KAAX STATEMENT
Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX) condemns the mob violence against African migrants in central Durban last week. In the space of two days, three men were attacked. On Wednesday, 21 October, a Ugandan man was chased and assaulted by a mob. A Burundian man was also attacked and remains in hospital with serious injuries. On the morning of Thursday, 22 October, a man was beaten to death on Dr Pixley kaSeme Street by a group of about fifty people who, police say, were marching at the time. Community leaders in Durban have told KAAX that he was a Malawian national. He was killed on a street named after Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a founder of the liberation movement, who in 1906 called for the regeneration of Africa. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and community, and our solidarity to the Ugandan and Burundian men, their families, and everyone who now fears walking the streets of the city they call home.
The police say that the motive for Thursday’s killing is “unknown”. We vehemently reject this. Black South Africans heard the same evasions from the police under apartheid. These attacks follow weeks of organised anti-migrant mobilisation in Durban led by March and March. That mobilisation intensified after Home Affairs withdrew its asylum-access directive, and it brought two days of rioting and looting that led to soldiers being deployed in the city. The same groups have forced the Durban Refugee Reception Office to close. A man was then killed in the city centre, in broad daylight, by a crowd beside a march, on a street covered by CCTV cameras. A local security guard has told reporters that police were barely visible as vigilantes terrorised the area. Five men have since been detained by the police in connection to these events.
Migrant communities in Durban describe a clear double standard in policing. When a migrant is the suspect, the police act quickly. When a stone struck a police officer during clashes at a migrant encampment in August, a foreign national was arrested. When South Africans attack migrants, the police do little or nothing, and the instigators of this campaign continue to walk the streets openly. This is dangerous. When people conclude that the law will not protect them, the risk of wider and bloodier confrontation grows. The responsibility for preventing that lies squarely with the state.
These are hate crimes, preceded and incited by hate speech. South Africa is a constitutional democracy with laws, criminal justice institutions, and national policies needed to address them. What is missing is the will to use them. The right to march was won at enormous cost: Solomon Mahlangu was hanged in 1979 for fighting for the freedoms this democracy now guarantees. That right does not extend to marches used as cover for vigilante violence against black Africans. With local government elections only weeks away, we warn every party and candidate that scapegoating migrants costs lives.
KAAX, therefore, demands:
- the continued identification and arrest of everyone responsible for all three attacks, using the CCTV and video footage that is available;
- that each case be investigated with the possibility of a hate motive placed on record from the start;
- that KwaZulu-Natal SAPS give a public account of what it is doing to protect migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and of how any further marches of this kind will be policed;
- protection for the injured people, both while they are receiving medical attention and after they are discharged;
- that the government urgently implements the 2019 National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, as the Johannesburg High Court ordered it to do in its judgment of 4 November 2025.
An attack on any person because of where they come from is an attack on the Constitution, and on all of us.
Issued by Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX)
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