JOHANNESBURG — This is a tale of two cities. One is Africa’s richest metropolis: glitzy shopping malls, gated estates, swanky restaurants and leafy streets. The other — where 76 people died in an inferno that engulfed a derelict building on Thursday — has garbage rotting in the gutters, jobless men drinking morning beers and an abundance of ads for abortion clinics and funeral parlors.
The building that caught on fire is in what’s still called the Central Business District, even though big corporations have long moved out to the safer suburbs, leaving behind abandoned office spaces that, in South African parlance, have now become “hijacked.”
That means people desperate for housing in a country where unemployment is among the highest in the world — officially at 33% but likely much higher — have taken to squatting in squalid conditions in the multi-story buildings, forced to pay rent to the criminal gangs that now run them.
This is nothing new in this city of 6 million but made headlines this week after the worst fire in recent memory prompted renewed calls for action and led to much political finger-pointing. Authorities are still investigating what exactly caused the disaster.
Jumping from windows
Survivors of the fire, which broke out early Thursday morning, described how they were unable to get out of the five-story building’s exit. Some jumped from windows and one mother threw her baby wrapped in a blanket out of a second-floor window to safety.
After fire-fighters extinguished the blaze, forensics teams collected remains, with white body bags laid out in the street in neat rows. Desperate family members searched for loved ones, while survivors huddled with the sparse belongings they’d rescued — blankets, a boombox.
Prudence Ndlovu, 29, stood in a crowd behind a police cordon, staring at the charred and gutted building that was her only home.
Paying rent to cartels
A Zimbabwean, Ndlovu is, like many of the fire’s victims, a migrant from a poorer…
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