Zimbabwean Man Stabbed for His Passport by Cape Town Thugs

MAKUMBIROFA FARMS Advocacy & Human Rights

Advocacy & Human Rights

By Collen Makumbirofa  |  Makumbirofa Farms

Photo: Xenophobic violence in South Africa (file image, not the reported incident)

AZimbabwean man, Takudzwa Moyo, was stabbed by South African thugs who demanded to see his passport. These men were not police officers. They were not immigration officials. They had no legal authority to stop him, question him, or demand any document from him. They were simply men on a street corner who had decided that a foreigner’s papers were their business, and when Moyo could not satisfy them fast enough, they turned a knife on him.

After the attack, Moyo collapsed against a concrete wall, clutching a deep wound to his left side as bystanders scattered. He was rushed to Tygerberg Hospital, where surgeons operated on him for hours to save his life.

“He is not an illegal immigrant. He has an asylum permit granted by Pretoria Home Affairs.”

Moyo’s wife, Chiedza, has been clear about one thing: her husband did nothing wrong. He was in South Africa legally, holding an asylum permit issued by Home Affairs in Pretoria. None of that mattered to the men who attacked him. In the new climate on South Africa’s streets, a foreign accent or a foreign face is treated as a crime in itself, and due process has been replaced by mob judgment.

To date, no suspect has been arrested for what was, by any definition, attempted murder.

The Deeper Problem

South Africa’s crisis is not simply xenophobia — it is the collapse of accountability. The country carries a heavy burden of unemployed and desperate young men who have found in migrants a convenient target. When there is no work, no justice, and no consequence, criminality fills the vacuum, and foreigners pay the price for a economy and a state that has failed its own people.

This is making South Africa unsafe, not only for foreigners who live and work there, but for anyone who visits. We say plainly: Zimbabweans should think twice before travelling to South Africa. The rule of law has broken down. Once you are on the street, you are on your own. No police officer, no government department, no piece of paper can guarantee your safety. Anything can happen to you, and increasingly, it does.

“Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.”Exodus 23:9

The violence against foreign nationals in South Africa will not be ended by silence, and it will not be ended from inside South Africa alone. It must be answered in the streets of Harare, Maputo, Nairobi, Blantyre, Lusaka, and every capital across this continent. This is a new apartheid, dressed in different language but carrying the same cruelty — the sorting of human beings by where they were born, and the license that sorting gives ordinary men to draw a knife. Africa must stand up and demonstrate against it, loudly and together, because a wound to one African is a wound to all of us.

We continue to document these attacks, support the families affected, and call for accountability where none currently exists.

Collen Makumbirofa

Makumbirofa Farms