South Africans hold protests against migrants

**Celia Hatton** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, and at 15 Hours GMT on Tuesday, the 30th of June, these are our main stories. Thousands of people march in cities across South Africa, calling for undocumented migrants to leave the country. Anger in Venezuela, as many accuse the government of abandoning them after last week's twin earthquakes. The Chinese tycoon sentenced to 30 years in a US prison.
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It's been a tense day in South Africa. Extra security was deployed across the country as anti-immigration protesters filled the streets in a number of cities. Participants are voicing their anger at the presence of undocumented migrants. The demonstrations have been happening on the day of an unofficial deadline set by anti-immigration groups calling for migrants without proper papers to leave the country. Our first report comes from Nomsa Maseko, who was at the gathering of protesters in Durban.

**Nomsa Maseko** (1:21)
Thousands of police officers have been deployed countrywide, but there has been a concentration of maximum security here in Durban because the police believe that this is a possible hotspot where violence could erupt or that the protest itself can turn violent. We are now joined by Phelan Ndunikomete, who is one of the protest leaders. You have promised that this protest is going to be peaceful.
He's basically told us that they believe that they have given strict instructions to the people who will be holding these protests here that they should not loot any shops, they should not attack anyone, and that they can guarantee that there will not be any violence. But when it comes to the question that I asked him about, the carrying of traditional weapons, he has dismissed that. He says that as a Zulu man, there is no way that a Zulu man can walk around this route without holding a stick. He also says that carrying a stick does not mean that they will be using them to attack foreigners or anyone or even businesses, saying that it is just a symbol of who they are and that they will continue carrying those sticks.

**Celia Hatton** (2:48)
Some South Africans blame workers from outside the country for problems such as high unemployment, long waits at hospitals and crime.
Many migrants have already left the country or are preparing to leave. Our correspondent, Pumza Filani, spoke to us from one of the protests in Johannesburg.

**Pumza Filani** (3:05)
So we've just moved to a safe distance where we can speak to just moments ago. We saw crowds moving through the city center. This seems to have been a breakaway crowd from the initial group that we'd been following this morning that left from the center of town and were meant to deliver a memorandum to police officials. We're seeing reports that they've broken away into various parts of the city. But the group that we were with as they were walking down with the police trying to corral them, we saw people throwing stones into residential buildings into people's windows. We've also seen reports that some people were trying to get access into buildings. So police stepped in there to stop that from happening. It's a mixed crowd at the moment of people that one are still participating in what was agreed to the march, which was they were going to march, hand over a memorandum and disperse. But there seems to also be offshoot of people that are upset, feeling like this may not be enough and wanting really to take things into their own hands. I spoke to a team of police officers who had been deployed in this area to ask them what the plan is.
And he said to me that it's fluid at this point because this crowd seems to not be going by what was agreed. But what they're planning on doing is following people and boxing them in as much as possible so they can maintain a heavy presence and make sure that people don't run off into buildings.

**Lucy Hawkins** (4:24)
So Pumza, when you say you saw people throwing rocks, breaking windows in buildings, are these buildings where they think that there were undocumented migrants inside? I mean, why did they target these particular buildings?

**Pumza Filani** (4:36)
Exactly. So just for context, the area that we are in is believed to be home to mostly foreign nationals. So whether they are documented or undocumented is a secondary issue for most people. But it's an area that's known to be a community that's usually home to people from various parts of the continent. So those incidents of throwing those rocks, some people were hurling, you need to go home, inferring, which I can infer refers to wanting people that they believe are non-South Africans to leave the country.