fajar-ramadhan
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — For several weeks, Bishop Raphael Bahebwa has avoided showing himself in public. The 26-year resident of South Africa, who arrived 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.
"They say they are going to kill me for speaking about the rights of foreigners," he told Al Jazeera. In the more than two decades since he was granted a place in his adopted home, Bahebwa has repeatedly watched anti-foreigner sentiment rise and fall. But he believes this year is different, and the reason is a date on the calendar: September 30.
That deadline was declared by March and March, an anti-immigration movement that has organised protests across South Africa this year. The group has demanded that undocumented foreign nationals leave the country, and it has warned of further demonstrations if its demands go unmet. As the deadline approaches, migrant communities that already spent months sleeping on pavements say they see fresh danger in the rhetoric.
For many of those migrants, the careful distinction the movement draws between documented and undocumented status offers little protection. Refugees and asylum seekers interviewed in Durban described encounters in which the hostility they faced on the street had little to do with immigration papers. Attackers, they said, did not ask to see documents before striking.
Bahebwa was among the hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers who, for several months, slept on the pavement directly outside the Durban Refugee Reception Centre on Che Guevara Road. The population was drawn largely from the DRC and Burundi, with smaller numbers from Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania. They had gathered outside the Department of Home Affairs office seeking safety from attacks in their communities, but the pavement outside the centre effectively became their home.
For roughly four months, men, women and children endured exposure to the elements, relying on civil society organisations and volunteers for food and other necessities. Bahebwa described the experience as unlike anything he had been through before. Some migrants told Al Jazeera that conditions became desperate, with irregular access to food and medication. One man who had tuberculosis died while living at the camp; Al Jazeera has not independently established the circumstances of his death.
The camp's location did not insulate its residents from the violence that had driven them there. On September 3, members of March and March confronted refugees and asylum seekers living outside the centre. Fighting broke out and police intervened, with at least four people reported injured. At another demonstration days later, officers formed a barrier between the two groups as tensions climbed again.
March and March has consistently framed its mobilisation as a campaign against what it calls undocumented immigration, alongside crime and deteriorating conditions in South African communities. Its leaders say the government's response to immigration enforcement has been insufficient, and they have repeatedly rejected claims that their campaign is xenophobic, insisting that their target is undocumented migration rather than foreign nationals in general.
Bahebwa said documented and undocumented migrants alike have been caught up in the 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; two were hospitalised. Bahebwa said migrants also struggled to get help from the authorities after earlier attacks, alleging that police told them cases could not be opened because they were foreigners. Police have not publicly responded to that specific allegation.
The government moved in mid-September to clear the makeshift camp outside the refugee reception centre. Residents were given a stark 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, and its reputation made the offer a difficult one to accept.
The choice divided the camp. Some refugees feared being taken to a facility historically associated with detention and repatriation. Others felt they could no longer bear life on the pavement. On September 15, 274 people were transported by bus from Durban to Lindela, while roughly 150 chose to remain in the city and began searching for alternative accommodation.
For those who stayed, leaving the pavement did not solve the problem that had driven them there in the first place. Kafuti Muyumba, a small business owner from the DRC and a community representative, said many were afraid to return to the neighbourhoods where they had built businesses and lives, and that refugees had lost their livelihoods during the months of upheaval.
"Even the police allow March and March violence. They came with sticks and say we are attacking them," Muyumba said. He also said some officers were telling refugees they must leave. "We don't trust the police. They are not being fair with us. Some of them are also saying we must go."
Muyumba said the current climate is part of a long pattern. "This is not the first time we are experiencing xenophobia. In 2008 and then in 2015 we also experienced this." In 2008, violence against foreign nationals spread through townships and informal settlements, killing dozens and displacing thousands, and further outbreaks followed in the years after.
Those memories are why, for people like Muyumba, talk of a September 30 deadline is difficult to dismiss. The stakes are also rising politically: South Africa holds local government elections on November 4, in a campaign where migration has become an increasingly prominent issue. Police have said they have no plans to alter their normal policing approach because of the September deadline.
With the deadline days away, the refugees described in Durban face an unsettled choice between displacement within South Africa and the risk of returning to communities where they say they were already attacked. Bahebwa, who says he has spent months unable to appear openly, is among those waiting to see whether September 30 passes as a day of protest or of violence.
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