Blog

May 26, 2023

South Africa Fire: Fire in Johannesburg Kills at Least 74 People, Including a Dozen Children

An early-morning blaze tore through a five-story building that had become a sprawling, informal settlement, officials said. The cause was not known. John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel They arrived in

An early-morning blaze tore through a five-story building that had become a sprawling, informal settlement, officials said. The cause was not known.

John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel

They arrived in desperation, unable to find anything better, safer or cheaper in a city with a severe shortage of affordable housing. They settled in a trash-choked building owned and neglected by the city of Johannesburg, paying “rent” to criminals.

Hundreds of people lived there, and on Thursday morning, at least 74 died there, including at least 12 children, in one of the worst residential fires in South Africa’s history. Flames devoured a structure that overcrowding, security gates, mounds of garbage and flimsy subdividing had turned into a death trap. Some victims leaped from upper windows of the five-story building rather than burn to death.

The disaster came as no surprise to residents, housing advocates or officials of a city that has more than 600 derelict, illegally occupied structures — all but about 30 of them privately owned — according to Mgcini Tshwaku, a city councilman who oversees public safety.

The buildings are home to untold thousands of South Africans suffering from a shortage of housing and jobs, and to migrants from other countries who come searching for opportunity, only to find a nation enduring its own economic crisis. And these urban squatter camps are routinely “hijacked,” residents say, by organized groups demanding payment.

Distraught people milled through the crowd gathered around the building in the downtown area, and went from hospital to hospital, searching for loved ones or anyone who might have scraps of information. Officials said at least 61 survivors were treated at several hospitals.

Looking for her missing brother, Kenneth Sihle Dube, Ethel Jack gazed up at his fourth-floor window, hoping that the dishes she could see still stacked there meant that his corner of the building had not been devastated. She saw bodies covered in foil blankets lined up in the street and spotted her brother’s neighbor, her face burned, shaken and crying.

“I’m just praying he jumped from the window and didn’t die,” Ms. Jack said. He turned up, alive, at a hospital east of the city.

Many of the dead were burned beyond recognition and would have to be identified through genetic testing, officials said. Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, a local health official, told reporters that of those identified so far, two were from Malawi, two from Tanzania and at least two more from South Africa.

People who knew the building said that after the fire began, shortly after 1 a.m., people could have been trapped in the darkness by security gates that were on each floor — though it is not clear which ones were locked — as well as the warren of subdivided dwellings within. Mr. Tshwaku said that bodies were piled just inside a locked gate on the ground floor that had prevented at least some of the victims from escaping.

The authorities said they did not yet know what caused the blaze, which appeared to have started on the ground floor of a building they said housed some 200 families. But in such buildings, where there is no formal electric service, people routinely rely on small fires for cooking, heat and light, and sometimes on dangerous amateur electrical hookups.

“I am surprised more fires haven’t happened,” said Mary Gillett-de Klerk, a coordinator at the Johannesburg Homelessness Network, calling the fatal blaze “an event waiting to happen.”

Visiting the scene, President Cyril Ramaphosa called the disaster “a wake-up call for us to begin to address the situation of housing in the inner city.”

“The lesson for us is that we’ve got to address this problem and root out those criminal elements,” he said. “It is these types of buildings that are taken over by criminals, who then levy rent on vulnerable people and families who need and want accommodation in the inner city.”

But the underlying problems have to do with political dysfunction and economics. Official corruption is endemic, and in the nation that the World Bank ranks as the most unequal in the world, many of the wealthy live in gated communities with private security, while millions of the poor live in ramshackle slums. Three decades after the end of apartheid, inequality still falls largely along racial lines.

Johannesburg’s chronically unstable municipal government has had six mayors in a little over two years, and has failed to address a housing crisis that, like other problems, some politicians have blamed on migrants. Different administrations and political parties accuse each other of graft and of causing political chaos and lack of public services. A fire department that is chronically short of resources dispatched just two engines to the fire on Thursday.

The sprawling building that burned on Thursday once housed offices of the apartheid government, a checkpoint for controlling the movement of Black workers in and out of the city. Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda, who took office in May, said that in recent years the city had leased it to a nonprofit organization that provided emergency shelter for women and children. It also housed a medical clinic.

The city last did a safety inspection there in June 2019, around the time the nonprofit moved out. Inspectors did not return because “we wouldn’t want to go into a hostile environment,” Rapulane Monageng, acting chief of emergency management services for the city, said at a news conference.

Afikile Madiya was living in the women’s shelter when the nonprofit left, and dozens of men started moving in, occupying empty offices on the top floor. They demanded fees from the women and starting moving many more people in, she said, cramming up to 10 people into a room and subdividing it with cardboard, corrugated metal or sometimes just a sheet. She soon moved out.

In October 2019, the authorities raided the building and arrested 140 people in an illegal rent scheme, said Floyd Brink, the city manager, but the case was closed in 2022 for lack of evidence.

New York Times journalists visited the now-gutted building in May while reporting for an article about the chaotic state of Johannesburg. They saw trash spilling out of second-floor windows, a heap of rubbish partially blocking the entrance and a courtyard crammed with corrugated metal shacks housing more people.

Neighbors described the building as a nightmarish shantytown frequented by drug dealers, where a woman was thrown last year from the fourth floor. They said pickpockets and thieves would disappear into the squalid building, impossible to find, while at night screams and what sounded like gunshots emanated from it.

After the end of apartheid, many Black people migrated from rural areas and townships to the city center, where they had been prohibited from living, creating a housing crunch. But since then, advocates say, the government has prioritized the building of private rental units that are priced beyond the reach of most South Africans and of student accommodations, while low-income residents fill long waiting lists for places in public housing.

“There are a lot of houses that are being built for those who can afford them,” said Thami Hukwe, the coordinator of the Housing Crisis Committee, a residents’ group in Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg. He said that the Black population was most affected by the housing crisis.

“We are not being prioritized,” he added, “especially the poor and the working-class communities.”

Beginning in the 1990s, many landlords, fearful of the direction of the new South Africa, abandoned downtown buildings and let them fall into disrepair, said Khululiwe Bhengu, a senior attorney with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, a nonprofit. The buildings slowly filled up with squatters, and officials say that criminal syndicates moved in, demanding payment from the new residents.

“People are occupying these buildings because there’s nowhere else where they can access the inner city,” Ms. Bhengu said.

Mr. Tshwaku, the city councilman, said he had started a program this year to inspect such buildings and get people to move out of them. So far, 14 of the more than 600 buildings have been inspected, he said, but it is not clear how many people have relocated.

That effort is hampered by the fact that, legally, officials cannot remove people from their dwellings, even those who are present illegally, without providing alternative housing, if the residents show that they cannot find new accommodations on their own.

Lynsey Chutel

In 2016, Afikile Madiya moved into the building on Albert Street in downtown Johannesburg where Thursday’s deadly fire erupted. Back then, she recalled, it was a shelter for women and children.

Ms. Madiya had just graduated from high school and moved to Johannesburg to live with her mother. But then her mother lost her job at an airline, and the family was forced to move into the shelter. They paid 50 rand a night, equivalent to a couple of dollars, and helped look after the children of other women living there.

The charity that ran the shelter leased the building from the city, Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda of Johannesburg said on Thursday. Then in 2019, the charity stopped operating there, for reasons that haven’t been clear. Officials from the charity weren’t available to comment.

Around the same time, dozens of men started moving in, Ms. Madiya said, occupying empty offices on the top floor. They demanded money from the women, in effect hijacking the building, she said.

The illegal landlords brought in more tenants and would cram up to 10 people into a room, subdividing it with cardboard, corrugated iron or sometimes just a sheet, she said.

“As a family, we would plan: If this building burns, how will we get out?” Ms. Madiya said.

Much of Ms. Madiya’s story was supported by local officials, and residents of neighboring buildings also recalled the arrival of criminal gangs in 2019. Floyd Brink, the city manager of Johannesburg, said during a news conference on Thursday that city authorities raided the building in October 2019 and arrested people for illegally collecting rent from tenants but that the resulting investigation was closed in 2022 for lack of evidence.

President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site of the fire on Thursday and said South African officials needed to do more to prevent situations like the one Ms. Madiya described.

“It is these types of buildings that are taken over by criminals, who then levy rent on vulnerable people and families who need and want accommodation in the inner city,” he said.

After the charity stopped operating, Ms. Madiya said, she got an internship with a digital marketing company and moved out of the building with her family. But she stayed in contact with friends who lived there.

She returned to the building on Thursday when she heard about the fire. There, she told The New York Times that one friend, a teenager, died when she jumped from the fifth floor to escape the fire. She was still waiting for word about another friend, a 36-year-old woman with two young children.

Richard Pérez-Peña

In addition to those killed, 61 victims of the fire were treated at hospitals, said Floyd Brink, the Johannesburg city manager.

Lauren Leatherby, Lynsey Chutel and John Eligon

It may take time to determine what started an apartment fire in Johannesburg early Thursday and why more than 70 people died. But witness accounts, imagery of the blaze and a visit to the site in May indicate that the five-story building had a litany of major safety issues that made it vulnerable to a deadly fire.

Preliminary evidence suggests the fire started on the ground floor, a local official said, and trapped many residents behind locked gates as it spread. While the precise origin of the fire is unknown, some of the earliest flames were spotted in a courtyard behind the building where people were living.

Without regular electricity, residents also used fire for warmth and light in the crowded building. Flammable materials like cardboard and sheets subdivided living spaces. Electric cables dangled from the ceiling.

John Eligon

President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site of the fire on Thursday and said it was important for the government to address the root cause of the blaze, which consumed a crowded, derelict building that was the only place its residents could afford to live.

“It’s a wake-up call for us to begin to address the situation of housing in the inner city,” he said.

He called the tragedy unprecedented. “Johannesburg has never had an incident like this where so many people die as a result of a fire in the center of the city,” he said.

He added that the police also needed to clamp down on criminals who extort money out of the residents of these derelict dwellings.

“The lesson for us is that we’ve got to address this problem and root out those criminal elements,” he said. “It is these types of buildings that are taken over by criminals, who then levy rent on vulnerable people and families who need and want accommodation in the inner city.”

Aaron Boxerman

Decades before a five-story building went up in flames in Johannesburg on Thursday, it was the seat of a feared office in the South African apartheid government tasked with regulating the movement of Black residents in the area.

White authorities expelled many Black South Africans deemed to have no right to live in Johannesburg, much of which the government had zoned for whites only. In 1954, the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department began to operate at the red brick building at 80 Albert Street, the site of Thursday’s fire.

Working at what was widely known as the “pass office,” the white staff issued, checked and revoked permits that governed where Black Africans could live and work, with the aim of maintaining white dominance.

A visit to the pass office could be a protracted and humiliating experience. “The snaking line of black bodies reminded me of prisoners being searched,” the South African writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba wrote in a literary account in 1980 of a visit to the “notorious” building. “That was what 80 Albert Street was all about.”

The office received provisional protection as a heritage site in 2011.

John Eligon

President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the site of the fire on Thursday, saying, “We’ve got to address this problem and root out those criminal elements. It is these types of buildings that are taken over by criminals, who then levy rent on vulnerable people and families who need and want accommodation in the inner city.”

Aaron Boxerman

Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, a local health official, told reporters that the authorities had identified two of the victims as being from Malawi, two from Tanzania and at least two more from South Africa. Some victims were burned beyond recognition, she said, meaning that officials will have to use DNA analysis to try to confirm their identities.

Lynsey Chutel

Officials said a dozen children were among the dead.

Lynsey Chutel

The city last did a safety inspection at the building in June 2019, before it was illegally taken over. Officials have not entered it since. “We wouldn’t want to go into a hostile environment,” Rapulane Monageng, acting chief of emergency management services for the city, said at a news conference.

John Eligon

Floyd Brink, the city manager of Johannesburg, said during a news conference that in October 2019, city officials raided the building and arrested people for illegally collecting rent from tenants in the building. This happened just months after illegal occupants took over the building, which had been a shelter for women and children.

Lynsey Chutel

A resulting investigation was closed in 2022 for lack of evidence.

John Eligon

Officials said 74 bodies had been recovered.

John Eligon

President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to visit the site of the fire this afternoon.

Emma Bubola

The building where dozens of people died in a fire in Johannesburg was the only option for residents who couldn’t afford to rent an apartment legally and were forced to squat in cramped, unsafe quarters, rights groups say.

“People are occupying these buildings because there’s nowhere else where they can access the inner city,” said Khululiwe Bhengu, a senior attorney with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, a nonprofit. “South Africa has made sure that townships and other areas are very far, far away from the inner cities.”

Her group works with people who are under threat of being evicted from occupied buildings to ensure that they do not end up on the street. She said that many of them are informal vendors in the city who make only a few thousand rand a month, or less than $200, and cannot afford even the lowest rents. At the same time, they need to be near the city center to work.

After officials lifted restrictions on movement that the government imposed in the apartheid era, experts said, many lower-income people moved to the cities in search of better opportunities. But there was not enough affordable housing for the influx.

The government, rights activists say, has prioritized the building of private rental units and student accommodations, which are more profitable than the public housing for which poor residents fill long waiting lists.

“There are a lot of houses that are being built for those who can afford them,” said Thami Hukwe, the coordinator of the Housing Crisis Committee, a residents’ group in Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg. He said that the Black population was the most affected by the housing crisis.

“We are not being prioritized,” he added, “especially the poor and the working-class communities.”

At the same time, Ms. Bhengu said, many landlords in the late 1990s abandoned buildings in the city center, wary of the uncertainty of a new democracy. These buildings have slowly filled up with those who could not afford to live elsewhere, she said, as poorer residents found makeshift solutions the government was not providing.

“There’s a lack of political will to keep poor people in the inner city,” she said.

Aaron Boxerman

Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, called the Johannesburg residential fire “a great tragedy felt by families whose loved ones perished in this awful manner.” Ramaphosa said he hoped investigations would lead to punishment for anyone deemed criminally responsible and would help prevent similar disasters.

Joao Silva

Bystanders gathered down the street from the apartment complex on Thursday, waiting for news on those still missing and for more information on what started the fire.

John Eligon

The building that caught fire in downtown Johannesburg on Thursday morning was one of more than 600 derelict buildings in the city that are being illegally occupied — or “hijacked,” as locals say — according to Mgcini Tshwaku, the Johannesburg councilman who oversees public safety.

About 30 of the buildings are owned by the city, while the rest are privately owned, he said in an interview.

This year, Mr. Tshwaku started a program to inspect such buildings and work to get residents out because of the dangerous living conditions. City inspectors had recently visited the building where Thursday’s fire occurred, he said, and found conditions similar to those of other structures that are considered risky.

Many lack fire escapes, extinguishers and sprinklers, he said, and they often have no running water, electricity or working bathrooms. Residents light fires for warmth and light, and that can easily lead to deadly fires, he said.

Preliminary evidence suggests that the fire on Thursday started on the ground floor, Mr. Tshwaku said. A security gate trapped many residents who were unable to escape, he added.

The operation to clear illegal buildings has inspected 14 of them, Mr. Tshwaku said. One challenge, he said, is that the city lacks the resources to provide alternative housing for people it evicts, as it is required to do by law.

Mr. Tshwaku said the city was trying to speak to tenants of dilapidated buildings individually to determine their needs. When residents can afford a place on their own, city officials work to help them find somewhere to go, he said, and that has helped reduce the number of people who have had to be placed into shelters or other housing.

Lynsey Chutel

Ethel Jack spent hours searching for signs of her brother, Kenneth Sihle Dube, after her family got word from a neighbor that the building where he lived was on fire.

A relative who worked nearby had rushed to the burning building. Then Ms. Jack arrived, just before 8 a.m. She saw bodies, covered with foil blankets and lined up in the street, awaiting collection.

She spotted her brother’s neighbor, who had burns on her face and was shaken and crying. In the chaos, the neighbor had not seen Mr. Dube.

Ms. Jack’s daughter went to hospitals in the city to look for him. In the meantime, Ms. Jack, 60, kept her gaze on the window of his fourth-floor room, hopeful that the dishes still stacked by the window were a sign that his home had been spared the worst of the fire.

Her brother, in his late 40s, studied law but could never find a job. He set up a workshop in the building’s courtyard, fixing cars to make money. He lived in the building for more than a year, paying 400 rand, about $20, per month for his room.

“I’m just praying he jumped from the window and didn’t die,” she said.

John Eligon

Preliminary evidence suggests that the fire started on the ground floor of the building, Mgcini Tshwaku, the Johannesburg councilman who oversees public safety, said in an interview. A security gate trapped many residents who were unable to escape, he said.

Lauren Leatherby

The fire broke out in the central Johannesburg neighborhood of Marshalltown, the city’s historic financial district, which has been the site of disrepair and many abandoned buildings in the last few decades.

Building where

fire broke out

ALBERT STREET

DELVERS STREET

Johannesburg

Site of fire

Building where

fire broke out

ALBERT STREET

DELVERS STREET

Johannesburg

Site of fire

Building where

fire broke out

ALBERT STREET

DELVERS STREET

Johannesburg

Site of fire

Source: Google Maps

By The New York Times

Aaron Boxerman

Robert Mulaudzi, a spokesman for Johannesburg’s emergency services, told South African television that seven minors had been identified among the 73 killed in the fire. The youngest was “about a year and a half,” he said.

John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel

Johannesburg was once a city of dreamers, a gold town that seduced prospectors from all over hoping to strike it rich. Lately, though, the city has been something of a political punchline, a metropolis where many residents’ spirits are as dark as the streetlights.

In May, after days of brinkmanship and arm twisting, the city inaugurated its sixth mayor in 22 months: Kabelo Gwamanda, a first-term city councilor from a political party that received just 1 percent of the vote in the previous municipal election.

His ascent capped the latest chapter in a political soap opera in which mayoral terms are measured in weeks and months and the inability of council members to stick with a leader has resulted in a municipal mess. Johannesburg residents have been the biggest losers.

While political leaders bicker over power and cliques, exasperated residents often struggle through days without electricity and water, dodge cratered roads and fret about dilapidated buildings, such as the one that caught fire on Thursday.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Gwamanda was at the scene of the fire along with members of the city’s coalition government. He blamed years of neglect for the conditions that led to the blaze, although he vowed that his administration would be accountable.

“This government is only six months old, and already we are facing historic challenges,” he said.

Lynsey Chutel

Mpho Buthelezi, who shared a room with her husband and child in the building, said she had managed to grab a television and computer screen while fleeing the fire. The family has lived in the building for two years, hiding each time the police raided it.

Without permanent work, she said, it was the only place her family could afford. “We survived by God,” she said, wrapping herself in the baby blanket that she had also saved.

Lynsey Chutel

One of the building’s residents, Sinenhlanhla Cele, said that she had woken to flames in the courtyard below around 1:30 a.m. The fire quickly spread, and she fled her apartment with nothing but a blanket. “We didn’t take anything,” she said.

Ms. Cele, 23, shared a room with another woman, paying 1,000 rand ($53) for a room with no bathroom or kitchen. She said she had moved into the building six months ago while searching for work in the city.

Aaron Boxerman

The current death toll in the Johannesburg fire is approximately that of the 2017 blaze at Grenfell Tower in London, which claimed 72 lives. The disaster at the London high-rise was Britain’s deadliest residential fire since World War II.

Aaron Boxerman

Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda of Johannesburg told reporters at the scene that the five-story building was owned by the city, which had leased it to a nonprofit organization that provides emergency housing for women. But he said the nonprofit had subsequently abandoned its operations there.

Lynsey Chutel

The Johannesburg building where the deadly fire occurred on Thursday was one of several places that journalists for The New York Times visited in May while reporting for an article about the chaotic state of the city, South Africa’s most populous.

Residents of an apartment complex across the street described the building, which was once an apartheid government checkpoint for Black workers, as a nightmare. It had become a huge squatter camp in a city in the grip of a housing crisis.

People in the neighboring complex said they heard screams at night and sounds that they thought could be gunfire or fireworks. Cars had been stolen from their side of the street, only to be found hidden on the other side of the building where the fire broke out on Thursday.

Pickpockets and thieves would target visitors and disappear into the squalid building, impossible to find, the neighbors said. Drug dealers hung around outside. In the courtyard, corrugated iron shacks had sprung up. Last year, a woman was thrown from the fourth floor of the building, several residents said.

When The Times visited, trash sagged out of second-floor windows. Another pile of trash, at least three feet high, partially blocked the entrance. A street vendor, balancing a crate of oranges on her head, skirted by the trash heap as she entered the building.

Emma Bubola

“I am surprised more fires haven’t happened,” said Mary Gillett-de Klerk, a coordinator at the Johannesburg Homelessness Network, calling the fire on Thursday “an event waiting to happen.”

She said that a dearth of shelters and affordable housing in Johannesburg had compelled many poorer people to squat in overcrowded buildings, sometimes with no sewage service or electricity.

Emma Bubola

Occupants in such spaces get by with makeshift systems to cook or light their spaces, she said, and squatters often divide regular-sized rooms into tiny subsections and rent them out.

“People live in really, really cramped conditions,” she said.

John Eligon

Speaking to the South African news channel ENCA, a concerned woman relayed how she had arrived on the scene to look for her daughter, who lived in the building. The mother, whom the station did not name, said that her daughter had been living there for more than a year and had struggled with drugs.

John Eligon

She had tried several times to check in on her daughter and drop off supplies for her at the building, but her daughter would shun her, the mother said. “Every time I come, she runs away,” she said, adding, “Everybody is saying she was in the building when the fire erupted, so they don’t know if she has survived.”

John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel

A blaze on Thursday tore through a building in Johannesburg where squatters lived in dangerous conditions, city officials said, killing at least 74 people and injuring dozens of others in one of the deadliest residential fires in South Africa’s history.

The authorities were still trying to determine what caused the blaze. It consumed a five-story downtown building that had become a dilapidated informal settlement where electric cables dangled in dark corridors and trash spilled from windows — a vivid illustration of a political crisis that has resulted in a severe lack of affordable housing in one of Africa’s most populous cities.

Officials said that many residents lit fires for warmth and light, posing a deadly hazard. Mgcini Tshwaku, a Johannesburg city councilman who oversees public safety, said that when he arrived at the scene of the fire, people were jumping out of windows to escape.

Residents and officials said that illegally occupied buildings like this one often housed South Africans suffering under the country’s housing and unemployment crises and immigrants who have struggled to find stability in a country gripped by economic woes. On Thursday night, President Cyril Ramaphosa called the fire a “wake-up call,” saying South Africa needed to do more to prevent these types of buildings from being “taken over by criminals, who then levy rent on vulnerable people and families who need and want accommodation in the inner city.”

Here is what else to know:

By midmorning, the fire had been extinguished and firefighters were combing the structure floor by floor, searching for bodies. At least 12 children were among the dead, according to the city’s emergency services, and at least 61 survivors were treated at several hospitals.

The blaze ranks among the deadliest residential fires in recent years. The toll already exceeds that of the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which claimed 72 lives.

Initial evidence suggests that the fire started on the ground floor, Mr. Tshwaku said, adding that a security gate had trapped many residents who were trying to escape. The building was one of more than 600 derelict structures in Johannesburg that are illegally occupied, he said.

Journalists for The New York Times visited the building in May while reporting for an article about the chaotic state of Johannesburg. They saw garbage sagging out of second-floor windows, a pile of trash partly blocking the entrance and a building so overcrowded that some squatters had erected tin shacks in the back lot.

Mayor Kabelo Gwamanda of Johannesburg said that the city owned the building, which was once an apartheid government checkpoint for Black workers. He said that in recent years the city had leased it to a nonprofit organization that provided emergency housing for women but that the nonprofit had subsequently ended its operations there.