Over the past two decades, South Africa has witnessed bouts of severe xenophobic violence which has disproportionately targeted poor Black migrants from other African countries.
The roots of this violence, as the government stated in its 2019 National Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, are in the “many years of a racist and isolationist policy of apartheid,” recognizing African people as the “worst victims of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa.”
“Xenophobia is not only about the hatred of people from another country. It is also anti-Black, it is racist,” emphasizes Nomzamo Zondo, the executive director of the Social Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI).
Between 2008 and 2021, at least 612 people were killed and over 122,000 were displaced due to acts of such violence, according to a report published by Xenowatch. While xenophobia is not novel to South Africa, its various iterations in recent years have increasingly come to be associated with a vigilante group called Operation Dudula.
With a name that translates to “force out” in isiZulu, Operation Dudula first made an appearance on the 45th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising in 2021, when a group of protestors armed with weapons marched through Soweto on a “clean-up mission” targeting businesses owned by foreign nationals.
Since then, the group’s members have regularly incited or been directly involved in acts of hate speech, intimidation, and violence against people they perceive to be immigrants, including through forced evictions, “shut down” notices delivered to businesses and stores, physical attacks, and obstruction of access to public services.
A group of social movements and civil society organizations in the country have now come together to seek court action against Operation Dudula, and importantly, the failure of the South African state and police to discharge their duties to intervene and prevent the group’s criminal activities.
The petition has been filed by SERI on behalf of Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX), the South African Informal Traders Forum (SAITF), the Inner City Federation (ICF)—a self-organized group of low-income residents living in Johannesburg’s inner city, and the socialist militant shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM).
State-backed ‘vigilantism’
One of the key incidents of violence highlighted in the affidavit submitted by SERI took place on April 6, 2022, when residents of Diepsloot, an informal settlement located north of Johannesburg, carried out a march against instances of murder, high crime rates, and ineffective policing in the area.
Also in attendance was Operation Dudula’s leader at the time, Ntlantla Paballo Mohlauli (known as Nhlanhla Lux), who addressed the crowd, blaming the high crime rates on the presence of foreign nationals, going further to say, “we will wait for the police to leave and then disperse to the streets and our approach will depend on the people we are fighting, if those people have guns and weapons we also have guns and weapons.”
Later that day, a mob went door to door asking people they suspected of being foreign nationals to produce their passports or money. The mob beat, stoned, and then burned to death a 43-year old Zimbabwean man, Elvis Nyathi.
Two days later, the South African Police Service (SAPS) conducted warrantless raids in Diepsloot, asking people to provide identity documents.
Speaking to Peoples Dispatch, Nomzamo Zondo said, “Operation Dudula has actually said that they are not a vigilante group because they have the support of the government, that the government has joint operations with them and therefore, they cannot be acting outside of the law.”
“You have instances of Operation Dudula going into a community, there is a mob assaulting informal traders, closing down shops they perceive to be owned by foreign nationals…and then immediately behind them, the police would follow and carry out raids.”
This proximity to state power is also reinforced by the fact that Operation Dudula members often wear military-style clothes that resemble the uniform of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF).
The affidavit provides a detailed account of the failure of the SAPS to investigate Operation Dudula’s activities, intervene to stop its violent actions despite being present at the scene, or arrest the group’s members responsible for unlawful conduct. In some instances, “the SAPS has enabled and supported Operation Dudula’s criminal conduct,” the affidavit notes.
On June 13, 2022, Operation Dudula members went to the Yeoville Market in Johannesburg and ordered all traders to leave. Despite being present at the site, the SAPS did not intervene. On June 21, a third of the market burned down in an arson attack.
Moreover, the warrantless raids of people’s homes by the SAPS are themselves a violation of a judgment issued by South Africa’s Constitutional Court in 2021, which held that such raids constituted a violation of the rights to dignity and privacy.
In this context, the affidavit calls upon the court to declare the SAPS in breach of its constitutional duties and to interdict its “supporting or colluding with Operation Dudula.”
It seeks a similar interdict on the actions of the Minister and the Department of Home Affairs, by virtue of participation of its officials in “joint operations with the SAPS” as acknowledged by the MHA in a letter to SERI, on communities targeted by Operation Dudula.
Anti-poor xenophobia under capitalism
Operation Dudula often invokes reactionary anti-migrant rhetoric, publicly singling out entire nationalities as criminals, “illegal border jumpers,” and “cheap laborers.”
This is accompanied by repeated false statements saying that South Africa has over 15 million foreign nationals, when in reality, the figure stands at about 3.9 million according to Statistics South Africa. This figure is then used to construct narratives of foreign nationals as “leeches of the South African constitution” that are taking away housing and jobs from South African nationals.
Such a narrative takes root in a context of soaring unemployment and poverty in a country deemed the most unequal in the world. In circumstances where access to healthcare and education remains a struggle, Operation Dudula has threatened and targeted people trying to access public health facilities.
In Jeppe Park, the group physically attacked a primary school that was providing education to 300 students and primarily serving a poor community, ultimately forcing it to shut down by the end of 2022.
In the face of this routine violence, it is also critical to acknowledge the work that movements and groups in South Africa have done to resist such xenophobic narratives, while advocating for the very issues that Operation Dudula uses to justify its actions, even as they themselves are facing deadly state violence and persecution.
This includes Abahlali baseMjondolo and also the ICF, most of whose members are people who have been waiting in the government housing queue and are recipients of government grants. SERI itself has faced grave threats to the point of being forced to close down its offices, with people at the organization facing doxxing threats on Twitter, phone calls, and physical threats to their safety.
“These movements [the applicants in the case] feel the very pressure that supporters of Operation Dudula feel, of unemployment, of housing, but one thing they have expressed clearly is that ‘we cannot expect dignity for ourselves when we treat other people with indignity’…and the very same things that they are asking for themselves they want for everybody else,” Zondo said.
Central to this is a commitment to recognizing and affirming the humanity of all, AbM General Secretary Thapelo Mohapi stressed, invoking the isiXhosa proverb, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ “which means that a human being is a human being because of other human beings.”
“It is always worrying that the most vulnerable people who are trying to make ends meet are being attacked by the state using other organs such as Operation Dudula…they claim to be representing the poor but they are representing their own agenda, which is also the agenda of the state, to push away migrants,” he told Peoples Dispatch, speaking to AbM’s decision to join the petition.
The AbM has also likened Operation Dudula’s actions, of violently targeting people based solely on whether or not they are foreign, or even perceived to be so, to the segregationist pass laws of the apartheid regime.
“This is exactly what the DHA is trying to do, looking for what they are calling “illegal foreigners,” asking Black people to prove if they are in the country legally… that their humanity should be recognized accordingly,”
Mohapi further added, “A capitalist state always divides the poorest of the poor, so South Africans who have been robbed of their land, who are being violently evicted from the cities blame migrant workers rather than to look at the system that divides us…They tell us that we are impoverished because our African brothers and sisters have taken away our jobs or resources. That is a lie… We are one Africa.”
Masking government failure
Operation Dudula’s actions speak to something bigger— “the scapegoating of migrants is not just about migrants, it is also about state failure,” Zondo said. “Operation Dudula is giving the government a silver bullet, that if we just solve this one issue of migration, we will be able to provide better education, better healthcare…”
Zondo gave the example of the former Mayor of Johannesburg Herman Mashaba. “When asked about providing housing for the poor in the inner city, his response was that 90% of them were undocumented migrants, and thus, the government would not provide housing.”
Not only does xenophobia provide a justification for state failure, she added, but what emerges is a situation where when the state does act, it acts through violence. And this violence is borne by poor communities.
Moreover, while much of the rhetoric is focused on “illegal foreigners”, the widespread economic distress being experienced by the majority of people in South Africa points to the emergence of a kind of internal xenophobia.
“In the context that we are in, where there is rising cost of living, joblessness, landlessness, many of us are also internal migrants…first it is that all African migrants must go back to their own countries, then it is going to be that all people from Limpopo or KwaZulu Natal must go back…,” Zondo said.
“What stops us from reaching a point where almost every context of your life is governed by the violence of others? Where people are using the type of violence that Operation Dudula is using to limit access to health or jobs… because here we are rubber stamping this group’s use of violence, not only as a population but also specifically as a government.”
With an election looming just a year ahead, there is a heightened risk of the use of xenophobic, anti-poor rhetoric for the purposes of political gains. Operation Dudula has also announced its intentions to register as a political party.
“There is this canvassing for votes, which the African National Congress is also part of, despite the fact that when the ANC itself was in exile it was being hosted by the same people that they are today pushing out of the country,” Mohapi said.
Zondo also said, “Just recently there was a politician attempting to evict a building… and all of this is to be able to say that we will work, and we will work means we’ll remove the poor, that you won’t be able to see our failures. You might experience them, if you are poor, but you won’t see them.”
