How The Last Country Amplifies Stories of Immigration and Belonging in South Africa

Parts of South Africa are once again seeing flareups of anti-immigrant sentiment targeting African foreign nationals. These are currently focused on physically denying “illegal immigrants” access to public hospitals and, as of early, 2026 preventing children of those perceived to be “illegals” from accessing public schools—mostly without concrete evidence or due process. Self-proclaimed anti-illegal immigration citizen-led organizations Operation Dudula in Johannesburg, Gauteng province and March and March in Durban, Kwa Zulu-Natal province have been in the news as their members man gates of public hospitals to check and deny access to those deemed to be illegal foreigners. Black African nationals, including pregnant people, have been blocked from accessing public hospitals. Amid this, the play The Last Country, developed from a selection of thirty stories of migrant women over an eighteen-month research process, has inadvertently become the theatrical clarion call and rallying point for those within civil society who work with migrants.

To create The Last Country, Empatheatre’s Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni, and Dylan McGarry worked with data collected by the Democracy Development Program, the African Solidarity Network, and the Urban Futures Centre based at the Durban University of Technology. I saw the production during its run at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in May-June 2025, after it had already been performed all over the country as well as at the National Arts Festival in 2024.

At the time of its conception between 2017 and 2019, The Last Country focused of issues of migration, gender, and social exclusion. Those same issues have now become part and parcel of the daily public debate, especially on social media platforms. These impassioned debates are often emotionally charged, and at times inflammatory, as politicians and government officials jostle to take advantage of the public rage at the perceived “porous borders,” which have supposedly led to the “invasion” by African foreign nationals. Thus, The Last Country serves as a reflection of a society that feels that it has not fully benefited from the more than thirty years of black rule and democracy, and which finds African foreign nationals as easy scapegoats for every social ill.

The Last Country moves the action around the stage fluidly, featuring a minimalistic set that uses props such as suitcases, paper files, and empty boxes to depict different aspects of the story. The stage becomes at one point the home countries three of the women characters came from and, at another point, the village from which a South African woman moved in search of greener pastures. In touching both on external and internal migration, The Last Country shows how the struggles of these women are connected. In each of their stories lies a nuanced and vivid narrative of the intersection of gender and migration.

 As each character traverses different spaces, from markets where they eke out a living to queues at Home Affairs to submit immigration documents, they share what it means to live as a woman who does not belong where they have been forced to settle and make home. Ofrah longs to bring her daughter, whom she was forced to leave behind when she fled war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); Aneni longs to get a scholarship so she can finish her studies before her immigration status makes it impossible for her to do so; and MaThwala longs to finally move back into to the home she has been diligently building in the rural area where she lived before moving to Durban.

The Last Country was staged in a theatre-in-the-round format, with the audience sitting on all four sides of the stage. This kind of public-oriented “theatre-telling” guides the production’s staging, placing a subtle demand on the audience to participate. An example of this is how one of the characters, MaThwala, engaged with and sat next to an audience member during the show as she spoke of how proud she is of the beautiful house she has built back in her rural area and asked that audience member his opinion on how the house looked. This approach follows in the tradition of African orature where “call and response” is integral. The audience are not just viewers but also participants in how the story is told.

The stories of women in our city, what they have in common and how they differ as they try and make the city a place like home, we felt was best shared in the living, breathing storytelling of theatre.

It is not a production designed only for formal theatre spaces with a proscenium stage and lighting; its value and efficacy lie in how researchers or members of the Empatheatre team facilitate the post-performance discussion after each performance. This discussion functioned as an Indaba, an isiZulu isiXhosa term that refers to a “conference” or “meeting,” like when communal societies would either sit around a fire or under a tree to discuss important matters affecting the community. In this forum, members of the community who watch the show are invited to contribute their input about what they have seen, discuss matters around the themes, and engage in debate through what they have witnessed in the production.

Dr. Kira Irwin was one of the scholar activists and a research lead during the data collection process. In articulating the role of the scholar activist and why it was important to have that framework, she defined scholar activism as “a way of describing academic research work that is embedded or working closely in solidarity with justice struggles on the ground. In short, it is when participatory research is used as a form of activism for social and environmental justice.” Dr. Irwin found that Empatheatre’s transformation of data into stories made The Last Country a powerful piece whose relevance has continued to show long after it was created:

What Empatheatre did was transform the beautiful oral history data, themselves rich and moving stories, into a powerful piece of public storytelling called The Last Country. While there many ways to tell stories, especially in the contemporary digital landscape of videos, images, and sound, theatre and performance is a deeply intimate form of storytelling in which the stories are shared with a warm, living heartbeat. The stories of women in our city, what they have in common and how they differ as they try and make the city a place like home, we felt was best shared in the living, breathing storytelling of theatre.

In centring the stories of Ofrah from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Aamiina from Somalia,Anenifrom Zimbabwe, and MaThwala from Ndwedwe in KwaZulu-Natal, The Last Country pays tribute to women from South Africa and other countries who are forced to leave home to search for opportunities and safety. Their stories were captured in the various languages of the migrant women who were interviewed; thus, the language nuances of isiZulu, Swahili, Lingala, Thiluba, French, and English were all utilized in the final production. Even when translated into English, which is the main language in The Last Country, the production still retains an authenticity that one could attribute to the researchers’ and the theatre makers’ efforts to be as faithful to the original languages as possible.

The Last Country has been staged in formal theatres, hostels, schools, universities, and community halls, as these are the spaces the communities depicted reside in. This has allowed those very communities who are facing challenges (in terms of sharing of resources and access to opportunities) to not only see themselves in the production but use it to discuss these issues they face.

Outside of the standard theatregoing crowd, The Last Country has been staged for diverse audiences including city officials, students, refugees, asylum seekers, non-government organizations (NGOs), faith-based organizations (FBOs), hostel residents, and community members.

As the world witnesses a rise in anti-immigrant sentiments, intolerance, and exclusion, productions such as The Last Country provide a much-needed platform for society to see, understand, and empathize with the so-called “other” by pushing back on the agendas of divisive politicians and conflicted media.

For Dr. Irwin, The Last Country is an important production and has had some successes, especially in convincing key players like City of Durban to better plan for migrants. However, she also feels the issues the play raised should no longer be as present as they still are:

In a way I wish that The Last Country could be performed now as a historic piece. But xenophobic attitudes and the violence it enables continues in our country. Internationally, the swing to [the] right politically and the rise of nationalism is also fuelling the rise of oppression and discrimination towards people seen as “foreign.”

As the world witnesses a rise in anti-immigrant sentiments, intolerance, and exclusion, productions such as The Last Country provide a much-needed platform for society to see, understand, and empathize with the so-called “other” by pushing back on the agendas of divisive politicians and conflicted media who benefit from pushing such agendas.

Ultimately, the migration stories of Ofrah, Aneni and MaThwala in The Last Country poignantly echo celebrated British poet Warsan Shire’s poem “Home,” which opens with these words:

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.