When 33-year-old Princess Adjei set up her hair salon in downtown Durban in November, she had lived in South Africa since moving from Ghana as a toddler; there was no other place she called home. Adjei did all ​her schooling in South Africa, has local friends and speaks Zulu, the lingua franca of this eastern port city. It had rarely occurred to her that she was an ‌outsider. On May 18, demonstrators at an anti-migrant march broke into her salon and looted it. Suddenly, even people she knew started demanding that she go “home” to a country she’s visited once. Adjei is one of scores of victims of attacks on mostly African foreign nationals accused by an anti-immigration movement of being in South Africa illegally. Many of them have legal papers and deep roots here. “They took everything,” Adjei said, surveying the wreckage of her first-floor shop, amid smashed mirrors and broken chairs. “Those were hair ​pieces I was selling here,” she told Reuters, gesturing to a wall of empty hooks. “There were acrylic nails, six hair dryers, a range of shampoos. All gone.”

Full report : African migrants with deep roots in South Africa flee xenophobic attacks.