Durban court gags March and March as police warn the refugee centre will burn

The Durban High Court has blocked the March and March Movement from marching through the streets of eThekwini, and the people who have spent months filling those streets for stricter immigration control have been told by a judge to stay off them.

The interim interdict was granted on Wednesday, 28 October 2026 and it returns to the same court on Friday, 30 October, when a judge decides whether the restrictions become permanent. It names the movement as first respondent and its leader, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, alongside Xolani Zuma, Mthokozisi Gumede, Nozibusiso Khambule, Lindani Xulu and Uyama Mthembu. The eThekwini Municipality, its municipal police leadership and the Minister of Home Affairs are also cited.

March and March has held repeated protests in Durban calling for tighter control of who enters and stays in the country, and for the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals. Those demands are the reason the movement exists, and they are shared far beyond its own membership. The load on Home Affairs, on clinics, on schools and on informal trading in this city is not a slogan invented for a placard. It is what residents queue in and trade alongside every day, and the movement’s answer is enforcement.

The interdict, as Briefly News reported on 29 October, was sought by KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia. Its founding affidavit, sworn by Brigadier Thamsanqa Gama, rests on police intelligence of an alleged plan to set alight the Home Affairs Refugee Reception Centre on Che Guevara Road, formerly Moore Road, in Berea. Gama warned of an immediate threat to public safety, lives and order across Durban and the wider province. Police also flagged the risk of retaliatory violence after the death of a foreign national during the unrest.

That death is a murder investigation. A Ugandan man was allegedly assaulted and stabbed on Dr Pixley kaSeme Street. KwaZulu-Natal police spokesperson Colonel Robert Netshiunda said two men allegedly broke away from a group of marchers and attacked the victim, and that several others joined the assault. He said the motive was not established at that stage. The Enquirer does not treat that killing as the movement’s position, and the movement has not been shown to have ordered it.

During the demonstrations 14 vehicles were reportedly torched and roughly a dozen businesses in the Durban central business district were damaged. Those are serious crimes and they are properly investigated as such. They are also the ground on which the state has now moved against the movement as a whole.

The order, on the account published by Briefly News, restrains the named parties from organising, mobilising or taking part in marches, processions, protest convoys and encampments in specified parts of eThekwini, with particular focus on the Durban CBD, Che Guevara Road and the area around the Refugee Reception Centre. The precise terms have not been independently verified against the signed court document, and this paper says so rather than filling in the gaps.

The application also follows 6 October, when March and March protesters blocked access to the Refugee Reception Centre and left asylum seekers, among them women and children, stranded outside while services were disrupted. That is a real consequence for real people and it belongs in the record. So does the question the movement has been asking since before any of this: why the state can find a court on a Wednesday for a march, and cannot clear a Home Affairs queue.

Mkhwanazi had earlier said KwaZulu-Natal police would meet the movement’s leaders over its recent actions, and he repeated that citizens do not carry the responsibility of checking whether the people around them are documented. He is right about that. Documentation is the state’s job, and the state’s failure to do it is the grievance March and March was built on.

What the interdict does not do is answer the demand. It does not deport anyone. It does not shorten a queue, staff a clinic or open a gate. It silences, for now, the South Africans who were saying out loud what a great many more of their neighbours say privately, and it leaves the conditions that produced them exactly where they were.

Ngobese-Zuma has been the subject of sustained personal scrutiny while the system she campaigns against has gone largely unexamined. The Enquirer’s position is plain. She and March and March are South African voices speaking for the public on immigration and enforcement, and this paper will keep treating them that way.

The matter returns to the Durban High Court on 30 October. The Enquirer will be watching what the judge does with the permanence of these restrictions, and what the state does about the load that put the movement on the street in the first place.