The List of Fifty: How a Wave of Xenophobia in South Africa Is Pushing Kenyans to Plead for a Way Home

The bedding came out onto the pavement first. In Durban this month, families who had fled their homes folded blankets on the open street, sleeping where streetlight and stranger could see them, because the rooms they had rented no longer felt safe to return to. They were Malawians, Mozambicans, Congolese, Nigerians. And, increasingly, they were people whose passports carried the black, red, green and white of Kenya.

For most of the 27,000 or so Kenyans estimated to be living, working or studying in South Africa, the past weeks have been a slow narrowing of options. A wave of anti-immigrant protests has hardened into something closer to an ultimatum. Now a group of them has done the only thing that felt within reach: they have written down their names and asked their own government to bring them home.

A Memorandum, and a Deadline

The request arrived in the form of a memorandum, delivered to Kenya's High Commission in Pretoria by a community lobby called the Kenyan Diaspora in South Africa, or KEDASA. According to the group, at least 50 Kenyans have so far registered to be repatriated, citing fear, lost jobs and a sense that the ground beneath their daily lives has shifted.

The number is small against the size of the community, but KEDASA warns it is unlikely to stay that way. Mobs targeting foreign-owned shops and homes have circulated a warning that foreigners should be gone by June 30, and the lobby says the count of those seeking help is expected to climb as that date approaches. The High Commission, KEDASA says, has agreed to assist those who formally register.

"Particularly concerning are reports from some individuals residing in informal settlements and township communities who express fear for their personal safety and uncertainty regarding their future," the group's secretary-general, William Thegeya, said in remarks reported by the Daily Nation, which first carried the appeal.

The Quiet Community Now Counting Heads

Kenya's presence in South Africa has never been one of the diaspora's loudest chapters. There are no headline-grabbing remittance corridors to rival the United States or the Gulf, no political drama over visas. The community is dispersed and, until recently, comfortably ordinary: nurses and accountants, university students, traders, IT workers, people who chose Johannesburg or Cape Town for the same reasons anyone chooses a new city, and who quietly built lives there.

That dispersal is now part of the anxiety. KEDASA says it has fielded distress calls from Kenyans across the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, the North West and the Northern Cape, a spread that covers nearly the whole country. The circumstances differ from province to province, but the underlying message has been consistent: a rising hostility that makes ordinary movement feel calculated, and ordinary documents feel like liabilities.

The numbers also hint at how connected the two countries had become before the violence. In 2024, roughly 58,000 Kenyans visited South Africa for tourism after Pretoria lifted short-stay visa requirements, a goodwill gesture that briefly made the country one of the more accessible destinations on the continent for Kenyan travellers. That openness is precisely what now feels in jeopardy.

When the Paperwork Becomes a Trap

For many of those asking to leave, the obstacle is not willingness but logistics. KEDASA says a significant share of the affected Kenyans face real financial strain and cannot independently fund flights or the costs of replacing documents. Some report passports that have expired, gone missing, or become impossible to renew under current conditions.

It is a quietly cruel bind. To leave a country safely, a person needs the very paperwork that violence and displacement tend to scatter, and the very money that job losses tend to erase. That is why the community's demands to Nairobi are specific rather than rhetorical: an emergency support framework for vulnerable citizens seeking voluntary return, the issuing of emergency travel documents where needed, and practical help getting people physically onto planes and across the border.

These are not abstractions for a family sleeping on a Durban pavement. They are the difference between a flight in days and an indefinite wait in a place that has told them, in painted slogans and crowded threats, that they are not wanted.

A Region on the Move

Kenya is far from alone in confronting this. The xenophobic surge that has gripped parts of South Africa between April and June has displaced foreign nationals across major urban centres, and several governments have already acted. Malawi, Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique have organised or begun repatriating distressed citizens, and international coverage has documented thousands of Malawians fleeing their homes in the face of threats.

The pattern is grimly familiar to anyone who has followed South Africa's periodic eruptions of anti-foreigner violence over the past two decades. What gives this round its particular edge is how organised it appears: campaigners have framed their demands around undocumented migrants, but the hostility has spilled well beyond paperwork, sweeping up lawful residents, students and visitors alike on the basis of accent, appearance or simply being recognisably from elsewhere on the continent.

For Kenya's diaspora, the South African chapter lands differently than the Gulf or Western stories that usually dominate. This is intra-African migration, the movement of Africans within their own continent, and the violence cuts against a long-told story of pan-African solidarity. Watching from Nairobi or Mombasa, families are not parsing visa categories. They are asking a simpler question: is my relative safe tonight.

What Nairobi Has Said, and Hasn't

Kenya's official posture has so far been more cautious than that of some of its neighbours. In an advisory dated early May, the High Commission urged Kenyans in South Africa to "exercise caution and remain vigilant," to avoid areas where protests might occur, to keep valid identification on hand, and to stay in contact with the mission. Officials had earlier said no Kenyan was known to have been harmed in the unrest.

That measured tone has reassured some and frustrated others, particularly those who feel the moment calls for the kind of decisive repatriation effort other capitals have mounted. The KEDASA memorandum, in effect, asks Nairobi to move from watchfulness to logistics, to treat the appeal not as a warning to be monitored but as a list of citizens to be brought home.

Whether the government answers with planes or with patience will say something about how Kenya sees its obligations to citizens abroad, a question that has surfaced again and again this year, from the Gulf to the Horn. For the fifty names already on KEDASA's list, and the others expected to follow before June 30, the answer cannot come soon enough. They have, after all, asked for very little: a document, a seat, and a way back to a place that still claims them.