Driven out by hate, dumped into hardship: Zimbabweans fleeing South Africa find no home to return to

Samantha Chimbuya had built a life. Then a deadline, set by men with no authority to set one, took it away. Chimbuya, 30, left Zimbabwe in 2019 and settled in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she found work, could afford food, and believed her two children had access to better schooling and healthcare. As June 30 approached - a date by which the anti-immigrant group March and March demanded all undocumented migrants leave South Africa - she packed her belongings and went home to Zimbabwe. "It was not safe any more. They were raiding our homes, warning us to leave. It was scary," she told Al Jazeera from Mutare. The June 30 deadline was not imposed by the South African government, which insisted the day would be normal and warned against intimidation and violence. But fear did the activists' work for them. By July 28, 116,670 Zimbabweans had returned from South Africa, according to Information Minister Zhemu Soda - 36,940 with government assistance, 79,730 on their own. More than 160,000 foreign nationals fled altogether, including over 108,000 Zimbabweans and 46,800 Malawians; South Africa's Inter-Ministerial Committee says it processed 86,596 foreign nationals for deportation and repatriation between June 14 and August 20. The machinery is now permanent: a 24-hour command centre at Beitbridge, 50 state buses, reception centres for registration and clinics. And the deadline machine is starting again - March and March has announced a fresh September 30 deadline, a "second wave" it called "the mother of all protests", urging South Africans to "remain the eyes and ears of the police against any illegal foreigners." Panic has gripped foreign nationals anew. What awaits the returnees is the hardship they fled. Chimbuya has struggled to find work and relies on family and friends; her husband remains in South Africa, also struggling. She had hoped for a grant to start a small business. She has received nothing. Others describe arriving to find their original homes in ruins, no land, and the assets of a working life left behind. Many say they will try to go back - "use their connections to get the right papers, and return" - because, as returnees told researchers, they see no future in Zimbabwe given the state of the economy. South Africa, over the years, had become home: children in its schools, friends, a navigable life. Citizens Watch Zimbabwe says many migrants feel trapped between two cruelties: insecurity and periodic deadly violence in the host country, and at home, customs duties and import charges that strip them of the belongings accumulated over years of work abroad. President Cyril Ramaphosa says he is "deeply ashamed that people from other countries have suffered ill-treatment." Shame has not stopped the next deadline. The workers who built lives across the Limpopo are moved like pieces - by the mobs who set the dates, the borders that process them, and the economies that offer them nothing on either side.