Foreign-owned shops in Durban have suffered heavy losses after looters swept through several townships during and after the nationwide anti-immigration protests of June 30. Traders in Mariannridge, Clermont, Hammarsdale and Umlazi counted their losses this week as police and soldiers worked to restore calm around the city.
The scale of destruction has turned attention to how vulnerable foreign-owned shops in Durban remain whenever anti-migrant sentiment boils over into the streets.
At least eight foreign-owned shops in Durban’s Mariannridge area were broken into and stripped of stock on Monday night and into Tuesday morning, according to Eyewitness News. Reporter Thabiso Goba said residents linked the raids to a mob chanting “abahambe,” a Zulu word meaning they must go. Locally owned shops nearby were left untouched, and one of the ransacked stores was reportedly run by an Ethiopian national.
Clermont was hit just as hard. Six shops there were targeted, including the Savemore Supermarket, owned by a Somali family who had lived and traded in the community for more than a decade. The store lost stock worth over R1 million and suffered extensive damage to its premises. Nineteen local employees who depended on the supermarket for a living are now out of work, according to reports carried by allAfrica.
A few kilometres away in KwaDabeka, similar scenes played out. A security guard at the SaveMore outlet, Sanele Ncane, told Daily Maverick that looters arrived demanding foreign owners leave, telling staff to move aside “if we don’t want trouble.” The shop’s manager, a Somali national who gave his name only as Mohammed, said he had lived legally in the area for eleven years before losing his stock in a matter of hours.
Not every incident targeting foreign-owned shops in Durban went unanswered. Five suspects were arrested in Hammarsdale’s Mpumalanga Township after police responded to reports of tuck shop burglaries along Mbutheni Main Road, IOL reported. A separate container shop near Mariannhill, run by a foreign national, was also broken into the same night, with looters forcing the padlock before taking goods.
Soldiers and police were deployed to Clermont on Tuesday night to stop looters cleaning out the Savemore outlet and the nearby Uhuru Supersave Store and Hardware, TimesLIVE reported. Officers fired shots to disperse crowds still helping themselves to appliances and stock as security forces arrived.
The looting followed weeks of mobilisation by citizen-led groups, including March and March and Operation Dudula, who had set an unofficial June 30 deadline for undocumented foreign nationals to leave South Africa. AFP, via Vanguard, reported that at least four people had been killed nationwide as protests spread to Johannesburg, Soweto and other cities, with roughly 900 arrests recorded on the day.
Community leaders in Mariannridge and Clermont have condemned the attacks on foreign-owned shops in Durban, blaming criminal opportunists rather than genuine protesters for the destruction. Many residents took to social media to argue that looting had nothing to do with the original aims of the June 30 marches.
Critics however, point out that anti-migrant marches in South Africa have repeatedly been followed by looting of foreign-owned shops in Durban and other cities, a pattern that has fuelled accusations the unrest gives cover to criminality rather than genuine protest.
The unrest has driven a wave of departures. South Africa’s justice minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi, said more than 15,162 Malawian nationals had already been processed for repatriation before the protests even began, with camps in Durban and Pietermaritzburg overwhelmed by demand.
Zimbabwe’s government said it had repatriated 3,624 citizens by June 26, according to NewZimbabwe.com, while Nigeria’s federal government confirmed it had evacuated more than 600 citizens in three separate flights, the Guardian reported. Ghana has taken out roughly 1,000 of its nationals since May, Premium Times reported.
Returnees have described losing homes and businesses built over years. Malawian father Idrissah Akilemu told reporters after arriving home that his house in Johannesburg was burned down during a night raid, and that he was simply grateful to be alive. His account echoes what many owners of foreign-owned shops in Durban now face as they weigh whether to rebuild or leave for good.
For now, the damage to foreign-owned shops in Durban stands as one of the clearest markers of how far the June 30 unrest spread beyond the largely peaceful marches that dominated headlines. Traders who spent years building their businesses in Mariannridge, Clermont, Hammarsdale and Umlazi are left counting losses, while South African authorities continue to insist that criminality, not the protest movement itself, was behind the destruction.
