Air Peace's Free Flights Home During South Africa's 2019 Xenophobic Attacks

A wave of xenophobic violence swept through Johannesburg and Pretoria in early September 2019, with mobs looting and burning foreign-owned shops and businesses, many belonging to Nigerian, Zimbabwean and other African migrant traders, in attacks that killed at least a dozen people and displaced hundreds more. Nigerians, one of the communities most frequently singled out in South Africa’s recurring cycles of anti-migrant violence, faced particular targeting, and the Nigerian government came under domestic pressure to respond to citizens caught in the unrest.

Into that response stepped Allen Onyema, founder and chief executive of the Lagos-based carrier Air Peace, who announced the airline would send an aircraft to South Africa to fly home any Nigerian wanting to leave, entirely free of charge. The first evacuation flight touched down at Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed International Airport on the night of September 11, 2019, carrying 187 returnees who arrived to a welcome organized at the airport’s cargo and Hajj terminal, with Onyema present in person to greet them. Video and photos from that arrival, showing an emotional Onyema embracing returning citizens, circulated widely on Nigerian and international media.

Air Peace’s evacuation effort did not stop at one flight. As demand from Nigerians wanting to leave South Africa continued, the airline organized additional free flights in the weeks that followed, including one carrying 315 more passengers, bringing the total number of Nigerians the airline repatriated free of charge to more than 500. Onyema pledged publicly that Air Peace would keep flying evacuees home for as long as people wanted to return, a commitment that went well beyond a single symbolic gesture and into a sustained, company-funded repatriation operation.

The episode became one of the more widely cited examples of private-sector humanitarian response to the recurring pattern of anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, a pattern scholars researching the phenomenon, sometimes labeled “Naijaphobia” in academic literature specifically addressing anti-Nigerian sentiment, have linked to economic competition, negative stereotyping of migrant traders, and identity-based political narratives rather than any single cause. Onyema’s flights offered no resolution to those underlying tensions, but they gave the roughly 500 Nigerians who boarded them a direct, immediate way out of a crisis their own government’s diplomatic channels were still working through.