- By Ayanda Charlie in Johannesburg and Tamasin Ford in London
- BBC Africa Eye
1 hour ago
The South African vigilante group Operation Dudula is notorious for raiding businesses owned by foreign nationals and forcing businesses to close. BBC Africa Eye has been given rare access to members of the country’s most significant anti-migrant street movement.
In a school kitchen in Kwa Thema, a township east of Johannesburg, Dimakatso Makoena is busy making sandwiches. The 57-year-old single father of three has been working as a chef there for more than ten years.
“To tell you the truth, I hate foreigners. I wish they could just pack up and leave and leave our country,” she says, fighting back tears.
It’s hard to understand the strength of this hatred until Ms. Makoena pulls out her phone to show a picture of her son. He was emaciated, had a glassy look in his eyes, and angry burn scars spread across his body, arms, and face.
“He started smoking drugs when he was 14 years old,” she says, explaining how her son often steals things to feed his addiction. One day he was trying to sell some electrical cables when he was electrocuted and burned.
image description,
Dimakatso Makoena accuses foreigners of selling her son drugs and destroying his life
“Dudula, that’s the only thing that keeps me going,” she tells the BBC.
Launched two years ago in Soweto, Operation Dudula was the first group to formalize sporadic waves of xenophobia-driven vigilante attacks in South Africa, dating back to shortly after the end of white minority rule in 1994. It calls itself a citizens’ movement based on an anti-migrant platform, with the word “dudula” meaning “to displace” in Zulu.
Soweto was at the forefront of the resistance to apartheid and was the home of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president. The community has now become home to the country’s most significant anti-migrant group.
With one in three South Africans unemployed in one of the world’s most unequal societies, foreigners have generally become an easy target.
But the number of migrants living in South Africa is greatly exaggerated. According to a 2022 report by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an independent research organization based in the capital Pretoria, there are approximately 3.95 million migrants in South Africa, making up 6.5% of the population, a figure that complies with international standards. This number includes all immigrants, regardless of their legal status or origin.
Xenophobic rhetoric from some officials, politicians and anti-migrant groups has helped fuel the myth that the country is overrun with migrants. The 2021 South African Social Attitudes Survey found that almost half of the 60 million people believed there were between 17 and 40 million immigrants in the country.
Recent polls suggest support for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the party once led by Mr Mandela, could fall below 50% for the first time.
Operation Dudula has the ambition to fill this vacuum and has now transformed itself from a local anti-migrant group into a national political party, with the aim of contesting next year’s general election.
Zandile Dabula, who was elected President of Operation Dudula in June 2023, is calm, charismatic and forceful about the group’s message: “Foreigners” are the main cause of South Africa’s economic woes.
When told that this campaign is based entirely on hate, she tells the BBC: “We have to be realistic here that most of the problems we have are caused by the influx of foreign nationals.”
“Our country is a mess. Foreign nationals are working on a 20-year plan to take over South Africa.”
When she questions the veracity of this 20-year plan, she admits it was a rumor but says she believes it to be true.
“You see drugs everywhere and most drug addicts are South Africans rather than foreigners. So what happens? “Are they eating our own brothers and sisters to make it easier for them to take power?” She says.
video caption,
BBC Africa Eye joins a Dudula task force on a mission to Soweto
But the anger directed at migrants can be directed at those who are in the country legally and work in legal jobs. A Nigerian market trader who was the target of a raid by members of Operation Dudula in Johannesburg earlier this year tells the BBC that the two women who insulted him and destroyed his clothes by throwing them into the gutter never stopped asking questions place.
As they fired, he said they insulted him and said: “You have to go to Nigeria… We are Dudula, we are South Africans.”
Without stocks, he now sleeps on the streets: “I vote in this country. I am a citizen here. I have never seen a country treat people like this. If I do something illegal, that’s fine. Send me away.” But I’m not doing anything illegal. Now you’re making my life hell, I can’t pay my rent. I want to leave, it’s too much.”
Operation Dudula claims that concerns about the huge influx of drugs into South Africa’s most disadvantaged communities is its most pressing complaint, but there is no data to support the claim that people selling drugs are not South African citizens.
No comparative statistics are available for drug-related crimes, although the ISS report quotes the justice minister as saying that immigrants accounted for 8.5% of all convictions in 2019 and 7.1% in 2020. The ISS adds that 2.3% of inmates detained each year are undocumented foreigners.
In Diepkloof in eastern Soweto, the BBC is joining a so-called Dudula task force. Men in trucks will confront a Mozambican shopkeeper who a South African landlady claims has not paid his rent.
It’s supposed to be a negotiation, but a confrontation quickly arises in which one of the men, Mandla Lenkosi, threatens to beat him up. When the BBC questions them about their brutal behavior, they claim they are enforcing the law.
Mr Lenkosi, also from Soweto and unemployed, takes part in raids on migrants’ homes and workplaces on suspicion of everything from drug trafficking to staying in the country beyond their visas.
“We grew up in apartheid times and things were much better than today,” he says, referring to the drug problem. “The law was the law [then].”
His Dudula supporter Cedric Stone agrees: “South Africa must return to the old South Africa we know.”
“Our fathers started the tuck shops, but today all these tuck shops are foreigners, especially Bangladeshis, Somalis and Ethiopians. Why?”
President Cyril Ramaphosa has spoken out against anti-migrant protests and condemned vigilante groups for harassing and attacking migrants. He has compared their behavior to the apartheid regime’s strategies for oppressing black communities.
Annie Michaels, an activist with the Johannesburg Migrants Advisory Panel, says South Africans blame the wrong people for their illnesses and should actually admire migrants for their survival skills.
“Stop sitting in this corner complaining and dying and waiting for the government to let you down every day,” she tells the BBC.
“The migrants… are the poorest of the poor. They’d rather go and shake them than the cages of the guys who live in glass houses.”
For her part, Ms. Dabula says critics of Operation Dudula, who claim it is a collective of violent vigilantes, are wrong.
“We do not promote violence and do not want people to feel harassed,” but added: “We cannot let foreigners overtake us and do nothing about it.”
Hundreds of supporters traveled to Johannesburg in May for its first national conference, where members voted To the group as a political party.
image description,
Operation Dudula gives Dimakatso Makoena meaning and hope for the future
Waving South African flags, dancing and singing through the streets to the town hall, it feels like a celebration.
However, the songs they sing contain a threatening message: “Burn the foreigner. We go to the garage, buy gasoline and burn the foreigner.”
The military clothing is reminiscent of South Africa’s liberation struggle. All of this conveys a willingness to fight.
Ms. Makoena is there too, smiling and wearing her party t-shirt. “Operation Dudula will make history today,” she says.
On stage, Operation Dudula technical advisor Isaac Lesole poses a question to cheering supporters: “Are we making peace with illegal aliens?”
“No,” the audience shouts back in unison.
Operation Dudula has no manifesto or policy other than its stance towards foreigners, although Ms Dabula claims it is present in every province except the Northern Cape.
Supporters of the new party who spoke to the BBC seem to genuinely want things to be sorted out in their communities. They reflect a changing mood in South Africa’s political landscape, where people are fed up with the status quo.
However, a toxic mix of poverty, drugs and fear has led to a blame game in which migrants have become scapegoats.