30 arrested as anti-immigration protests hit Durban and Soweto
NATJOINTS says heightened police deployments will stay in place at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg after this week's demonstrations.
Thirty people have been arrested after this week’s anti-undocumented-immigration protests in Durban and Johannesburg, 25 in KwaZulu-Natal and five in Gauteng, on offences including public violence, illegal gathering, obstruction and resisting arrest.
The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure, the standing command that coordinates the South African Police Service with the metro police, the defence force and the intelligence services during large public-order operations, says heightened deployments will remain at hotspots in Durban and Johannesburg. As SABC News reported on 10 October, the structure’s briefing confirmed the deployments would stay in place.
The protests began earlier this week in the Durban CBD, in Soweto and in Johannesburg. They are the latest round in a long-running public argument about undocumented immigration, the load it places on clinics, schools, housing and informal trading, and what South Africans want the state to do about it.
That argument has a history. In 2019, waves of unrest in Durban and Johannesburg targeted foreign nationals and their businesses. In 2021, the July unrest began as a protest against the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma and spread into looting and destruction across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Each time, the state’s answer has followed the same shape: a deployment, an arrest count, and a promise that the situation is under control.
The numbers this week are smaller than either of those episodes. Thirty arrests is not a mass casualty event. But the pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched the debate over immigration in this country over the past decade. The anger is real, it is expressed in public, and it is not going away because a briefing says criminality will not be tolerated.
What a South African reader will notice is that the briefing did not address the underlying question. It did not say how many undocumented migrants are in the country, because no reliable figure exists. It did not say what Home Affairs is doing to process the backlog of asylum applications, which has been a source of frustration for years. It did not say what happens to the people who are here without papers, or to the communities that say they are carrying the cost.
Those are the questions the protests are asking. The state’s answer, so far, is a deployment and a charge sheet.
The Enquirer will continue to report on this story as it develops.
