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South African police on Wednesday fired rubber bullets and teargas to disperse hundreds of anti-immigrant protesters in the coastal city of Durban.
The country has been repeatedly swept by waves of anti‑foreigner sentiment, often erupting into violent — and sometimes deadly — attacks on immigrants.
With local elections due in less than a year, the issue has become an even sharper political flashpoint.
The protesters were whipped into action by groups including political parties and xenophobic vigilante movement Operation Dudula, whose name means “push back” in Zulu.
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They poured into the streets waving placards, singing and chanting as they demanded tougher action against undocumented foreign nationals.
Police had initially managed to hold the marchers back from heading towards the beachfront, which protesters claimed was rife with drug dealers and other criminal activity.
But a small group broke away, harassing bystanders and looting shops, triggering the show of force.
Some shop owners, fearing looting and possible violence, had shuttered their businesses well before the march began.
“People can call us names but we cannot allow a situation where our country is being destroyed before our very own eyes,” said Herman Mashaba, leader of the ActionSA party, which promises to tighten immigration controls.
“We are seeing our government allowing our country to be flooded by groups from all over the world as far as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico, all over the world. So we are saying to our government this is unacceptable,” he said at the protest.
Among the marchers was 81‑year‑old Thembi Dlamini from Clermont, west of Durban, who said she had joined last year’s protest as well.
“I have seen my country going down because officials take bribes to give documents illegally, police allow drug trade because they are paid,” she said, adding: “Jobs are being taken away by our brothers from other parts of Africa who are here illegally. Where will our children get jobs?”
As the continent’s most industrialised economy, South Africa is a prime destination for people seeking work even though its own unemployment rate hovers around 32 percent.
Competition for jobs has caused resentment among unemployed South Africans.
According to the statistics agency, some three million foreigners, or 5.1 percent of the population, live in the country.
A small town in South Africa’s semi-desert Karoo has become the unlikely centre of a national argument about memory, identity and who gets to decide what a place is called — after the government renamed the nearly 250-year-old settlement of Graaff-Reinet after anti-apartheid leader Robert Sobukwe, triggering protests, legal threats and a community fracture that has unsettled a town known, until recently, for its calm.
More than 22,000 objection forms have been delivered to the government since the renaming decree was published, a number that exceeds the town’s total population of 25,000. A legal challenge is being prepared. Residents have taken to the streets. And a mayor’s remark that colonial settlers arrived by sea — and that “the sea is open” — has sharpened a debate that was already generating what one local lawyer described as “angry rhetoric” in a community that has not been accustomed to it.
The town sits about 650 kilometres from Cape Town, tucked into a loop of the Sundays River and ringed by the flat-topped hills of the Karoo. Its whitewashed Cape Dutch houses, jacaranda-shaded verandas and lack of the high security walls common across South Africa give it the quality of a place that time has handled gently. It is the fourth oldest town in the country, established in 1786 and named after Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff, then-governor of the Cape Colony, and his wife Reinet. A century after its founding it served as a staging point for the Great Trek, when Afrikaner settlers moved into the interior to escape British rule — a fact that gives the town an almost totemic significance within Afrikaner historical memory.
The new name honours Robert Sobukwe, born in Graaff-Reinet around a century ago, who founded the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959 and led protests in the period leading up to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, when security forces killed dozens of demonstrators and exposed the savagery of apartheid to the world. For his family and his movement, the renaming is recognition that is three decades overdue.
“Someone who comes from that area, who led this glorious struggle for everyone to live in harmony, is being ignored and not accepted by the community of Graaff-Reinet itself,” said Jaki Seroke, deputy president of the PAC. “There is no malice intended in the name change. It is really to build a nation.”
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Sobukwe’s grandson, Mangaliso Tsepo Sobukwe, said the opposition did not surprise him. “I am not surprised by the resistance of a specific segment of the population who does not want to embrace change,” he told AFP — a formulation that frames the controversy as a predictable rearguard action against an overdue reckoning.
Opponents see it differently, and their objections are more complicated than straightforward nostalgia for apartheid-era geography. The majority of Graaff-Reinet’s residents identify as coloured — people of mixed African, Asian and European ancestry — a community that has navigated a difficult position in post-apartheid South Africa, neither the primary beneficiaries of liberation nor the architects of the system that preceded it. Laughton Hoffman, a campaigner with the Hands Off Graaff-Reinet movement who has been going door-to-door collecting objection forms, said his community has felt sidelined for thirty years. “We don’t agree with things like black economic empowerment because I’m a coloured person and we have been marginalised,” he said.
