What Happened in the Minutes Durban’s Cameras Weren’t Watching?

The camera watching Dr Pixley kaSeme Street saw the march go past on Thursday morning. It saw two men break away from the column and approach a man standing on the roadside. Media reports cited by The Citizen say the footage recorded them speaking to him. The camera’s view moved on. When it came back, the marchers were gone and the man was on the ground. He was declared dead at the scene.

Neither the man’s nationality nor any motive appears in it. A group was marching toward Maud Mfusi Street when the two men pulled away. A group of about 50 people then allegedly assaulted the victim, believed to be in his late 30s or early 40s. The motive is unknown. His nationality was not given. A murder case is open, and the provincial police spokesperson said investigators were following several leads and urged the public not to spread unverified information. No arrests have been announced.

Four months earlier, in Pietermaritzburg, the same spokesperson described almost the same sequence. On June 19, a march of more than 2,000 people organised by the anti-immigrant movement March and March moved from Dales Park to the city hall, and the provincial government said it ended “without incident.” Then a group broke away, went to the nearby Jika Joe informal settlement, and a 29-year-old Malawian who had lived there with his family for years was stoned to death. Two other people were seriously injured and taken to hospital; dozens of foreign nationals fled the settlement. KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thamsanqa Ntuli said at the time that “criminality must never be allowed to masquerade as activism or community action.”

IOL, citing the police, identified the victim as a Ugandan man who had been assaulted and stabbed. Those details do not appear in the national police statement, where the nationality is unknown and — per The Citizen’s account of the camera footage — what was used in the assault had not been established either. Nobody has been named as a suspect.

Wednesday’s march isn’t in the statement at all. The killing came a day after a March and March motorcade of e-hailing drivers and supporters moved through Durban, starting at Berea Centre, an area where many foreign nationals live. A different man is understood to have been assaulted on the sidelines of that motorcade on Wednesday afternoon; his condition remains unclear, and Netshiunda did not mention that assault in his statement and had not answered questions about it when Inside Politics published. That night, addressing supporters, March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma threatened a shutdown on November 10 over the government’s handling of asylum applications. She has denied the movement is xenophobic: “We have lived alongside these people for many years, and now that we say it is too much, enough is enough, we are labeled as xenophobic.”

The same morning, protesters armed with sticks and knobkerries stormed a visa and permit office in Morningside. Private security said the protesters allegedly fired shots and tried to force their way into the office near Cowey Road, according to TimesLIVE, and the group dispersed when police and private security arrived.

In August, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination adopted a decision on South Africa. Publicised on the 27th, it called on the country to prohibit and dismantle organised racist vigilante groups. It cited at least four migrant killings and the displacement of at least 50,000 migrants since early 2026, named March and March among the groups of concern, and said the rhetoric “fosters stigmatisation and intolerance and creates an environment of fear and insecurity for migrants,” calling for investigations that “ensure accountability and end impunity.” Two months earlier, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights had warned of high-risk areas “including KwaZulu-Natal.” And in August, President Cyril Ramaphosa told Parliament the police were pursuing the instigators of violence against foreign nationals: “And there will be arrests, and there will be charges that will be prepared against those who have done so.” EFF leader Julius Malema, questioning him, had said the violence had a face: “The level of violence perpetrated against African foreign nationals in this country over the past few months has a face. We know who the investigators, the instigators and the perpetrators of this act are.”

More than 60 people died in South Africa’s 2008 wave of xenophobic attacks. Seven were killed in Durban and Johannesburg in April 2015. September 2019 brought the Johannesburg riots, mobs looting migrant-owned businesses. And in April 2022, vigilantes in Diepsloot went door to door demanding identity documents, and Elvis Nyathi, a 43-year-old Zimbabwean, was stoned and burnt to death by the mob they formed.

On Thursday evening the refugee reception centre on Che Guevara Road remained closed, with at least six public-order policing trucks parked outside.