South African police arrested more than 900 people as nationwide marches marking a self-imposed "deadline" for undocumented foreigners to leave the country tipped into looting and violence in several cities this week, and soldiers were deployed to Johannesburg's Hillbrow neighborhood after a shooting that wounded two people, including a 17-year-old. More than 300 of those arrested were undocumented migrants detained for contravening the Immigration Act; the rest face charges including public violence, robbery, looting, incitement and harboring undocumented migrants.
The marches — 120 official demonstrations, with some 300 affiliated gatherings alongside them — were organized by a coalition of more than 20 groups, led by the March and March movement founded by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and the vigilante network Operation Dudula. The coalition had set June 30 as the date by which undocumented migrants were to leave South Africa, a demand with no legal force but enormous practical effect: thousands of foreign nationals, many from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, crossed the borders home in the preceding weeks.
Police said 108 of the 120 sanctioned marches passed off peacefully. The other 12 required intervention. Looting broke out in Germiston and Alexandra in Gauteng province and in Clermont in KwaZulu-Natal; in Alexandra township, one person was shot dead during a looting incident. In Palm Ridge, east of Johannesburg, two people were run over, leading to eight arrests. The Western Cape recorded the most arrests of any province at 215, followed by the Eastern Cape at 208 and Gauteng at 154.
Lieutenant General Tebello Mosikili, the national deputy police commissioner, said those "who sought to exploit yesterday's demonstration for criminal gain were identified, pursued and brought before the law." The army's deployment to Hillbrow — a dense inner-city district with a large migrant population — followed the shooting there and was described as support for overstretched police.
President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged what he called demonstrators' "deep concerns about illegal immigration, border management, pressure on public services," but drew a hard line at enforcement by mob: "taking the law into one's own hands is vigilantism and has no place in our constitutional democracy." His government announced a migration overhaul in June — stepped-up deportations, dedicated immigration courts, thousands of new labor inspectors and a biometric population registry — that has so far failed to take the momentum out of the street movement.
The protests cap months of escalating intimidation. At least seven people had been killed since the campaign began in March, according to rights monitors, before this week's death in Alexandra; in Mossel Bay in late May, dozens of shacks housing Mozambican workers were torched, prompting mass repatriations. Amnesty International and other rights groups say migrants are being scapegoated for unemployment above 30 percent and failing public services.
The movement has no intention of stopping. Ngobese-Zuma announced that marches will continue "every Thursday" until the government meets demands for tighter border controls and a review of asylum policy. The government, in turn, says it is preparing a dialogue with organizers — while its police force braces for a protest calendar that now repeats weekly.