ON a clear morning last October, Nozie Khoza and her brigade of self-proclaimed patriots stood at the entrance of a public health clinic in Johannesburg on a quest to shape South Africa in their image.
When the gate opened at 7.30am, the group demanded to see IDs from everyone seeking to enter, saying that only South Africans would be allowed inside.
“You belong to Nigeria, sweetheart,” Bongi Nomnganga, one of Khoza’s allies, told a young woman, turning her away because, even though she had a South African ID, her last name was Nigerian.
“It smells like fraud,” another one of Khoza’s associates said of a young woman’s South African ID, after the woman told them her parents were from Mozambique.
Khoza, a 39-year-old mother of two, had no authority to determine who could enter the public clinic.
Rather, she is a foot soldier in a highly organised network of activists going to extreme lengths to harass immigrants in South Africa, most of whom come from other African nations in search of opportunity in the continent’s largest economy.
Polls show a growing number of South Africans share hostility towards immigrants and want the government to do more to thwart the heavy flow of migrants entering the country.
There have been nationwide protests and violence. Immigrants have been attacked and even killed, chased from their homes and businesses.
Despite a lack of evidence, many South Africans blame immigrants for crime, for stealing jobs and for taking up valuable public resources in a nation with high unemployment and growing inequality.
They say they have lost faith in the government and have taken the law into their own hands.
This wave of anti-immigrant furore echoes movements in the United States and Europe. But only 5% of South Africa’s 65 million people are immigrants, according to government statistics.
Foreigners accounted for just 3% of arrests over the past five years, according to police data. They accounted for just 1.2% of arrests for violent crimes over the same period.
Still, officials have ramped up workplace inspections, punishing employers who hire foreigners who lack legal status.
More than 53,000 foreign nationals have been deported or repatriated from South Africa since June, the government said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced new investments to secure the nation’s border, and he has repeatedly warned South Africans not to engage in vigilante justice.
But police have not always intervened when citizens harass foreigners.
“It’s only South Africa that is experiencing such an influx of foreigners every day,” Khoza told those waiting outside the public health clinic.
“The schools are full of your kids. Healthcare is full of you. Workplace is full of you. Restaurants full of you.”
“There’s going to be a war,” she said.
Khoza was born and raised in Durban, the epicentre of much of the recent anti-immigrant unrest in South Africa. But it wasn’t until she moved to Johannesburg at 23 to work as a television extra and in production that she developed her grim view of immigrants.
She said she watched as the city deteriorated over time and blamed the urban blight on immigrant street vendors.
She blamed foreign landlords for not taking care of dilapidated properties.
A construction company she owns stopped getting business. She claims it was because Zimbabweans were underbidding her for contracts.
She also says she had to send her daughter to private school because the public schools nearest her home were at capacity. She blamed this on immigrant children overcrowding the school system.
Khoza’s frustration led her to become an outspoken member of a national anti-immigrant group called March and March. The group targets all foreigners – not just those in the country illegally – and wants them gone.
On a Saturday in May, Khoza joined a group of about 50 people who marched down a residential street near her neighbourhood. Their goal was to raid a home they said had been overrun by Congolese immigrants who lacked legal status.
They stopped at a house in the middle of the block to carry out what the group called an eviction. It did not matter that the Congolese family living inside was there legally.
The mob used bolt cutters to break through the driveway gate. They banged on the doors and jostled the burglar bars on the windows. The house was dark and seemed empty.
A few minutes later, the mob breached the front door. Teary-eyed children emerged from a dark corridor, hustling out of the house, shivering.
“We are sorry,” some of them squealed.
Their mother, Sandra, an immigrant from Congo, shuffled out in shock as she cradled her youngest child in a blanket, a two-week-old baby.
Tall with her hair braided in cornrows, Sandra’s eyes welled with tears as she confronted the angry crowd.
While all the banging was going on outside, Sandra, 38, had been hiding inside with seven of her eight children.
She called her husband Pierre, who was out at the time, and he went straight to a police station to report a break-in.
Having lived nearly half her life in South Africa, Sandra knew how dangerous situations like this could be.
In 2008, the year she arrived after fleeing civil war in Congo, South Africa experienced its first major spasm of xenophobic violence after apartheid, the era when many Black citizens were forced to flee the country’s violent white-led regime.
Vigilantes killed dozens of immigrants and destroyed many foreign-owned shops, leading tens of thousands of foreigners to flee the country. Violence spiked again in 2015 and 2019.
Other African nations have watched these waves of anti-immigrant violence in disbelief, shocked to see so many South Africans turn their backs on people from countries that provided refuge during apartheid.
Nigeria has demanded that South Africa compensate its citizens who have been forced to leave their homes and businesses.
Over the years, Sandra, whose house was raided, had learned how to survive as a foreigner in South Africa.
She knew not to answer her cellphone in a crowded taxi so no one would recognise her accent. She knew not to play Congolese music too loudly at home or in the hair salon she owned. She knew how to dress like a South African.
She and her husband said they always keep their immigration paperwork up to date and have legal status as asylum seekers.
None of that seemed to matter to the angry mob shoving its way into her house.
The group stormed the family’s home and dumped their belongings on the street.
Pierre, 47, was incredulous when he arrived with the police.
He had migrated from Congo in 2008 and met Sandra in Johannesburg.
He tried to pacify the crowd by speaking Zulu to them and showing photos of a traditional Zulu wedding ceremony he had with a South African woman he called his second wife.
The mob still wanted them out.
Khoza has been watching with envy clips of US immigration agents raiding American streets to capture and deport immigrants there illegally under the Trump administration.
“The government here should be doing exactly what Trump is doing,” she said, “so that South Africa can have order and South Africans are put first.”
While they wait for the government to act, groups like March and March have asked organisers like Khoza to be as loud as possible and to make a scene wherever they go.
At Pierre’s house, neighbours flocked to the street to gawk. The block was jammed with police vehicles, a heap of furniture and the mob’s shouting.
Pierre called his landlord, Dermot Connors. When Connors arrived, he explained that Pierre and his family were lawful tenants and he begged the mob to let the children back inside.
They refused.
Connors asked police to intervene, but a police captain told him he was concerned about a potential standoff.
“I don’t want to promote violence,” the captain said, adding that the best solution was for the family to find somewhere else to stay for the night.
The battle continued the day after a nationwide anti-immigrant protest on June 30.
The organisers had given that date as a deadline for all migrants lacking legal status to leave the country, and Khoza hoped to see fewer immigrants on the streets of Johannesburg.
Instead, she saw many immigrant street vendors selling goods just as before.
“It’s no longer allowed to sell here,” Khoza told a man selling vegetables.
“There are people coming here to check the situation. Pack quickly.”
As the women went from one stall to another, vendors were rattled and hustled to pack their onions and cellphone cases and socks.
“I have papers,” one of the vendors said, holding up a plastic bag with her passport.
“Mama, we don’t want your permit,” Khoza said.
“The only thing we want is only South Africans in our country.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
