3.6.2026
A Ghanaian woman is now fighting for her life in intensive care (ICU) after she was savagely attacked by angry South Africans wanting foreigners to leave their country.
According to the Ghanaian High Commissioner in South Africa Benjamin Quarshie, the victim who had valid papers to stay was attacked when she refused to pay extortion money to the assailants who came to her shop.
Quarshie who was speaking on Joy Prime on Wednesday said the attackers first requested documentation, which the woman provided, before demanding money. When she refused, she was severely beaten.
Meanwhile hundreds of foreigners fearing for their lives have taken shelter in community halls on South Africa’s south coast, saying mobs of locals were going door-to-door telling them to leave the country.
Mostly nationals of Malawi and Mozambique, many said they had fled their homes at the weekend and spent nights in the mountains and bush before making their way to the small-town community centres.
“They said ‘you are a foreigner, you don’t belong in South Africa, so you must go’,” Mozambican Thomas Vincent Baloyi told AFP in Gansbaai, around 110 kilometres southeast of Cape Town.
“I said, ‘no, I got documents to be here in South Africa’. They didn’t want to know,” said Baloyi, who has been in the country for nearly 16 years working in construction and gardening.
“They just chased us away like dogs… that is unfair because, actually, I’m a human being,” the 32-year-old said. “We just stayed in the bush until six in the morning.”