The victims of the outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa: ‘Even in front of the police they can beat you up and no one protects you’ | International

Priscilla Mussa is three months old and has spent two of them sleeping on a filthy mattress on a sidewalk in the South African city of Durban. A fuchsia down onesie, a wool cap and a thick blanket that her mother, Rebecca Varis, pulls almost completely over her protect her from the southern winter. Around them there is the smell of a steaming, spiced stew that several dozen men and women are eating for breakfast from plastic cups. Across the sidewalk, washed clothes hang from an iron fence. “This is where we live now,” Varis says, pointing at the mattress. Durban has become one of the epicenters of a wave of xenophobic violence that for weeks has been forcing thousands of migrants and refugees to leave their homes. Foreigners make up around 4% of South Africa’s population, but they have become the scapegoats for a much deeper crisis.

When Priscilla was barely a month old, a group of men came at night to the neighborhood where she lived with her family, explains Kurda Mussa, the child’s father. “They went house to house yelling that we should go back to our country,” he recalls. The couple, both Congolese refugees who have lived in South Africa for 18 years, barely had time to leave with the baby and their other two children. They lost their home, furniture, clothes and even their cooking utensils. “We don’t even have a spoon left,” Varis says.

But they have also lost something less visible: their routine and livelihoods. The two older children have stopped going to school because they can no longer reach it, and Mussa lost his job as a barber after his shop was vandalized.

Since then, the whole family has been sleeping on the street. At night, Rebecca Varis keeps Priscilla pressed to her chest to protect her from the cold. “Otherwise her nose gets blocked; and even so she fell ill a few days ago,” she laments, keeping an eye on her baby with a sidelong glance; the infant is invisible beneath the thick blanket.

They are among roughly 450 people—mostly refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—camped for weeks in front of Durban’s refugee reception center. Torn mattresses on concrete, blankets damp with dew, children playing around piles of clothing, men gathered around a cardboard parcheesi board using bottle caps as pieces, and women passing the time looking at their phones or talking as they wait for a solution. Or simply hoping that no one will attack them. Some have been exposed to the elements for more than a month.

According to testimonies gathered by EL PAÍS, groups of South African men have for weeks been going through neighborhoods where migrants and refugees live, knocking on doors. If no one answers, they force their way in. Then come the threats, the beatings, the looting or the occupation of homes and small businesses.

They also confront them in the street: while several refugees were talking, a Congolese delivery worker showed up with a swollen head. Still trembling and unwilling to give his name because of the fear he feels, he says he had just been beaten with sticks by three men while collecting a package. “They told me that foreigners can’t work here,” he tells his fellow Congolese, who ask whether any security guard or passerby helped him. “Even in front of the police they can beat you up and no one protects you,” he replies. Faced with situations like this, thousands of people have left their homes and many have opted to return to their countries of origin.

The escalation began in May in KwaZulu-Natal province when, after several criminal incidents attributed without evidence to foreign nationals, anti-immigration groups formed by Black South Africans such as March & March intensified their activity and set June 30 as an ultimatum for undocumented people to leave the country. They also began organizing patrols and protests that have led to attacks on migrants, including those with valid documentation. It is a painful paradox in a country where around 80% of the population is Black and which only three decades ago ended apartheid, the system of racial segregation imposed by the white minority. Activists and academics have long warned that the deep inequalities inherited from that regime have fed new forms of exclusion, this time by Black South Africans directed against other Black Africans.

The campaign feeds on an idea that is increasingly widespread in a part of South African society, and beyond: that immigrants are responsible for unemployment, crime, poverty and the deterioration of public services. In a year marked by municipal elections scheduled for November, various anti-immigration movements have gained prominence by taking advantage of that unrest in a country of 63 million people with unemployment close to 30% and deep social inequalities.

Meanwhile, the government is struggling to control the situation. President Cyril Ramaphosa has publicly condemned the violence and insisted that enforcing immigration laws is the exclusive responsibility of the state, not civilian groups. He has also promised to tighten border controls, speed up deportations of irregular migrants and reform the asylum system, a stance human rights organizations say is insufficient to stop the attacks and protect those who legally reside in the country. In recent days the government has announced the deployment of more than 3,000 military personnel for a month across the country.

South Africa experienced major xenophobic outbreaks in 2008, 2015, 2019 and 2021, but survivors of those episodes say that this time the violence has crossed a line: it is no longer just protests or attacks on shops, but the expulsion of entire families from places where they have lived for years.

Data also suggest that the violence never fully disappeared. According to Xenowatch, the monitoring system at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa recorded 148 verified incidents of xenophobic discrimination and 14 deaths in 2025 alone—the highest annual figure in recent years—within an upward trend that preceded the current crisis. The 2026 figures only cover up to June 9, just before the worst of the unrest, and even then recorded 50 incidents and seven deaths.

Gaby Bikombo, a worker with Refugee Social Services, an organization that provides assistance and legal advocacy to refugees and asylum seekers in Durban, summarizes the difference from earlier waves of xenophobia: “Before they marched and shouted. Now they go into houses and throw you out.” Bikombo has a South African passport after more than two decades living in the country, but he also fears for his safety. He has not yet been evicted from his home, but he has already received signs that his presence is unwelcome: “A few days ago, two other migrant neighbors and I were removed from the community WhatsApp group without explanation; the truth is I can no longer sleep without sleeping pills,” he says, shrugging.

Buses to leave the country

In front of the refugee reception center, it is primarily Congolese families who remain. They emphasize that they are not newly arrived immigrants but entered South Africa years ago fleeing the war in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many have spent half their lives in South Africa, work, pay rent, speak local languages and readily show their residence permits or asylum seeker documents.

On one of the mattresses lives and sleeps 25-year-old Wivine Bahati, who arrived as a child. She grew up in Durban, attended South African schools and speaks Zulu as naturally as English, French and Swahili, so she has volunteered as an interpreter, spokesperson and liaison between refugee families, the authorities and aid organizations. She has given so many interviews since the attacks began that she now fears the exposure could turn against her, but that does not deter her.

Bahati recalls precisely the moment she felt real fear for the first time: the day she went to report several assaults to the police and the officers denied them protection. “If the police don’t act, anyone can do anything to you,” she laments. Authorities referred them to homeless shelters even though they already had one, but they were not welcomed there either. “They threw women out too. One woman was even pulled by the hair,” she says. The next recommendation was that they “reintegrate.” “They tell us to go back to our communities. But it is those communities that are expelling us,” the young woman says.

For these families, returning to their country of origin is not an option. Most come from South Kivu, one of the Congolese regions hardest hit by the M23 offensive, backed by Rwanda. One refugee says that just months ago he lost a brother during the capture of Uvira, one of the conflict’s most recent and bloodiest episodes. “Return? To what?” he asks, without raising his voice.

Not even those who had a small business managed to keep it. Cadeau Mohatu, 38, is another man in the camp; he had been cutting hair for years in an improvised barbershop—just a mirror, a chair and some scissors on the sidewalk—a very common business among Congolese. His stall was looted and destroyed. He lost his job and with it the ability to keep paying rent. “First a woman and a man came. The next day two more returned. Then more than 20 came with iron bars,” he recalls. They destroyed the business, took his tools and he lost the only income he had to pay rent. “My children don’t go to school anymore because I can’t pay for transportation. Now they sleep here.”

About five kilometers from the refugee reception center, and very near the sea, another camp appears and disappears each day. This is where citizens of Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique who have decided to leave South Africa out of fear are waiting to board one of the hundreds of buses taking them back to their countries of origin.

Every few hours new families arrive with suitcases, plastic bags and rolled-up mattresses. And so more than 25,000 people—according to South African authorities, about 20,000 of them Malawian—have already returned to their countries since the xenophobic campaign began. The trickle shows no sign of stopping.

Blessing, a 44-year-old Malawian, waits sitting on the luggage that sums up more than a decade of his life in South Africa. He worked installing satellite TV antennas and had been sleeping in the hills for several days to avoid being found by the groups that roamed his neighborhood looking for foreigners. “From the hill I would go to work and from work I would return to the hill,” he says. He stayed until he was paid the week’s wages. “I couldn’t leave before that. I need that money to return home.”

Around him, other countrymen listen in silence. One joins the conversation to debunk one of the most repeated arguments against migrants. “They say we all sell drugs. That’s not true. We get up in the morning to work and we go home. Those who sell drugs are still there, but they come to drive us out,” he protests. Another nods with resignation: “They tell us to leave, but no one gives us the money to go. How do they expect us to travel almost 24 hours to Malawi without a cent?”

Their conversation is interrupted by a pickup truck that slows down as it passes the camp. Four men lean out of the windows and start shouting insults in Zulu: “Go back to your country!” Minutes later, the driver of a white passenger car rolls down her window, shouts “Dogs!” and speeds off. No one seems surprised. “It happens every day,” one of the men comments. “Even now that we are leaving.”

Blessing then opens his suitcase and takes out a duvet that was once white. He unfolds it slowly to show several darkened drops of blood. “They beat me two days ago,” he says, pointing to still-visible wounds on his face. He says he knew his attackers, people he sometimes shared a drink with. “They asked when I planned to leave the country and then started beating me.”

The return operation from this other improvised camp is run by many hands: community leaders draw up lists, consulates verify the travellers’ identities, humanitarian organizations and governments help finance the transportation. On the coach platform is Alí (who gives no surname), a community leader in charge of organizing that movement. “Every 10 minutes more people arrive. I request buses for 200 and when I finally get them we are already 230; those leaving today travel with people who arrived a couple of days ago,” he explains.

Before leaving South Africa, everyone must pass through the Musina processing center, near the Zimbabwean border, where South African authorities complete the administrative exit formalities. The shortage of buses has caused long waits and a recent investigation by the South African newspaper Daily Maverick has revealed that thousands of people have been trapped for weeks in an improvised camp near the border due to bureaucratic delays and lack of transportation.

Back at Durban’s refugee reception center, the Congolese refugees are not asking for a ticket home so much as to recover a life they feel has been taken from them. And while adults talk about complaints, occupied homes and an increasingly uncertain future, Priscilla sleeps wrapped in her fuchsia onesie under a blanket. She is three months old and has spent most of her life on a Durban sidewalk.

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