Smuggled to suburbia: no end to danger for Ethiopians looking for better life in South Africa

Original article by Rachel Savage in Johannesburg

On the evening of 5 January, residents driving through the suburb of Mulbarton in south Johannesburg saw five young men in the street dressed only in underwear.

They were later picked up along with seven other young men by South African police. Police said two were in a car involved in a high-speed chase. A 47-year-old Ethiopian man was arrested and charged with kidnapping and failing to stop when police instructed him to. The 12 men, originally thought to be teenagers but said by police to be 22 to 33, were charged with being in South Africa illegally.

The incident was just the latest involving young Ethiopian men and boys escaping from suburban houses in Johannesburg, where they were allegedly locked up in dire conditions while people smugglers demanded money from their relatives to free them.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimated in 2024 that as many as 200,000 Ethiopians live in South Africa. Yordanos Estifanos, who has researched the “southern route” from Ethiopia to South Africa, said his “educated guess” was that tens of thousands arrived each year.

Ethiopians have been migrating to South Africa since Nelson Mandela opened the country up to other Africans when he became president in 1994 at the end of apartheid, a few years after the brutal Derg junta that ruled Ethiopia was overthrown.

“There have been other political moments in Ethiopia which have inspired waves of migration from particular regions, particularly where there’s been repression in those places,” said Tanya Zack, whose book The Chaos Precinct profiles Jeppe, the economic heart of Ethiopia’s diaspora in downtown Johannesburg.

Aseged Yohannes arrived in South Africa in 2012 after fleeing Addis Ababa. He had been arrested and briefly imprisoned, after expressing support for an opposition party on Facebook and attending political meetings. “I did not feel safe there,” he said.

Yohannes caught a bus with three friends to Moyale on the Kenyan border. There, he paid 22,000 birr (then about £785) to a smuggler, with another 20,000 due on arrival in South Africa. They walked over the border at night, then drove across Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, taking about two months in total.

Yohannes claimed asylum, worked in spaza corner shops, sold clothes and now manages an alcohol store in a Johannesburg township. The 36-year-old considers himself fortunate to have had a relatively smooth journey: “It was luck. God first, actually. And I paid and then I found the right people [smugglers].”

Since then, the journey has become more dangerous and extortionary. In 2020, 64 people were found dead in a truck in Mozambique. The lucrative nature of the smuggling has drawn in more rival gangs, who sometimes intercept groups of migrants en route so they can trade them, said Estifanos.

The profile of the Ethiopians travelling the more than 3,000 miles overland has also changed. “Increasingly, the migration is inspired by economic opportunity here and lack of opportunity in Ethiopia,” Zack said.

Those who head south are now mostly following others from a region around the town of Hosanna in southern Ethiopia.

This was at least partially catalysed by Tesfaye Habiso, Ethiopia’s ambassador to South Africa from 2002 to 2004. He told Dereje Feyissa, an Addis Ababa University adjunct professor, that he arranged for dozens of people from the region, including 15 extended family members, to come to South Africa.

Estifanos said the migrants, who are mostly male, are driven by a combination of poverty in the largely rural area where they live and comparisons made with wealthy returnees and extravagant social media posts from people in South Africa. “It inculcates a sense of feeling inferior and left behind,” he said.

Sahlu Abebe’s brother, who migrated to South Africa in 2012, told Abebe not to follow. But three years later, he set out anyway. His brother had no choice but to pay the first half of the 63,000 birr (then about £2,030) smuggler’s fee.

In Tanzania, while travelling through a forest on foot, his friend fell sick with diarrhoea and vomiting and was left behind with another group. Abebe, now 36, assumed that he died, along with more than 40 others that he later heard had perished in Tanzania. “I was hoping to see him here,” he said, through a translator, at the township spaza shop he works at. “I never thought he would die on the road.”

His group was then arrested in Malawi, where he spent six months crammed in a jail cell with up to 90 others. “The route was the most painful thing, as a human being,” he said.

Abebe was not abused at the smugglers’ final stop in Johannesburg, something that appears to be a newer phenomenon. However, he did say he had been violently robbed twice in South Africa, where xenophobic attacks are also a constant risk.

Abebe said he would not advise others in Hosanna to follow him. “I can’t say that you must come this side,” he said. “It is not safe.”