When dawn came Mohammed could see both the shore and the dirt road that led away into the forest. The fishing boat, which had dropped him on a deserted stretch of coast in northern Tanzania, had long since disappeared. Now, as the sun came up, the 28-year-old teacher hoped the next stage of his journey would begin.

The day passed. Mohammed and the 12 other Somali men who had joined him on the boat sought shade under the thorny scrub. They had little water but shared a packet of biscuits bought in Kenya before their departure. By late afternoon it was clear they was not going anywhere. Night came again, bringing the roar and howl of wild animals.

“We felt very lonely,” Mohammed remembered.

Another day crawled by, and another night. Then, finally, the men heard shouting. Their guide had come. Their journey could continue.

Though they may have felt alone, the small group were part of something much bigger. The African refugees heading to Europe have received massive media coverage in recent months, but a far larger number seek security and prosperity elsewhere on their own continent.



“Immigration to the European countries is a huge thing in the media … but in the rest of African there is a lot of movement too,” said Marc Gbaffou, of the African Diaspora Forum, a Johannesburg-based NGO.

Exact figures are hard to come by but no one disputes that the numbers moving around Africa are much greater than those heading to Europe. The idea of an “exodus” from the continent is misplaced, experts say. Only two African nations were among the top 10 source countries for refugees heading to Europe in 2015: Eritrea in sixth, and Nigeria in seventh position. Of the world’s 17 million displaced Africans, approximately 3% are in Europe; the vast majority remain in Africa.

Those travelling within the continent face the same hardships as those seeking to escape it. Few African states welcome newcomers and transit visas are impossible to obtain. So many travel clandestinely. A dense network of interconnecting routes and trafficking operations carries migrants east to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, while the “southern route” leads 4,000 miles from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s richest nation, South Africa.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gemechu Alemu Lama, 18, and Tigisti Kebede, 17, crossed their arms in a symbol of protest while representing Ethiopia in an athletics tournament in Durban. They are now seeking refuge in South Africa. Photograph: James Oatway/The Guardian

Mohammed fled his home on the outskirts of Mogadishu because Islamic militants from al-Shabaab had threatened to kill him for refusing to send his teenage students for military training. His first destination was Kenya, but he decided to move on after a year earning a pittance giving religious instruction to the children of refugees. He thought briefly of Europe. But to reach the west without contacts, more money and better English was impossible. He headed south instead.

Recent years have seen a surge in numbers of those travelling within Africa. New conflicts in Burundi, Libya, Niger and Nigeria, as well as unresolved crises in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan have led to an overall increase of about 20% in the number of people displaced in Africa.

South Africa has attracted migrants from elsewhere in Africa for more than a century and the relative wealth and stability of the “Rainbow nation” still draws many today. The exact number of migrants in South Africa is hotly contested but it is likely to be between 1.5 million and 3.2 million, two-thirds of whom come from elsewhere on the continent, mainly neighbouring countries but also from as far away as Morocco or Eritrea.

Neighbourhoods such as Mayfair in Johannesburg are almost entirely populated by east Africans, with each nationality, ethnicity and faith clustered around a mosque or church and a restaurant serving a specific cuisine.

Over stew and flatbread, tales of the journey are told. Most migrants are forced to rely on traffickers and corrupt officials to reach their destination. Criminal gangs charge according to the needs of their customers. Equipped with visas and passports, a Somali in Kenya could travel to South Africa by bus in relative comfort and safety for about $2,000 (£1,600) in less than a week.

However, for someone with neither a passport nor visas, the cost would be greater and the risks much higher, as Mohammed found out.

He boarded a fishing boat that took him to the desolate shoreline in northern Tanzania in the Kenyan port of Mombasa. When their guide finally arrived, Mohammed and his fellow migrants were taken 800 miles by bus towards the border with Mozambique. Then, dropped far out into the bush, they started walking.

“We walked for seven days. Sometimes we had some food, sometimes nothing. We slept on the ground, and all the time we were scared, of animals, of just being left behind and dying there, or of the police,” Mohammed said.

Such fears are justified. Migrants often end up detained for months, or even years, in the states they try to cross to reach South Africa. Many hundreds of Somalis are held in Kenyan prisons. Scores of foreigners are detained in Zimbabwe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Getachew Sugebo left his home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to escape ethnic violence. He has been in South Africa for 12 years. He has been a victim of xenophobic violence and his shop has been broken into many times. Photograph: James Oatway/the Guardian

Others do not survive at all. “We hear of drownings in rivers, of people dying of snake bite, or being attacked by animals, or simply the thirst and hunger. For the young men it is better, but sometimes there are older people and children,” said one Ethiopian dissident who made the journey to Johannesburg last year.

Few such deaths are recorded, and only the most lethal accidents make headlines. In 2012, 47 people from east Africa died when their boat capsized in Lake Malawi. In June, the bodies of 19 Ethiopians who suffocated in the back of a Zambian container truck were discovered by DRC authorities.

In Mozambique, Mohammed and his group were met by a new guide who led them into Malawi. Once more there was a nocturnal border crossing. “My shoes were finished. I was feeling much pain. One guy fell and broke his arm, twisted his ankle. We had to carry him. At night it was too cold,” Mohammed said.

We walked across and found the police. They were kind to us

Once across, the group found shelter in a camp run by an NGO where they stayed for two weeks, gathering wood to sell for food. Then came the final leg of their journey: back into Mozambique, another march through the scrub at night into Zimbabwe followed by a long drive in a truck to the border with South Africa.

“We walked across and found the police and said we were refugees. We were bleeding; we had no food or water for so long. They were kind to us,” Mohammed said.

But the welcome soon soured. There have been repeated outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa, most recently in January and April 2015. More than 60 migrants were killed in one bout of attacks in 2008. The small grocery shops run by many new migrants are frequent targets of mobs.

Mohammed’s early enthusiasm for South Africa has dissipated. Earlier this year a gang burned and looted the shop he had started with a friend with savings painfully accumulated over the months since their arrival. His wrists bear the scars of where the attackers tortured him with implements heated on a stove, and he has depression and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They burned me, nearly killed me. This was the lowest time of all. After so much, so many sacrifices, to lose it all, to have nothing again. It is hard to get up again after that,” Mohammed said.

Of the four closest friends with whom he travelled from Somalia, three have been killed in violent incidents since reaching their destination.

Such attacks are fuelled by chronic shortage of jobs, housing and services. But researchers say violence is whipped up by political leaders, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, found.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abenego Mokom, 32, from Cameroon, arrived in South Africa four years ago to help his brother run a business. Photograph: James Oatway/The Guardian

Malusi Gigaba, South Africa’s home affairs minister, denied that planned reforms of the country’s overloaded immigration and asylum system would “shut the door” on foreigners. The new policy aimed “to build [an] industrial base and knowledge economy based on services and trade integrated with Africa and the world”, he said, though insisted his country needed migrants “who complement but do not replace domestic skill development”.

South Africa has the highest number of pending asylum claims in the world, with more than a million people waiting to be processed.

Gigaba told the Guardian “the country of [Nelson] Mandela [could] rise to the challenge”, adding : “We are working to expand our understanding of what it means to be South African. We are the country of the internationalist freedom struggle.”

Few think the flow of migrants on the southern route will diminish significantly soon, particularly as European resistance to accepting new migrants stiffens.

“Most countries make immigration decision based on national interests and don’t … care about the impact on other countries. You can’t intentionally destabilise other countries and then close down your borders,” Gigaba said, though he admitted official statistics so far showed no increase in arrivals in South Africa that could be linked to tougher western policies.

Others see the flow as inevitable, whatever happens in Europe. “They will come,” said Mark Gbaffou, the activist. “Some are rich and come here to get richer. Others are poor and are coming here to change their lives. Many just tell themselves they will be free in a foreign land, and that is enough.”