The fire swept through Masiphumelele township in the middle of the night. It started just after midnight and grew to such a force that firemen could not contain it until six hours later. Not one of the 40,000 people in township slept throughout the night.
When the sun rose, 1500 shacks had been burnt to the ground – almost 5000 people displaced.
This is how my friend Sipho retold the experience to me the next morning:
‘We could smell the smoke in the air before we heard the shouting outside. I opened the door and went outside looking in the direction of the fire. The air was black with thick, heavy smoke. It was hard to breathe, hard to see. I could hear the fire rumbling in the distance, like a monster growling for food. I could hear the muffled shouting that the stiff wind carried to us from the direction where the smoke was coming from.
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| Cleaning up - the metal on the left will all be used again |
‘All you can do is pack as many of your things as you have time for and get out of your house. I knew I still had some time before the fire would reach me and I thought of my sister, whose shack was where the smoke was coming from. I ran towards the fire.
‘When I got there, it was like a movie...The fire was so big, it looked like it was moving in slow motion. It was ten metres high and 100 metres wide. People were running everywhere, carrying as much as they could and dragging their children behind them. I couldn’t get to my sister’s shack, the fire had already swallowed it.
‘I went looking for her, and found her at a friend’s house. She was fine, but crying. She had only had time to grab her ID documents and a handful of small valuables before the fire forced her to flee. She knew she had lost her house and all her belongings.’
I went to Masiphumelele that morning, after I woke up and saw the lights of the emergency vehicles in the distance from my bedroom window.
When I got there, the heavy smell of burnt waste lingered in the air. It was a grey day and rain was quietly falling, turning the ash into a black sludge.
If only the rain had come a few hours earlier.
The destruction I saw was immense. Hundreds of makeshift shacks made from wood and corrugated iron were burnt to the ground. Where once stood a maze of hundreds of haphazardly built homes was now reduced to nothing. What was left were charred cars, burnt furniture and melted plastic toys.
I heard stories of people who just had time to grab their children and run before the fire wiped out their homes. It is a miracle that only a handful of people died.
The black ashes had not yet cooled, smoke was still rising from everywhere, and yet people all around me were starting to clean-up, sort through the burnt rubble and to rebuild their homes with whatever useable materials they could find. Everyone was helping each other.
What else, but to rebuild, could they do?
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| What is left of the PASSOP Help Desk Office |
Whereas most other NGOs had their offices in the more developed part of the township, safely away from the maze of shacks that so easily light up in flames, our humble help desk office was in the heart of the township. It too got burnt.
My colleagues and I helped our neighbours rebuild and they helped us clean up. We felt proud to be one with, and be part of the community in such a sombre way. We heard that some of our volunteers and neighbours had poured water on our little office for hours in the middle of the night to try to stop it from burning down. They saved most of our furniture and supplies.
We repaid their loyalty to us by spending several days organising clothing and food donations and raising money to contribute towards all they had lost.
But in many cases, money or food or clothes, don’t provide the help where it is needed. One of our Zimbabwean volunteers had had an appointment to get married three days later – he lost his birth certificate and passport in the fire and so will now have to wait for many months, if not over a year, before the inefficient Zimbabwean authorities issue him with replacement documents.
It has been five days since the fire, almost all the shacks are now standing again. It looks like the same maze of wood and scrap metal shacks, leaning slightly to one or the other side, only now most of them are empty inside. No beds, no chairs, no stove, no pots and pans.
All of this - and all the little prized possessions - like a CD player or a fridge - takes people months and months of saving and borrowing to be able to buy. Now they have to start over.
But despite that, there was no feeling of resignation anywhere. The attitude was one of acceptance; as one local volunteer summarised: ‘It happened before, it happened now, and it will happen again. It’s part of life in a township.’
People have been hardened in the face of poverty, HIV/AIDS, unemployment, exploitation and other hazards, like fires.
How much tougher they are than us.
