No one was in the dark about what was happening at 80 Albert Street.
In January 2019, a Johannesburg city official was so shocked by what she saw during a visit — seeping sewage, a sudden influx of squatters and children in filthy clothes roaming the hallways alone — that she called for the building’s health clinic to be immediately shut down.
“I was really angry,” said Mpho Phalatse, who would go on to serve briefly as Johannesburg’s mayor. The building, she said, was “quite frankly, not habitable.”
Neighbors were constantly complaining about the crime spilling out of it and the thugs who had hijacked it. It was a city-owned building that had been essentially abandoned. Residents begged police officers and firefighters for help. A 2019 report by city inspectors and provided to The New York Times showed scorched outlets and melted wires in the building’s rooms, clear fire hazards, all adding up to a steady drumbeat of increasingly worrisome signs.
On Thursday at 1 a.m., on a cool winter night in the center of what is perhaps sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest and most important commercial center, a fire broke out at 80 Albert Street. It quickly swept through the corridors and up the grimy stairs, fueled by the highly combustible makeshift barriers of cloth and cardboard that separated many rooms. As the flames spread, dozens of people, including children, found themselves trapped behind piles of garbage and locked gates.
At least 76 died, and in the days since, many pundits and ordinary people have concluded that Johannesburg officials were well aware that the building’s 600 or so residents were in danger — there was a clear paper trail — but nobody seemed to care.
“No one chooses to live in a hijacked building,” said Brian McKechnie, a Johannesburg architect and heritage expert. “They were only there because they were desperate.”
He added: “The city failed them. The injustice of it just boggles the mind.”
It is difficult to find a more apt symbol of South Africa’s disturbing past and troubled present than 80 Albert Street, a five-story red brick building that contains so much of what has happened in this country before the end of apartheid and after.
Completed in 1954, it is an imposing quasi-Brutalist structure, a statement of power and superiority that expresses exactly what it was used for: the dreaded Pass Office.
During apartheid, Black people had to line up here and wend their way through a labyrinth of condescending and threatening clerks to get a pass to travel to white areas where the jobs were. Mtutuzeli Matshoba, a South African writer, wrote a searing short story about it, ending with how he had to undress for an owl-like white officer to get his pass.
“You held yourself together as best as you could until you vanished from their sight,” he wrote. “And you never told anybody else about it.”
After apartheid, the building briefly flourished as a women’s shelter, and articles from the time express an…
2023-09-02 10:54:28
Source from www.nytimes.com
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