Zanele Mji: South Africa deploys soldiers after anti-immigrant shutdown protests

South African soldiers were deployed outside looted foreign-owned shops in KwaDabeka near Durban on 30 June, after weeks of anti-immigrant protests culminated in a self-declared “shutdown” deadline, according to a Guardian column by Zanele Mji. The civic groups behind the marches demanded identity documents from African foreign nationals, told non-citizens to close their businesses and urged undocumented migrants to leave. The article says at least four people were killed in the run-up to the deadline.

Mji describes a pattern familiar from earlier outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa, including attacks in 2008, 2015 and 2019: economic stagnation, high unemployment and declining trust in state institutions create a market for simple explanations, while the cost of acting on those explanations is paid by people with the least protection. In the column’s account, protesters blame “porous borders” for crime, joblessness and overstretched services such as healthcare and education, even as official data has “repeatedly debunked” the link. That gap is where street-level enforcement emerges: rather than waiting for border agencies, marchers conduct their own document checks in townships and city centres.

The immediate fallout is visible in logistics, not slogans. Mji reports tens of thousands of migrants — including people from Zimbabwe and Malawi — displaced into makeshift camps while awaiting repatriation. Small shops become the pressure point because they are legible targets: they are local, cash-based, and operate in neighbourhoods where the state’s presence is intermittent until violence forces it to appear. Soldiers outside shuttered storefronts are a late-stage intervention, arriving after intimidation and looting have already rearranged who can safely trade.

The column also places the episode in a wider feedback loop driven by online mis- and disinformation. President Cyril Ramaphosa, Mji notes, warned earlier in June that the government would act against forces exploiting immigration concerns for “political, personal, or criminal agendas,” and urged South Africans not to be misled by social media campaigns spreading “misinformation, fake news, and lies” about foreign nationals. The article draws a parallel to anti-immigrant violence in Belfast the previous month, where disinformation and violent imagery helped fuel nights of unrest that included cars set alight and immigrant families driven out.

Mji’s point is less about the novelty of xenophobia than about how quickly it becomes a substitute for governance. When borders are described as out of control and services as collapsing, the demand shifts from policy to punishment — and the enforcement mechanism becomes whoever is willing to show up in the street.

On 30 June, the deadline date the protesters chose for others to leave, soldiers were standing outside looted shops in KwaDabeka.