I'm still amazed at how successfully the NGO March and March held the country to ransom on 30 June 2026 — leveraging online posts and performative shows of people power to stoke our deepest fears of looting and unrest. The government's efforts to hold the line were admirable, but the lateness and apparent panic of its mass mobilisation said everything about how rattled it was. For those who don’t know, the NGO March and March has built a following on calling for undocumented migrants to self-deport from South Africa - but it’s presence and manner provides oxygen to a growing anti-foreigner sentiment, which could at any time tip over into violence.
I observed a March and March protest the Saturday before D-Day in Parklands — a Cape Town suburb known for its large African immigrant population, its links to the criminal underworld, and its informal nickname, Little Lagos, a nod to the concentration of Nigerians who live there and the reputation that follows them.
What struck me most was that the march felt less like a community uprising than a content production exercise. There were around a hundred protesters, many of whom, according to other journalists, had already appeared at marches elsewhere in the city on other days — no spontaneous groundswell there. But a core group within the crowd was visibly intent on capturing every possible frame.
The cameras, though, were also turned on them — by foreign bystanders with phones, by the media, by bland individuals who blended quietly into the background, and by official police photographers who recorded it all. The watchers were being watched.
Around the block in Parklands, near Table View in Cape Town, June 27th, 2026, three days before D-Day.