At the Durban Drive-In, a disused open-air cinema, white emergency tents now stretch like a canvas city. Inside the main tent, hundreds of men sit in a dense, silent queue, inching forward only centimetres at a time. They are Malawian migrants waiting for buses that will take them 2,000 kilometres home. Outside, discarded shoes, cardboard plates and nappies litter the ground; someone has dropped a copy of a residence permit. The scene, witnessed this week, is a stark inversion of the welcome South Africa projected during the 2010 football World Cup, when the nearby Moses Mabhida Stadium was built and the country marketed itself as a rainbow nation open to the continent.

The exodus is driven by a wave of xenophobic protests and attacks that have intensified in recent weeks. Citizen-led groups, notably one called March and March, have set an unofficial deadline of 30 June for all undocumented foreign nationals to leave, and have called nationwide marches. The government has pleaded with citizens not to take immigration enforcement into their own hands, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has said security forces are ready. Yet the fear is palpable. South Africa’s justice minister confirmed on Friday that more than 15,000 Malawians have been processed for repatriation, with thousands more still waiting in camps where conditions are, she acknowledged, “untenable”. Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and other countries have organised buses, but demand far outstrips supply. In Cape Town, hundreds of Zimbabweans have been sleeping on the pavement outside their consulate, hoping for a seat.

The current violence is not an isolated episode. South Africa has seen recurring bouts of xenophobic attacks, most notoriously in 2008 when 62 people were killed. The country remains the continent’s most industrialised economy, drawing job seekers from across Africa, even as its own unemployment rate hovers around 32 per cent. Many South Africans blame immigrants for crime, joblessness and strained public services. Yet, as a Ghanaian business commentator noted this week, the borders that now define who belongs and who does not were largely drawn by colonial powers to serve administrative and extractive interests. Before these lines existed, Africans moved, traded and lived across vast territories defined by culture and commerce. The demand that Africans “go back home”, he wrote, elevates nationality above a shared continental identity and ignores the structural conditions that drive migration.

The most direct intervention by a major business figure came from within South Africa’s own establishment. At the funeral of a Zimbabwean-born activist, Mcebisi Jonas, the chairman of telecoms giant MTN and a former deputy finance minister, delivered a eulogy that placed the blame squarely on state failure. “Foreigners can leave tomorrow – inequality will be with us,” he told the congregation. “Foreigners will leave tomorrow – unemployment will be with us.” He described the anti-immigrant sentiment as a cynical exploitation of public frustration by politicians whose sole purpose is “to be elected and re-elected”. Jonas also traced the roots of the violence to colonial-era tribalism, arguing that ethnic divisions were historically amplified to enforce indirect rule and are now being weaponised again.

For many, there is no safe return. Leanne Sefu, a 25-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo, arrived in South Africa at the age of three. After being attacked at the nail salon where she worked in Durban and chased from her home, she is now camping on a mattress on the pavement outside the Home Affairs office. “The entire world knows that there’s a war in Congo,” she said, “so me going back, it feels like going back to death.” As the 30 June deadline approaches, her vigil on the concrete, surrounded by dozens of others with nowhere to go, has become a quiet emblem of a continent’s broken promise.