Nationwide anti-immigration protests swept South Africa on Tuesday, leaving a trail of looted shops, isolated violence and more than 900 arrests, as fringe groups declared the first in a planned series of weekly demonstrations demanding the removal of undocumented foreign nationals from the country. While the scale of unrest fell short of the worst fears, the day was marked by targeted confrontations, opportunistic looting and at least one death under investigation.

Several thousand people marched across cities including Durban — South Africa's major east-coast port city — and Johannesburg, with the largest gathering taking place in Durban. Many protesters wore traditional Zulu attire and carried spears and shields, stopping repeatedly outside buildings they believed housed undocumented migrants and calling on residents to leave. "We want mass deportation," said Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, leader of the organising group March and March, which has now pledged to march every Thursday to maintain pressure on the government. In Hillbrow, a densely populated neighbourhood in Johannesburg, gunfire broke out and the army was deployed to support police; two people were injured in a shooting incident and a murder investigation has been opened in the township of Alexandra after a young man was fatally shot during looting the night of 30 June. Police also launched a separate inquiry after a foreign national died in Durban, apparently falling from the eighth floor of a building while trying to flee protesters.

In Clermont, outside Durban, looters ransacked shops owned by foreign nationals, stripping them of food, appliances, building materials and clothing. Mohamed Abdul, a 29-year-old originally from Somalia who has lived in the area for 11 years, said a large group stormed his store employing 19 people, taking everything including an ATM machine. "We are not illegal in the country but they just started looting. I was scared and felt betrayed," he said. Some shop owners estimated losses running into millions of rand and said they were unsure whether they could reopen. Lieutenant General Tebello Mosikili praised security forces for preventing a wider collapse, noting that of the roughly 900 people arrested, most were undocumented foreigners and South African looters caught in the act. Analysts observed that the protests were smaller than organisers had predicted, with governance expert Tendai Mbanje noting that without support from minor political parties, turnout would have been even lower. Several African governments — including Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Ghana — organised voluntary repatriation flights and buses; South Africa's Justice Ministry said some 4,200 foreign nationals had been voluntarily repatriated and a further 419 deported in recent weeks.

The unrest, while serious, has not yet approached the scale of South Africa's worst episodes of xenophobic violence — around 62 people were killed in 2008 and approximately 350 in 2021. But analysts and researchers caution that enforcement-centred responses address only part of the problem. Most immigrants in South Africa originate from neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho — countries facing prolonged economic decline and governance difficulties — and regional instability rather than individual choice is the primary driver of irregular migration. President Cyril Ramaphosa has outlined five migration priorities including regional cooperation, yet experts from the Institute for Security Studies argue that sustainable solutions require coordinated investment in economic development and democratic governance across Southern Africa. As long as collapse persists in countries of origin, tighter borders and deportations alone, they warn, will shift spending towards managing consequences rather than reducing the conditions that generate migration in the first place.