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Published : 15 Jun 2026, 09:47 PM
When 33-year-old Princess Adjei set up her hair salon in downtown Durban in November, she had lived in South Africa since moving from Ghana as a toddler; there was no other place she called home.
Adjei did all her schooling in South Africa, has local friends and speaks Zulu, the lingua franca of this eastern port city. It had rarely occurred to her that she was an outsider.
On May 18, demonstrators at an anti-migrant march broke into her salon and looted it. Suddenly, even people she knew started demanding that she go "home" to a country she's visited once.
Adjei is one of scores of victims of attacks on mostly African foreign nationals accused by an anti-immigration movement of being in South Africa illegally. Many of them have legal papers and deep roots here.
"They took everything," Adjei said, surveying the wreckage of her first-floor shop, amid smashed mirrors and broken chairs.
"Those were hair pieces I was selling here," she told Reuters, gesturing to a wall of empty hooks. "There were acrylic nails, six hair dryers, a range of shampoos. All gone."
Migrants Sleep on Streets After Attacks
Adjei said she spent 50,000 rand (more than $3,000) renovating the salon in February. This month, she moved out of her central Durban apartment.
"Without the salon .... I don't have money for rent," she said, showing Reuters a blanket where she and her 14-year-old son now sleep next to 200 other migrants on the street.
They have set up camp outside the office of the government's Department of Home Affairs, hoping officials there will be able to confirm their residency status.
Other Africans have fled towns and cities and taken refuge on mountains and rough ground amid violence that has killed at least five and caused a diplomatic rift with the rest of the continent.
Reuters interviewed a dozen migrants in Durban, four of whom had been in South Africa since childhood.
March and March, the organisation which began the protests last month, denies xenophobia.
"Xenophobia (applies) ... to those people who come to a country illegally and make people from that country feel uncomfortable," Jacinta Ngobese, founder of March and March, told Reuters in an interview in Durban.
She said her movement had spared migrants violence by redirecting South Africans' anger toward the government. Still, the group's protests usually coincide with violence, including the looting of foreign shops and the destruction of homes.
"We are not responsible for the violence," Ngobese said. "If we were violent, we would have been arrested."
Migrant Say Police Chased Them Away
Some arrests were made after protesters killed five Mozambicans last month and at other incidents. But police responses are rare.
After fleeing their homes during the protests in Durban, around 200 migrants camped outside the central police station.
Four interviewed by Reuters, including Adjei, said the police escorted them first to a homeless shelter then to a market warehouse. In both places, people already there refused to let them in.
The following day, police told them to leave, later firing on them with rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas, the four migrants and some local media reported.
"They told us to look for another shelter," said Congolese refugee Tchomba Kasongo, hobbling and showing a bullet scar on his leg. Now they live in fear of a Jun 30 deadline that protesters have given all "illegal" migrants to leave.
"We never tear gassed anyone, we never fired on anyone," Durban police spokesperson Booysie Zungu told Reuters. When told about the attacks on Adjei's salon and other anti-migrant violence, he said, "We don't have cases of that nature reported. They must open a case."
A spokesperson for Durban's mayor declined to comment.
Old Friends Turn On Migrants
When Adjei returned to her apartment after seeing her salon in tatters, she bumped into a South African neighbour whom she regarded as a friend. They'd often sat in the corridor chatting or sharing tea, but now he was scowling at her and asking when she was leaving.
It was the third time she had experienced the xenophobia that periodically convulses South Africa. The first was when she was bullied in school during protests in 2008 by classmates who'd previously had no interest in her nationality.
Some South African friends have kept up their support.
After the latest protests, Congolese refugee Wivene Bahati, 25, also sleeping on the curb near Adjei, said an old classmate had made contact.
"She felt bad. She asked me is everything ok?" Bahati, who has been in South Africa since 2011, told Reuters.
Analysts say migrants are seen as competition for jobs and services, which can make them scapegoats when shortages arise or government services fail.
Anti-migrant sentiment sometimes increases around election time, as politicians stoke it for populist votes — South Africa has local elections due by November.
Thamsanqa Ntuli, the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, of which Durban is the main city, rejects the notion that politics fuels xenophobia, blaming illegal migration instead.
"We agree with the entire society when they say: 'government, you should have started to manage migration properly ... a long time ago'," he told Reuters.
