27 October 2026
March and March members march past a South African National Defence Force convoy. Photo: Joseph Bracken
On Tuesday morning, a group of March and March members gathered outside the Home Affairs Refugee Reception Centre on Che Guevara Road, Durban, to protest against illegal immigration and immigrants being employed as delivery scooter drivers.
March and March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma addressed the crowd of around 50 people, including some South African delivery drivers, at 11:45am.
Ngobese-Zuma claimed President Cyril Ramaphosa had sent the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to harm March and March members and claimed that his government had approached the courts to stop them from marching.
“We have been marching for 21 months now, carrying memorandums, but they never listened to us,” she said.
On Tuesday, the government announced that it had deployed 510 SANDF members in Durban “to support SAPS in maintaining law and order amid recent violence linked to misinformation about a Constitutional Court judgment on the Refugees Act”.
Ngobese-Zuma urged March and March members not to vote for the ANC in the upcoming local elections.
She then singled out GroundUp’s Joseph Bracken, who was filming her speech. She said the “white journalist” and GroundUp had been writing negatively about the group and had called them vigilantes.
The crowd turned on Bracken, shouted threats and told him to leave. Ngobese-Zuma told the crowd to allow the journalist to write about the protest and asked for calm. But March and March members spent much of the rest of her address threatening the journalist, including making throat-slicing hand gestures.
In the past, journalists have been harassed and assaulted by March and March members and associated vigilante groups.
Ngobese-Zuma has insisted on multiple occasions that March and March is a peaceful protest group.
The group then proceeded to Berea police station.
Earlier, at around 6:45am, an immigrant-owned shop on Denis Hurley Street was set on fire. The motive is unknown. According to the shop’s security guard, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety, three men asked to use the bathroom and one of them then pulled out a gun. The guard was held at gunpoint while the other two men broke one of the store windows before pouring petrol into the shop and setting it alight.
The store suffered exterior and interior damage, including damage to the walls and ceiling. An industrial printer that was stored inside the shop was also destroyed.
KwaZulu-Natal SAPS had not commented at the time of publication.