The deadline is September 30. It was not set by a court, or by the Department of Home Affairs. It was set by March and March, the anti-immigration movement that has led protests across South Africa this year, and its demand is that undocumented foreign nationals leave the country, with further demonstrations promised if they do not. The government notes, correctly, that the date carries no legal authority — that ordinary citizens cannot deport anyone from South Africa. But deadlines do not need legal force to create fear. An earlier one, for June 30, had none either.
For roughly four months, hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers slept on the pavement outside the Durban Refugee Reception Centre on Che Guevara Road. Most came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, others from Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania. They said they had fled their communities because they feared antiforeigner attacks. They arrived at a government office seeking safety. The pavement became home instead — men, women and children out in the weather, fed by civil society organisations and volunteers.
Among them was Bishop Raphael Bahebwa, a refugee from the DRC who has lived in South Africa for twenty-six years. He is, at the moment, in hiding. “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. Of the months on Che Guevara Road, he said: “It has been very tough. Never before have I experienced something like this.”
Some at the camp described irregular access to food and medication, and said one man who had tuberculosis died while living there. Al Jazeera has not independently established the circumstances of his death.
On September 3, members of March and March confronted the people living outside the centre. Violence broke out, police intervened, and at least four people were reported injured. At another protest days later, officers stood in a line between the two groups. March and March describes its mobilisation as a campaign against undocumented immigration, crime and deteriorating conditions in South African communities; it says the government’s enforcement response has been insufficient, and its leaders repeatedly reject the word xenophobic.
The distinction between documented and undocumented has not, in practice, been much use to the people on the pavement. Earlier this year six refugees working in salons around Durban’s Warwick Street Market were beaten by men carrying sticks, the public-interest outlet GroundUp reported; two were hospitalised. Bahebwa alleges the authorities were no help after earlier attacks. “Police said we can’t open cases because we are foreigners. We had nowhere to go,” he said. Police have not publicly responded to that specific allegation.
In mid-September the government moved to clear the camp, and offered a choice: return to the communities the refugees had fled, or accept temporary accommodation at Lindela, in Gauteng, hundreds of kilometres away — a government-run immigration detention facility, used to hold people facing deportation. The choice divided them. On September 15, two hundred and seventy-four people were transported by bus from Durban to Lindela. About a hundred and fifty stayed, and began looking for somewhere else to be.
Kafuti Muyumba, a small business owner from the DRC who speaks for the refugee community, says people are afraid to return to neighbourhoods where they built businesses and lives. “Even the police allow March and March violence. They came with sticks and say we are attacking them,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is not the first time we are experiencing xenophobia. In 2008 and then in 2015 we also experienced this.” In 2008 the violence spread through townships and informal settlements, killing dozens and displacing thousands. “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 September 30, and that any protesters will be expected to remain within the law. The state, meanwhile, has been busy on its own account. Between June 14 and August 20 it processed 86,596 foreign nationals for deportation and repatriation, according to its Inter-Ministerial Committee on Migration — Malawians the largest group, followed by Zimbabweans and Mozambicans. Government data says 90 percent of those repatriated had entered illegally and 95 percent crossed outside official ports of entry. Officials describe a broader effort on border management, and have repeatedly warned private groups against taking enforcement into their own hands. March and March, in other words, proposes to do by menace what the state already does by paperwork. March and March says all it wants is for undocumented immigrants to go home. Muyumba said home is not available. “There is still war there,” he said.
South Africa holds local government elections on November 4, in a campaign where migration has become an increasingly prominent issue. Bahebwa has spent more than a quarter of a century in the country. For now he is hiding, and says he does not know what September 30 will bring.
“They are scapegoating us as foreigners,” he said. “It is not going to end on September 30. It has to do with the elections.”