A Field in Durban, a Plea to Nairobi: How Xenophobia Is Driving Kenyans Out of South Africa

In a stretch of open ground on the edge of Durban, more than three thousand people have been sleeping under the winter sky, their belongings folded into bundles beside them. Most are Malawians who fled their homes when the threats turned to action. They are the most visible face of a fear that has spread across South Africa this month, but they are not alone in it. Far from the cameras, in townships and informal settlements from the Eastern Cape to Gauteng, a quieter group has been making a different kind of decision: a few dozen Kenyans, frightened and out of options, have written their names on a list asking their government to bring them home.

The list was compiled by the Kenyan Diaspora in South Africa, known by its initials KEDASA, and handed to Kenya's High Commission in Pretoria. By the association's count, around fifty people have so far asked to be repatriated, and its officials expect the number to climb as a deadline imposed by anti-migrant groups draws closer. For a community that has spent years building lives in Africa's most industrialised economy, it is a startling reversal — a request not for opportunity, but for rescue.

The Memorandum

KEDASA's appeal took the form of a memorandum, accompanied by names, presented to the Kenyan mission. The community is asking Nairobi to set up an emergency framework for vulnerable citizens who want to leave voluntarily, to issue emergency travel documents to those who need them, and to help arrange safe passage back to Kenya. According to the lobby, the High Commission has agreed to assist Kenyans who register for help.

William Thegeya, KEDASA's secretary-general, has described receiving distress calls from members spread across nearly every province — the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, the North West and the Northern Cape. The accounts vary from place to place, but the thread running through them is consistent: fear of violence, lost jobs, and a growing sense of being unwelcome. Those living in informal settlements and township communities, he noted, have voiced the sharpest anxiety about their personal safety and their future.

A Deadline With No Law Behind It

The pressure has a date attached to it. Anti-migrant protest groups have demanded that undocumented foreigners leave South Africa by 30 June, an ultimatum that several African governments and South African officials alike have stressed has no basis in law. No court has ordered it, and no statute backs it. Yet the deadline has taken on a force of its own, amplified by online campaigns that observers describe as unusually organised, and it has become the clock against which frightened families now measure their choices.

That distinction — between what the law says and what a mob is willing to do — offers cold comfort to people who have already watched shops looted and neighbours chased from their homes. The reported violence has left at least two people dead and foreign-owned businesses ransacked across multiple provinces. For many Kenyans weighing whether to stay, the legality of the ultimatum matters far less than the question of who will protect them if it is enforced by force.

How Many Kenyans, and Where

Counting Kenyans in South Africa is an imprecise exercise, because the population shifts with work, study and the seasons. Officials estimate that roughly 27,000 Kenyans live, work or study in the country, a figure that does not capture those on short visits. The traffic between the two nations has grown in recent years: after Pretoria lifted short-stay visa requirements for Kenyans, some 58,000 travelled to South Africa for tourism in 2024 alone.

Those numbers describe a relationship that, until recently, looked like one of Africa's success stories — open borders, mobile labour, students and professionals moving south to a larger economy. The current crisis has exposed how fragile that arrangement can be when public anger turns toward foreigners. A community measured in the tens of thousands can feel very exposed when even a small, vocal movement decides it is no longer welcome.

The Paper Problem

For those who want to leave, the obstacles are often mundane and practical rather than dramatic. Many of the Kenyans seeking help cannot afford the cost of flights or the fees tied to travel documents. Others have run into a more frustrating barrier: passports that have expired, been lost, or were never easy to replace from abroad. A person who arrived years ago on a valid document can find themselves, in a moment of crisis, unable to prove their nationality or board a plane.

This is where a High Commission becomes more than a ceremonial outpost. Issuing emergency travel documents, verifying identities and coordinating with airlines are exactly the functions that determine whether a stranded citizen can actually get home. KEDASA's request that Nairobi streamline this process speaks to a recurring lesson of diaspora emergencies: the difference between safety and limbo is frequently a stamp, a form, and the speed with which an embassy can act.

A Continental Exodus

Kenya's predicament is part of a much larger picture. Across the region, governments have moved to pull their citizens out of harm's way. Nigeria and Ghana have repatriated nationals, and Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have mounted emergency evacuations of their own. The field outside Durban, where thousands of Malawians including many children have been camped after fleeing their homes, has become a symbol of how quickly ordinary life can collapse into displacement.

South Africa's authorities have promised a security response, with the police saying they are deploying additional officers nationwide ahead of the deadline. But the underlying conditions that feed the hostility are not easily addressed by extra patrols. Unemployment in South Africa sits above 30 percent, and a long history of anti-foreigner violence has repeatedly found a target in migrants who are blamed, without evidence, for crime and joblessness. Each new flare-up draws on that reservoir of grievance.

What Nairobi Can and Cannot Do

Kenya's mission had already, in early May, urged its nationals to stay alert, avoid areas where protests might erupt, and carry valid identification at all times. Such advisories are standard, and necessary, but they place the burden of safety largely on the individual. The KEDASA memorandum effectively asks the government to do more — to treat the situation as an emergency requiring active intervention rather than caution from a distance.

What happens next will be watched closely by Kenyans far beyond South Africa, because it touches a promise that every diaspora community quietly relies on: that when things go badly wrong abroad, home will answer. For the fifty who have signed their names, and the many more who may yet, the coming days before 30 June will test whether that promise holds. The mission in Pretoria had not, at the time of reporting, detailed its next steps. For families packing what they can carry, the wait itself has become the hardest part.