Operation Dudula: South Africa’s anti-migrant movement

Activists have returned to court in South Africa to try to enforce a court order banning an anti-migrant group from blocking foreign nationals from accessing public health facilities and schools.

The campaigners say that migrants and their children are still being barred from two Johannesburg clinics by Operation Dudula, a controversial group, despite a judge ordering authorities to “stop the harassment” in December, said News 24.

‘Aggressive tactics’

In the Zulu language, “dudula” means to remove something by force. The “populist movement” was founded in 2021 as a vigilante force against crime and drug trafficking in the township of Soweto, just outside Johannesburg, said Deutsche Welle.

Operation Dudula, now registered as a political party, also campaigns against migrants in South Africa, which is home to about 2.4 million migrants, just under 4% of the population. They come mainly from neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.

The group’s supporters are known for “aggressive tactics”, including “forcing their way into residential buildings, searching for migrants, checking their ID cards, and blocking access to public services”.

Although it’s often “accused of using force to make its point”, an Operation Dudula candidate will fight a by-election in Johannesburg next month. “We are trying to put our people first,” Alton Stephens, a 51-year-old security company director, who will stand as a ward councillor, told The Telegraph.

‘Contemporary scapegoats’

Apartheid “created two societies in South Africa”, Fredson Guilengue, a project manager at the left-wing Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg, told DW: a “white society with an abundance of security, good health, education and prosperity” and a “society of Black people without rights” in which they “had to compete for the few resources available”.

Now, foreigners have “become the contemporary scapegoats” for South Africa’s continuing inequalities, three decades after apartheid ended.

Operation Dudula’s supporters see its activists as “concerned citizens taking a stand to defend the rights” of South Africans and their “straining public services”, in a country that’s “overrun by migrants”, said The Telegraph. But to their critics they’re “mob-rule vigilantes trading in dangerous xenophobia”.

In 2022, a report by the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria found that many of Operation Dudula’s claims are based on exaggerations about the number and effect of foreign nationals in South Africa, including “false claims that immigrants commit most crimes or overload public services”.

But the “fringe movement poses no real threat” to the country’s democracy, Lizette Lancaster, one of the report’s authors, told DW, because “most South Africans, over 90%, do not support violence against migrants in their communities”.