Durban Anti-Immigrant Protests: Police Whisk Mayor Cyril Xaba From Hostile Crowd

South Africa · POLITICS

Durban anti-immigrant protests reached a new pitch on 10 September 2026, when police had to extract eThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba from a crowd that refused to be addressed by him. The standoff, driven by the March and March movement, is now colliding with South Africa’s 4 November municipal election campaign.

Durban anti-immigrant protests forced the eThekwini municipality’s mayor into a humiliating retreat on Thursday 10 September 2026. Cyril Xaba had gone to the volatile area around the Home Affairs refugee reception office on Che Guevara Street hoping his presence would calm tensions. Instead, demonstrators from the March and March movement heckled him and refused to be addressed, and a strong police contingent whisked him away, the Mail & Guardian reported.

A mayor on the firing line

The scene on Thursday was a measure of how far the crisis has escalated. More than a hundred demonstrators from anti-illegal-immigration groups brought Che Guevara Street to a standstill, some carrying sticks and sjamboks, some with faces covered by balaclavas, according to Eyewitness News. Public order police carrying shields formed a human barricade between the protesters and the migrants camped outside the facility.

Xaba’s attempt to address the crowd collapsed within minutes. Protesters shouted that they would not be addressed by the African National Congress, accusing the party of protecting foreign nationals over South Africans. The mayor, who is on the ANC’s list of potential mayoral candidates for the crucial 4 November municipal elections, left under police escort.

March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma used the rally to dare the camped migrants directly, saying they should put women and children away and “show themselves”, the Mail & Guardian reported. Provincial leaders of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party and ActionSA also attended the protest, underlining how the migration issue is being folded into the election contest in KwaZulu-Natal.

From violent clash to court ultimatum

Thursday’s show of force followed a violent confrontation at the same site on 3 September. Police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades to separate March and March supporters from the foreign nationals after stones were thrown; at least five people were hospitalised and several were arrested, according to Eyewitness News and other South African outlets.

The movement’s next step is legal as much as physical. Xolani Zuma, March and March’s head of legal, told Eyewitness News the group would go to court and expected the migrants to be gone from the pavement within 7 to 14 days. “We are not here to attack them,” he said. “So please don’t hit or kill them.”

Authorities are also moving on the camp itself. Eyewitness News reported that the KwaZulu-Natal migrants camped outside the Durban Home Affairs office are to be relocated to the Lindela repatriation centre near Johannesburg. How many of the camp’s residents, who include women and children and say they are legally verified asylum seekers and refugees, will accept transfer remains unclear.

How the Durban camp crisis began

The standoff has been building since May 2026, when hundreds of foreign nationals, mainly of Congolese origin, fled their homes in Durban after what they described as targeted attacks. Turned away from the Durban Central police station, they erected makeshift shelters outside the refugee reception office, then on Moore Road, now renamed Che Guevara Street.

An early flashpoint came in the week of 21 May, when authorities processed 459 foreign nationals who had gathered at the Diakonia Centre in the city centre. Home Affairs found only two without valid documentation; one had a rejected permit application and the other a fraudulent permit, and both were arrested. The remaining 457 were in the country legally.

Xaba, who stayed on site throughout that operation, said at the time that those verified as lawful residents had to be accepted back into their communities. That position, broadly the ANC’s, is precisely what the Durban anti-immigrant protests are now mobilising against.

A national wave with a deadly toll

The Durban unrest is part of a broader anti-migrant wave across South Africa. Police figures cited by international media put the national toll at at least four migrants killed in anti-migrant unrest this year, with thousands of foreigners driven from homes and businesses at the peak of the violence earlier in the southern winter.

Civil-society groups have criticised the March and March campaign as vigilantism. Activists quoted by TimesLIVE this week said the movement’s “clean-up” demonstrations outside the refugee reception office endanger people whom the state has already verified. Human rights organisations have repeatedly warned that inflammatory rhetoric from public figures can fuel attacks on vulnerable groups.

For expats and foreign workers in Durban, the practical picture is immediate: a flashpoint camp in Umbilo, recurring protests, and a heavy but stretched police presence. International firms with operations in the port city have been reviewing security protocols since the June violence.

Election stakes for the ANC

The political timing is acute. South Africa holds municipal elections on 4 November 2026, and eThekwini is one of the ANC’s most contested metros. In a late-August interview with News24, Xaba argued the ANC could beat the MK party in eThekwini, a contest in which migration has become a mobilising theme for the opposition.

The images of a sitting mayor being driven off by protesters, with MK and ActionSA figures in attendance, cut directly against that message. Whether the ANC keeps Xaba on its candidate list, and whether the promised court case and Lindela relocation defuse or inflame the camp standoff, will now be watched well beyond KwaZulu-Natal.

As covered in our Africa: The New Scramble pillar and the Africa Intelligence Brief of 5 September, migration politics is becoming one of the sharpest levers in South Africa’s local power contests, with Durban as the current epicentre.

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