Hafiz Idreess Nungu, 53, has been a South African for almost as long as South Africa has been a democracy.
Born in Zimbabwe to Malawian parents, he arrived in South Africa in 1992 to further his boxing career and became a naturalised citizen six years later. But sitting in the small house he shares with his family in Tembelihle, south of Johannesburg, with his two-year-old son Abdul Rahaman on his lap, citizenship still feels like something that has to be proved again and again.
His South African ID book records Zimbabwe as his place of birth. His son was born in South Africa but still does not have a birth certificate. For Nungu, the two documents tell the same story from different ends of a life. One belongs to a father who became South African but is still sometimes treated as foreign. The other belongs to a child who was born here but is still waiting for the state to formally recognise him.
“We still have the problem here now in South Africa for birth certificates,” Nungu says. “We tried to get it for him, but they said they need the mother. So the mother needs to fix some of the documents, and then I need to get married to her, and then after that, maybe we can get it and things will become better.”
He says the problem is not only the paperwork itself, but the maze that people are expected to navigate to get it.
“Even if you go to home affairs to do that, it’s a long process. I’m struggling at home affairs to get that appointment. When you go there, they tell you, ‘Today we are offline, today we are doing this.’ It’s a lot of stories.
“This is the problem in South Africa that we are facing as migrants. Not that people don’t want to apply. They want to apply and they know they need to apply for documents, but how to get it is another problem.”
Outside Nungu’s house, the immediate surroundings tell the story of neglect the entire community faces, with cars unable to pass the gravel road outside. Tembelihle, an informal settlement near Lenasia, has long been a place where residents have had to organise for the basics: land, services, housing and electricity.
These guys are trying to make us scared, but I’m a boxer. You can’t scare a boxer
— Hafiz Nungu
Nungu’s involvement in the Thembelihle crisis committee (TCC) places his migrant rights work inside that wider community activism. The TCC has long fought for development in the settlement, including for electricity, a struggle that has benefited South Africans and migrants living in the same streets. The organisation has also been credited with helping to prevent xenophobic violence in Tembelihle when attacks broke out elsewhere in the past.
Nungu says that matters because people in Tembelihle understand that poor services, broken roads and unemployment are shared problems caused by poor governance and service delivery, and not a specific group of people. Despite that, there has been a rise in anti-immigrant groups recently, blaming migrants for these failures and more.
Prof Loren Landau, co-director of the Wits-Oxford mobility governance lab, said the danger of anti-migrant mobilisation is that it creates informal tests of belonging that are not grounded in law. Once ordinary people or vigilante groups decide who may live and work in a community, legal status can quickly become irrelevant.
“It’s important to keep in mind that the victims of xenophobic attacks are not universally ‘illegal’ or, indeed, universally foreign. These groups don’t ask for documents, nor do they verify someone’s legal rights in the country. Rather, they use their own metrics — language, look, name, loyalty to a leader, et cetera — to decide if someone is worthy to remain,” Landau said.
Recent Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) research shows that anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa has hardened sharply since the Covid pandemic. Using data from the South African social attitudes survey, researchers found that by 2025 only 15% of South African adults said they would welcome all immigrants, while 42% said they would welcome none.
And this is where Nungu’s work begins: with people who are told to produce documents but are left to navigate a system that is slow, confusing and often hostile. Through his organisation, African Migration, he helps migrants deal with roadblocks, arrests, court processes and encounters with police. Many, he says, are not trying to avoid the system. They are trying to enter it, but are blocked by language barriers, bureaucracy and corruption.
The work has obviously brought threats. But Nungu, who first came to South Africa as a welterweight boxer to train under the late Gerrie Coetzee, says he will not be intimidated. His fight is no longer in the ring but is in the queues, offices and communities where the line between citizen and foreigner is being redrawn through suspicion and hostility.
“These guys are trying to make us scared, but I’m a boxer. You can’t scare a boxer,” he says.
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