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The burglar alarm screamed endlessly inside the Soweto clothing store.
No one paid any attention: there was nothing more to loot.
A crowd had casually laid bare the popular store, leaving only broken mannequins, hangers and empty shoe boxes strewn on the ground among debris and rocks.
In a nearby children’s store, the only item left was a poster of clothing. In a laundromat, there was just an old sign that said, “No checks. No credit. No cash refund.” Nearby, an ATM had been torn from the wall and was opened without a banknote in sight.
Diepkloof Square Shopping Center in Soweto is just one of the many shopping malls, factories and warehouses around Johannesburg and South Africa’s southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) that have been ransacked.
Troops walk past the remains of an automated teller machine (ATM) in the Diepkloof Square shopping center in Soweto. By Phill Magakoe (AFP) The violence and looting began on Friday, a day after former President Jacob Zuma began serving a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of the country’s highest court.
At the nearby Meadowlands shopping center, where 10 people died in a looting stampede on Monday, a metal shutter was sprayed with the words “Free Zuma”.
Opportunity
But the sign may have had very little to do with the looting itself.
Several looters who spoke to AFP said they were caught in a rush to grab free consumer goods, or the chance to make a life marred by poverty – and no one was there to help them. Stop.
“I’m really not worried about Zuma. He’s a corrupt old man who deserves to be in jail,” said a 30-year-old man who works in a car wash.
Suspected looters are transporting goods from the Game Warehouse in Durban. By – (AFP) He admitted to “taking things from the store for my mother” – stainless steel casseroles, meat and groceries.
“KZN Zulus can fight for him (Zuma) – for us it’s about poverty and unemployment,” he said, glancing nervously at any security patrol in the streets. .
“We went to take things when we saw that others were vandalizing and nothing was being done to (stop them),” said Karabo Mokone, a 24-year-old woman.
She said she just took what she could find in the hustle and bustle and she would sell what she didn’t use – “and make some money, because I’m unemployed, like you can see it, ”showing his old jeans and worn sneakers.
Standing in front of the mall, she saw soldiers enter a parking lot and munch on candy and crisps that she had looted from a store.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, in a nationwide speech on Monday, lambasted the looters and said he was sending troops to “restore order”.
But, for George Litle, 20, “the president has to understand that we are hungry – we go to school but we have no job.”
‘Where do I start?’
Business leaders are devastated.
Loss: Thandi Johnson weeps in his looted store at Diepkloof Mall. By Phill Magakoe (AFP) Thandie Johnson, 55, broke down, sobbing uncontrollably, after seeing what was left of her party supplies store at Diepkloof Mall.
“Why? Why? Can someone tell me why?” she asked, browsing through the remains of empty shelves and boxes.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
She had put all her savings into the business.
“I have nothing, no pension money, nothing. So where do I start?”
Godfrey Ratabane’s liquor store, a stone’s throw from Diepkloof, had surprisingly been spared despite a ban on the sale of alcohol imposed as part of restrictions on coronaviruses.
But he feared his store was next on target.
“I’m trying to get the police to help me move my stock from here to my house in Fourways,” he said, a posh suburb of Johannesburg.
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