- The authors argue that South African law does not permit private citizens or movements to enforce immigration laws or restrict access to healthcare.
- They contend that March and March's campaign against undocumented migrants has contributed to fear, displacement and an increased risk of violence.
- The opinion calls on the state to enforce constitutional rights and hold those responsible for unlawful conduct accountable rather than allowing vigilantism to flourish
We read the Bill of Rights searching for the sentences to make someone listen. Everyone is equal before the law. Everyone has inherent dignity. Everyone has the right to access healthcare. We underline them, because we stood at enough clinic gates to know exactly whose humanity gets treated as optional.
South African law does not recognise vigilante justice in any form, for any cause, against any category of person. Not against alleged gangsters, not against suspected drug dealers, not against undocumented migrants, not against anyone.
A private citizen may report a crime and may only in the narrow circumstances the Criminal Procedure Act allows, make a citizen's arrest. A private citizen may join a Community Policing Forum working alongside the police, never instead of them. That is the entire menu of lawful private involvement in law enforcement in this country. Everything beyond it, demanding a stranger's identity documents, searching a business, blocking a hospital entrance, imposing punishment, forcing someone out of a community, is not community action. It is a criminal offence wearing a movement's t-shirt.
History has already taught us how quickly that line gets crossed. PAGAD gave South Africa its first modern lesson. Formed in Cape Town in 1996 amid gang violence on the Cape Flats, it moved within months from protest to the public killing of alleged drug dealer Rashaad Staggie, and elements linked to it were later connected to bombings. The law never authorised any of it. It does not care how justified the underlying anger feels. It cares whether a court, a prosecutor and due process were involved, and they were not.
The evolution of vigilantism
Operation Dudula updated the pattern for a new target, and the courts have already answered it in terms that should end this violence. Formed in Soweto in 2021, it organised unofficial business inspections, demanded identity documents from the public, pressured landlords into evicting migrant tenants, and stationed people outside hospitals and clinics to block entry.
In November 2025, the Johannesburg High Court ruled against Operation Dudula in Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, finding it had engaged in intimidation, harassment, incitement to violence and hate speech on the grounds of nationality and ethnicity, declaring that only an immigration officer or a police officer may demand identity documents from a person, and barring the movement from interfering with access to healthcare and schools. That is not our opinion of what the law should say. It is a judge, under oath, saying what the law already says.
March and March is where that same law is being broken today, in real time. Formed in March 2024 under Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, it has grown into something far more dangerous than a lobby group. In 2025 its volunteers stationed themselves outside public hospitals and clinics across KwaZulu-Natal, including Addington Hospital and RK Khan Hospital, demanding identity documents from patients before allowing them through the gates. Sick people were turned away at the door of the one institution the Constitution says must never turn anyone away.
That guarantee was suspended, in practice, by ordinary people who decided they were entitled to police the boundary of who deserves to live.
The deadline and its fallout
Then came the deadline. In December 2025, an affiliate of the movement announced that all undocumented foreign nationals had six months to leave, with a hard cutoff of 30 June 2026. It was treated as an ultimatum by the people who received it. Thousands of Malawian nationals gathered at Sherwood Park in Durban, afraid to sleep in their own homes.
Zimbabweans queued outside their consulate in Cape Town, desperate to leave before a date decided not by any court or law but by a movement with no legal authority whatsoever. Reporting this year has put the number who fled the country in the tens of thousands, displaced not by war or famine but by fear of what their neighbours might do to them on an ordinary afternoon.
That fear was not imagined. Human Rights Watch documented that demonstrations organised by March and March in Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban during April and May 2026 were followed by violent and sometimes fatal attacks on foreign nationals, including the killing of at least two Nigerian men in Johannesburg. A Cameroonian shop owner who has lived here almost two decades told researchers he was attacked in April 2026 by people he believed were affiliated with the movement, during protests aimed at foreign-owned shops in Durban.
No court has convicted named individuals for these killings at the time of writing, and we will not pretend otherwise. But a movement that sets deadlines for human beings to disappear, that gatekeeps hospitals, that marches under the slogan Mabahambe, they must go, creates the exact conditions in which death becomes foreseeable. Foreseeable harm carried out in the name of a cause is not an accident of that cause. It is its outcome. That is how a deadline becomes a death sentence.
Intersectional harm and marginalised groups
We want to pass this history through an intersectional lens, because a right that exists equally on paper does not reach everybody equally in practice, and the people paying the highest price are rarely the ones on camera. Poor black migrant women carry the heaviest weight of xenophobic vigilantism, and carry it quietly, because reporting an assault means revealing an immigration status that could see them detained rather than protected.
A woman who cannot walk to the shops after dark because she is a refugee in an informal settlement with no working streetlight and no functioning police station nearby is living the exact collapse of section twelve's promise of security of the person. Research on gender and migration here has shown for years that women face sexual violence and exploitation layered on top of the racism and nationalism already surrounding them, a triple burden of gender, poverty and foreignness; this wave of marches has sharpened rather than caused.
Many LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers and refugees standing in that crowd of the condemned are undocumented not by choice but by system failure. The Department of Home Affairs, Marabastad in Pretoria most of all, shows a persistent lack of understanding of what it means to flee persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity, or its officials simply prefer not to know, because knowing would require processing a claim instead of shelving it.
Queer refugees who fled criminalisation in Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana came here precisely because this country's law promised something better, only to find intersecting discrimination and homophobia waiting here too. They do not experience xenophobia in one place and homophobia in another. They live both at once, often unable to seek help from a police service with its own record of hostility toward queer people, and unable to seek help from a community that sees their foreignness before it sees their humanity. That failure belongs to the state, not to the asylum seeker still queuing for status they are legally entitled to.
We also want to remind March and March that its own premise sits uneasily against South Africa's history. The Zulu people themselves trace their origins to Nguni communities that migrated from Central and East Africa. This is not an argument about tribe, and we will not turn it into one. It is a reminder that the line between who belongs and who does not has never been as fixed as a megaphone makes it sound, and that a Constitution built on remembering apartheid's cruelty was written so that no generation would draw that line again with such confidence.
International and constitutional obligations
International law closes any gap the Constitution leaves open. The Refugee Convention, the African Charter, and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination do not only bar the state from committing violence. They impose a positive obligation on the state to prevent violence committed by private citizens and organised movements, to investigate it, and to guarantee survivors a path to justice, whether the survivor is documented or not, whether she stays silent for fear that reporting exposes her to detention instead of protection, whether he is straight or queer.
Asylum seekers are not drivers of crime, and there is no record anywhere that says otherwise. Many of us are here because our own governments failed us first, on grounds of who we love or how we identify, and because this Constitution promised to be the one document on this continent that would not fail us twice. Our plea to March and March is not rhetorical.
Look past the queue at the clinic gate and toward the desk in Marabastad where a claim has sat unprocessed for months. Look past the shopkeeper on the corner and toward the ministry that has failed to build the housing, jobs and hospitals it promised every citizen and migrant alike. If accountability is genuinely the demand, it belongs at the desk of the decision maker, not at the feet of the person still waiting on one.
We defend the right to protest and to demand better policy from an elected government. That right ends exactly where a hospital door begins, where an identity document is demanded from a stranger, where a punishment is handed down by anyone never appointed a judge. South African law has already delivered its verdict on every tactic this movement has used.
Dignity, equality and life are not negotiable by deadline. They were never meant to be. Millions of ordinary people, many of them born elsewhere, built this country brick by brick, and they deserve better than a countdown to their own disappearance. What remains is not a legal question. It is a question of whether the state will finally enforce the rights it wrote, before the next name is added to a list that keeps growing, one clinic gate, one asylum file, one silenced woman at a time.
Get your news on the go. Click here to follow the Conviction WhatsApp channel.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conviction.co.za.
