It was early April when the whispers began.
Mobs are looting foreigners’ shops.
They go door to door, and if you don’t have your papers, they beat you.
Why We Wrote This
African governments began repatriating their citizens from South Africa last month amid growing threats of violence against migrants. But the choice to leave is not a simple one,as illustrated by the story of two close friends: a hairdresser who returned to Ghana, and her colleague, who chose to stay.
They say all the illegal migrants must leave before June 30 or they’ll shut the country down.
As Esther Ofosu and her friend Shalom waited for customers at their salon south of Johannesburg, the two Ghanaian women flicked nervously through the social media posts. In grainy videos, marchers, sometimes draped in South African flags and carrying clubs and leather whips, smashed shop windows and beat migrants in the streets.
“Abahambe,” they chanted. “They must go.”
“We don’t sleep at night,” says Shalom, who asked that only her first name be used because she does not have long-term legal status in South Africa.
The protests were largely organized by a group called “March and March,” which advocates for an end to illegal migration in South Africa, using talking points that have global echoes: Foreigners are taking our jobs. They’re committing crimes. They’re leeching our resources. Such claims – though widely debunked – have long found support in communities on the margins of one of the world’s most unequal societies, where unemployment and poverty are rife.
But their building velocity in recent months also reflects a global trend. At least 75 countries have played host to migration-related protests since the beginning of 2025. Often, these demonstrations are driven by politics, and South Africa, which will hold local government elections in November, is no exception.
“South Africa will be great again,” promised March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma at a news conference in May.
Rumors circulate
Not long after the protests began, customers in the hair salon began coming in with apologies: We can’t be seen here anymore. It’s too dangerous. If they know we’re supporting foreigners, they’ll come for us, too.
Days went by without a single client, and in the sparse bedroom Esther and Shalom shared above the salon, they began pondering their options. “They don’t want us to stay, but how are we supposed to go?” Shalom asked. “We don’t have any way to leave.”
Rumors of a different kind then began to spread among Ghanaians in South Africa: that their government was going to evacuate anyone who wanted to leave.
Esther and Shalom didn’t know whether it was true. In any case, the decision facing them – to stay put and see if things settled down, or to prepare to return home – was not a simple one.
Courtesy of Esther Ofosu
Both women had grown up in cocoa-farming families in central Ghana, a hardscrabble life they fought to escape.
“Our parents did this work, and their parents, and their parents, and still we are struggling,” Shalom says. “That’s why I said, when I grow up, I will do something else.”
At first, she imagined herself as a nurse, wearing a crisp white uniform and cashing a regular paycheck. But there was no money for her to go to high school. So, instead, Shalom became a hairdresser. When a family friend called in 2019 offering her a job at a salon near Pretoria and a plane ticket to get there, the opportunity felt too good to pass up. This way, she thought, she would finally be able to support her mother and help her younger sisters get through school.
Only when Shalom arrived in the small South African town of Brits did she learn she would have to work off the cost of her journey. By the time she did, a year had passed – and she had overstayed the tourist visa the family friend had arranged.
“That’s when you get problems,” says her cousin Eunice, who came to South Africa around the same time, and whose surname is also being withheld to protect her identity. “You’re stuck.”
A friendship formed far from home
It was in Brits that Shalom first met Esther, whose life story in many ways mirrored her own – except that Esther had actually gotten that degree in nursing. But she couldn’t find a job in Ghana, either. For Esther, too, braiding hair in South Africa had been the best option.
Thousands of miles from home, in a town hemmed in by orange orchards and platinum mines, the two became fast and fierce friends, “like we are sisters from one stomach,” Shalom says.
With each other, they didn’t have to bite back their homesickness. They didn’t have to marvel alone at the strangeness of a place where each evening, as the sun set in a smudged, smoggy haze, everyone hurried home and locked themselves inside for the night. It was a sharp contrast with Ghana, where evenings were a perpetual street fair, with markets open and music pumping until late in the night.
Still, the two women tried to make the best of it. After they paid off their travel debts, the pair separated, finding work in different parts of the country before reuniting two years later in a town called Newcastle.
“Business was really good,” says Esther. “It was peaceful, and I was even saving enough to be sending some money back home to Ghana.”
But the women were never quite at ease. They spent long hours laughing and gossiping with the South African women who came to the salon, but outside its walls, they often felt a growing hostility. Their fears are borne out by statistics. More than 40% of South Africans say they don’t welcome any migrants living in South Africa – though in practice, this hostility is almost universally targeted at Black, working-class foreigners.
In hospitals and government offices, officials sometimes addressed the Ghanaians in Zulu, refusing to switch to English when they asked, or simply passed over them altogether. Some of their neighbors observed them with hard, angry stares, or told them point-blank they were stealing South Africans’ jobs. (A World Bank study from 2018 found that every migrant worker in South Africa creates about two jobs for South Africans.)
At the end of last year, the pair moved again, this time to Carletonville, near Johannesburg, where a Ghanaian friend told Shalom there was a salon space she could rent.
Themba Hadebe/AP
An ultimatum – and an out
Then came the threats from March and March, and their looming deadline: All migrants illegally in the country must self-deport by June 30. Their ultimatum quickly drew in other groups with similar agendas, including Operation Dudula – a violent vigilante group known for physically blocking migrants from entering health facilities and schools. The organizations began planning mass marches to coincide with the deadline.
Still, in early May, when the Ghanaian government officially announced its plan to repatriate any of its 25,000 citizens living in South Africa who felt endangered or simply “unwelcome in this country” because of rising xenophobic violence, Shalom and her cousin Eunice wavered. Eunice’s father was ill, and she needed to keep earning to pay his hospital bills. “I can’t go home now because I would go empty-handed,” she says.
Esther, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate. On May 27, alongside about 300 other Ghanaians, she boarded the first repatriation flight to Accra, Ghana’s capital. In the days that followed, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe began to evacuate hundreds of their citizens as well.
Esther’s initial welcome in Ghana was harsh. Her brother told her that, while she was away, the family’s house had burned down with all her possessions inside. But then things began to turn. Esther quickly found a nursing job – the first of her life – at a small maternity home near Accra. The pay was much less than what she earned in South Africa, and the commute was grueling. But she felt optimistic.
“Even if things are hard in Ghana, I know I have life here,” Esther says.
On a video call with Shalom, she showed off her new uniform and pointed the camera at a plate piled high with Ghanaian foods the two had ached for in South Africa.
Back in Carletonville, Shalom felt a twinge of regret. Maybe she should have gone, too. But now, the free government flights had ended, and she didn’t have enough savings to buy herself a ticket. And June 30 is fast approaching.
Though anti-immigrant groups pledged to protest peacefully at the end of the month, March and March’s recent demonstrations have sparked violent – even deadly – attacks against foreigners. The South African police have vowed to keep law and order on June 30 with a 600 million rand (about $36.5 million) deployment. But Shalom wonders whether anything could stop those who want her out.
“I know this country is not for me,” she says.