There is a video that has been quietly circulating on South African social media for months now. In it, members of a group called March and March surround a man on a street. He is not shouting. He is not threatening anyone. He is simply there standing when the punches start. The men believed he was a foreign national. Whether he was or wasn’t, it didn’t seem to matter in that moment.
That video tells you something that no political speech or protest banner can. It tells you what happens when frustration becomes fury, and when a movement loses the line between advocacy and aggression.
This is the story of March and March and how, without ever stepping onto a pitch, they managed to follow South Africa’s football team all the way to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
A Movement Born from Real Frustration
To be fair, this article is not here to judge the concerns that gave birth to March, and March is not invented ones.
South Africa is a country under enormous pressure. Unemployment sits above 40 percent. Public hospitals are overwhelmed. Schools are stretched. Many South Africans feel that their government has failed them, and some argue that the large number of undocumented immigrants in the country has made an already difficult situation worse.
It is out of this frustration that March and March was born in 2024, founded by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a former radio journalist from Durban. The movement’s name signals its intent to keep marching, and keep marching, until something changes. At first, they stationed volunteers outside government hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal, asking patients to show ID documents before entering. Then they expanded. By 2026, they were in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, everywhere.
Few argue that the concern about illegal immigration is a valid one. South Africa has real immigration challenges, and its citizens have a right to ask hard questions about policy and enforcement. What has alarmed observers, human rights groups, and fellow Africans watching from afar is not the question being asked it is the way the answer is being enforced on the street.
Vigilantes at the Door
Observers have watched as March and March members arrive at foreign owned shops and businesses, not to protest outside, but to walk in and demand they close. No court order. No legal authority. Just the force of numbers and the threat of what might happen if the owner refuses.
In some cases, that threat became real. Beyond that, the circulating video of a man being punched by group members, reports have emerged of shops being closed and looted, families woken in the night and told to leave, of delivery drivers and street traders chased from corners where they have worked for years. Human rights organisations documented attacks in which people were beaten with golf sticks and sjamboks, heavy whips, and pepper sprayed.
It is worth stating clearly that the man in that video, the Cameroonian shopkeeper whose door was broken down in Durban, the Malawian national who died after an encounter with authorities during the unrest, none of them were given a chance to prove their status, appeal to a court, or even speak. The movement that says it only targets illegal immigration has, in practice, targeted anyone who looks or sounds foreign.
That is the line many South Africans and now, many Africans across the continent say has been crossed.
The World Cup Nobody Expected
Then came the FIFA World Cup. South Africa arrived at the 2026 tournament as a co-hosting nation and a proud participant. Bafana Bafana, “the Boys, the Boys” in Zulu, took to the pitch representing a country that loves football deeply, a country that hosted the World Cup in 2010 and danced in the streets.
But something had shifted.
When Bafana faced Mexico in their opening match, football fans across Africa were watching and a remarkable number of them were not cheering for South Africa. From Nigeria to Ghana, from Zimbabwe to Zambia, from Malawi to the Democratic Republic of Congo, supporters who would ordinarily back a fellow African nation were wearing Mexico colours, posting celebration videos when South Africa conceded, and openly explaining why.
These were not random football rivalries. These were countries that had spent recent months watching their citizens be beaten, displaced, and repatriated from South African cities. Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Congo had each seen thousands of their nationals caught up in the unrest, some evacuated by their own governments. Their football fans carried that grief and that anger into the stands and onto social media.
The boycott of support for Bafana Bafana became, without anyone planning it that way, the loudest international response to the March and March movement that South Africa had yet received.
A Team Caught in the Middle
Perhaps the most painful symbol of the entire crisis arrived in the form of a 23 year old defender named Ime Okon.
Okon was born in Johannesburg. He grew up in Randburg. His mother is South African. His father, who was Nigerian, died when Okon was five years old. Ime Okon has never lived in Nigeria. He has never played football there. He came through the South African youth system, earned his place at SuperSport United, and worked his way into the Bafana Bafana squad.
And yet, when his World Cup call up was announced, some March and March supporters said he should not play for South Africa. Because of his father. Because of a man he barely knew, who died two decades ago.
That moment, more than any protest march or government statement, captured what is really at stake. It showed that when a movement decides “where you are from” matters more than “who you are,” nobody is truly safe. Not the immigrant shopkeeper. Not the asylum seeker in the hospital queue. Not even the South African boy who grew up playing football in Randburg.
What the World Cup Exposed
FIFA did not cause the March and March movement. The organisation did not design the protests or write the placards. But by placing South Africa on the world’s biggest sporting stage at this precise moment in history, the World Cup did something important: it gave the rest of the world a front row seat.
The African nations that quietly redirected their football support to Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi were not making a political speech. They were doing something simpler and, in many ways, more powerful. They were saying, we see what is happening, and we will not pretend otherwise, not even for 90 minutes.
That collective turning away, broadcast across social media during one of the most watched sporting events on earth, amplified the story of March and March far beyond South Africa’s borders. It reached audiences who had never heard of Durban or KwaZulu-Natal. It put a human face, Ime Okon’s face, the shopkeeper’s bruised face, the face of a man being punched on a street, onto what might otherwise have remained a distant political story.
Where Things Stand
As of the time of writing, March and March’s self declared 30 June deadline for undocumented immigrants to leave South Africa has arrived. The South African government has repatriated thousands of foreign nationals. Communities across the country remain on edge.
The question South Africans are now being asked by their continental neighbours, by human rights organisations, and by the mirror that the World Cup has held up is not just about immigration policy. It is about what kind of country South Africa wants to be.
A country that solves its problems through institutions, courts, and peaceful advocacy? Or one where a group of men can decide, on a street, who belongs and who gets punched?
That question won’t be answered on a football pitch. But the world is watching perhaps more closely now than it ever has been.
This article was written based on observer accounts, publicly available reports, and the author’s own analysis of the events surrounding the 2026 March and March protests and the FIFA World Cup.