justice. It is amnesia with a petrol can.
I will name conduct, never a people — for the South African is not the villain of this story; most South Africans are its conscience, marching with KAAX, ruling from the bench, pushing back in Parliament. The villain is a politics that has learned it pays to point downward at the weak rather than upward at the powerful. So let the courts do what they have begun to do. Let the African Commission and the African Union find their voice and their teeth. And let us, across these borders the colonisers drew, remember the only law that was ever truly ours: ubuntu — a person is a person through other persons. A nation that forgets that does not expel the foreigner. It exiles itself from Africa. Pamberi nehumwe hweAfrica — forward with the oneness of Africa.
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