A man was assaulted with a weapon in Braamfontein and left bleeding after a group of shirtless men carrying sticks and shields diverted from the approved route of an anti-immigrant protest organised by March and March on Wednesday.
Police accompanying the protest appeared unable to direct the crowd back to the approved route. About a thousand people came from various groupings, including ActionSA and the MK Party, to support the anti-immigrant protest.
Video: Ihsaan Haffejee
An Ethiopian shopkeeper said businesses shut for the day over safety concerns and uncertainty about police protection.
“We are hoping that there is no looting and that the police can protect us. People are scared, that is the reality,” an Ethiopian immigrant told GroundUp.
Protesters had initially gathered at Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown and were headed to the Gauteng Legislature but broke away to march through Braamfontein and Hillbrow.
Residents also watched from nearby buildings. The marchers shouted insults at anyone they thought was an immigrant.
On Bree Street, business owners hurriedly shut their shops.
A memorandum of demands was handed to Premier Panyaza Lesufi. Attempts by Lesufi to address the crowd were met with boos, forcing him to withdraw.
Police accompanying the protest appeared unable to redirect the march to the approved route.
ActionSA councillor Tshepo Mposula said, “Illegal migration is a problem in our country. People must come into the country legally and when they are here, they need to respect our laws. The government is failing to address these issues.”
Some protesters threatened to return to Hillbrow but later dispersed after moving through parts of the inner city, with tensions easing near a park in Jeppestown.
SAPS spokesperson Dimakatso Nevhuhulwi said, “There were no incident recorded, it was a peaceful march.”
In a Hillbrow apartment people gathered on a staircase to watch as the protesters made their way through the neighbourhood.
In a recent Freedom Day address President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly condemned xenophobia, warning that concerns about migration must not turn into violence or prejudice.
In recent remarks, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has also strongly condemned recent xenophobic incidents in South Africa, describing them as “criminal acts” driven by individuals exploiting socio-economic tensions.
© 2026 GroundUp. This article is published under the GroundUp Republication Licence Version 1.0. Email [email protected] to request permission to republish.
Lack of access to education: Limited access to quality education, especially in rural areas.
Intimidation Station
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Morbid Sugar
Padkos – food for the journey [putt-koss] Food that you will pack and take on the road – some sandwiches, drinks, chips, fruit and biltong and you have your padkos!
Flotsams54
USSR: You have two cows. But you wish this was not the case, because in Soviet Russia, cow milk you.