March and March and Black South Africa’s 1922

In these past couple of weeks, a fair amount of attention has been paid to the anti-immigrant riots in the country. MK-aligned anti-immigrant group “March and March” has launched protests in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and other centres, demanding undocumented foreigners depart by 30 June. The Mangaung Metro shutdown turned quickly to looting – additional concerns raised by the National Service Delivery Forum on 26 May 2026 ran out of control. Protesters blocked major roads, looted immigrant-owned shops; over 142 were arrested. M&M leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma has taken to social media to justify most of this and play three-card-monte with her interlocutors, claiming no responsibility for the violence, but not entirely condemning it either.

On Friday 29 May 2026, March and March protest action for Mosselbaai started at the Asla Park taxi rank and spread out. Participants demanded identification documents and pressured non-South Africans to leave. By the weekend it got worse. During the unrest, mobs looted and torched shacks. Approximately 50–55 shacks were destroyed and hundreds displaced and their belongings looted. On or around 29–30 May, Tomas Chunguane, a 27-year-old Mozambican, was assaulted and stabbed to death. The following day, 30 May, Danilo Muianga, a 43-year-old Mozambican, was also killed in the same area.

But the death that may define this whole episode was that of a South African killed for being Tsonga.

The great conveyor belt

In Mosselbaai, the riots have a decidedly instructive character which cannot be waved away with reference to laws or borders themselves. The crux of the matter is that, while national boundaries or race can be brought up as Schelling points for discussion, the heart of the matter is the sense of home territory. Xhosas who have settled in the Cape, often illegally and forcefully over the past few decades, have now established homogeneous little enclaves of their own, and don’t like sharing these with anyone else.

They came because local businessmen seek to undercut local labour, as all business eventually does. This was the case back in the formation of the Union of South Africa too, when the Chamber of Mines bribed the government to impose punitive taxation on the black homelands, to force them into “white” South Africa to work for cheap. This was done to undercut the white mineworkers, driven from their farms during the scorched-earth campaign, or imported from Cornwall, who were starting to unionise. When they did protest at scale in 1922, they were machine-gunned and bombed from the air, and forced to give up. This led to the eloection of the Nationalist-Labour coalition in 1924, and the stripping of the last political rights of non-whites by 1936.

Much like the old oligarchs, local businessmen learned in the 1980s (when race-based territorial and labour restrictions were relaxed) that fresh and insecure black labour from Transkei was more disciplined than local Coloured labour, and would take lower wages. But after a season or two, newcomers would find other options, and lose motivation to do dull, low-paid and repetitive work. In fact, with each season, a new batch of employees was imported, to make sure they had the greatest motivation to work.

As each cohort settled in and found other options, they were gotten rid of to make way for harder-working newcomers, until the past decade or so, when immigrants from abroad have proven easier to acquire and discipline. Now the Xhosa find themselves in the same position as the Coloured Cape natives.

The DA have leaned into this whole process particularly hard. The peak of the violence happened in Asla Park and Giyani, two neighbourhoods in the main informal settlement KwaNonqaba, which mostly dates from the late 1980s when migration restrictions were removed. Asla Park is home to around 2 500 households, with another 200-250 in the adjacent Giyani. These areas receive effectively free utilities from the local government, which adheres to a policy pioneered by the DA called “Urban Upgrading”, whereby land invaders are given title deeds and utilities connections and encouraged to stay, in the belief that it would reduce crime and urban violence. In practice, this has simply accelerated the illegal settlement of the province, making it the only province where informal settlement rates have risen in the past 20 years, and the worst-performing in this regard.

The municipality conducts regular surveys and uses municipal law enforcement, including drones, supposedly to curb further expansion, though this has done little in the absence of any meaningful attempt to change the laws around eviction. This is an area over which the Provincial government has some say, given that housing is a provincial competency, and the National legislation leaves fair room for provincial amendment.

Why Mosselbaai was different

The EFF’s MP Naledi Chirwa have defended their party’s open-borders policy once more, but this time she had something new to say. Anti-immigrant sentiment now seems to extend to native South Africans from Limpopo Province. She highlighted the chants of “Voetsek Shangane!” – Tsonga are a fairly put-upon ethnic group, who do not fall under the two main black ethnic denominations in the country (the Nguni like the Zulu/Xhosa/Swazi and the Sotho-Tswana), and popular cartoons on YouTube have shown fairly extreme negative depictions of the Tsonga for a long time.

And on 31 May, the mob also killed Nhlamulo Sambo, a 19-year-old Tsonga from Limpopo who was fatally stabbed multiple times. March and March spokespersons believed he was mistaken for a foreigner because of his language and ethnic background, despite being a South African citizen.

Authorities responded with riot police deployments, and five suspects appeared in court on the 2nd of June on charges related to public violence and possession of stolen property. A 30-year-old man, described as a leader of the protesting group, was charged with incitement to commit public violence; he appeared in court on 8 June, was remanded in custody and is due to apply for bail on 22 June.

Calm has not fully returned, but now organisers will have to ask themselves difficult questions about where their loyalty is really – is it the state defined by its colonial borders, is it the black race, is it the tribe? All of this will hinge on how they process the death of a South African Tsonga, or whether they choose to address it at all.

Aftermath

The municipality, working with the Mozambican consulate, has now evacuated more than 400 Mozambicans , with assistance continuing for around 100 additional foreign nationals. Zimbabwean nationals—74 people, including 49 adults and 25 children—sought refuge at the Mossel Bay Municipality Hall, where they were protected by police for up to two weeks. Some had been hiding there since the attacks. The Zimbabwean government arranged a bus that transported them to Beit Bridge. Malawian nationals who had been in temporary camps also began voluntary repatriation; the first two buses carrying 150 people departed Mossel Bay on 7 June, with further departures expected. Ghana, Mozambique, Malawi and Nigeria initiated repatriation processes.

The government has been trying to look busy in the meantime, with Leon Schreiber advertising tens of thousands of deportations and anti-migrant sweeps. The ConCourt recently banned foreign nationals from reapplying for asylum after rejection to end a “never-ending cycle” of nominal asylees abusing the process to remain indefinitely without merit. But these are little band-aids; the border is as porous as ever, and people just come back. The state seems to understand they can’t handwave the problem away, but they are clearly doing border control very reluctantly, and it leaves them little to say when events arise.

The Western Cape Provincial Police Commissioner Lieutenant-General Thembisile Patekile visited the area and urged protests to remain lawful. Mossel Bay Mayor Dirk Kotzé called for calm, noting that not all foreign nationals were in the country illegally. Local ward councillor, Mzwandile Mkonto, blamed authorities for neglecting the presence of undocumented people in informal settlements. President Cyril Ramaphosa, addressing Parliament, acknowledged pressures from illegal migration on services and jobs but condemned violence, xenophobia and vigilantism, stressing the need for lawful enforcement, workplace inspections and stronger border management.

Both are simply dong their jobs, but these seem to be particularly misguided and impotent statements. What everyone in the crowd will know, is that peaceful protest achieves nothing unless a politician already wants it to support his or her point. What is more, pointing out that the immigrants are legal just tells anti-immigrant activists that the government wants the immigrants there. This is not smart.

For the first time in South Africa’s democratic era, we now have large-scale, politically organised, anti-establishment nativism. This could easily translate into meaningful political change if harnessed correctly, and if anyone can do that, it’s Zuma. The temptation from the state will eventually be to put this riot down, and in many ways, they probably have no option if it keeps escalating.

But should the state make a move like they did for wildcat miners strikes back in Marikana in 2012, a new breach of the political consensus may just usher in the end of the status quo as we know it.