Shack fires in South Africa

Fire is a serious hazard in shack settlements in South Africa.^[1] It has been argued that "On average in South Africa over the last five years there are ten shack fires a day with someone dying in a shack fire every other day."^[2] In 2011, 151 were reported to have been killed in shack fires in Cape Town.^[3] It was reported that in 2014, 2,090 people burned to death in the Gauteng province, "many of them in shack fires that sweep through informal settlements".^[4]

Causes of shack fires

Shack fires are often termed accidents but this has been contested by shack dweller's organisations.^[5] Martin J. Murray argues that by "recruiting human frailty or sheer accident to their cause, key city-builders have been able to rationalize municipal policy-choices that have accomplished little toward changing the circumstances under which the urban poor—who bear the awful brunt of these continuing cycles of death and destruction — tend to invariably find themselves in harm’s way."^[6]

Matt Birkinshaw lists the key reasons for shack fires as lack of land, lack of housing, denial of access to electricity, adequate water and to adequate emergency services.^[7]

Responses to shack fires

The charitable NGO 'Children of Fire' offers support for victims of fires, and in particular to children.^[8]

The shack dwellers' social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo has campaigned against what it perceives as the failure of the state to address the problem of shack fires^[9] and organised people to connect themselves directly to the electricity grid.^[10][11]

See also

• Lumkani, a social enterprise launched by South African Students to deliver a networked heat detector device to decrease risks of fire in rural and urban informal settlements.

Further reading

• Shack Fires are No Accident, School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005
• The Solution to Shack Fires is Electrification, Not More Training, South African Civil Society Information Service, 2008
• A Big Devil in the Jondolos: A report on shack fires, by Matt Birkinshaw, Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2008
• Murray, Martin J. (2009). "Fire and Ice: Unnatural Disasters and the Disposable Urban Poor in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 33 (1): 165–192. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00835.x.
• Selmeczi, Anna (2009). "… we are being left to burn because we do not count" : Biopolitics, Abandonment, and Resistance". Global Society. 23 (4): 519–538. doi:10.1080/13600820903198933.
• 'Getting electricity was so exciting', Interview with Zodwa Nsibande, The Guardian (UK), 2011
• In the wake of the Makause shack fire, the destitute and forgotten, The Daily Maverick, 2012
• Shack fires: A devil in the detail of development, The Daily Maverick, 2013
• Are some Cape Town fires hotter than others?, Rebecca Davis, The Daily Maverick, 2015
• "Where there is fire, there is politics": Ungovernability and Material Life in Urban South Africa, Kerry Chance, Cultural Anthropology, 2015

Notes and references

This page was last edited on 31 August 2023, at 14:41