Joburg fire: chronicle of 77 deaths foretold
City officials would have had to be blind to miss the clear fire risk at one of Joburg’s hijacked buildings. But what are the odds the blaze will change anything?
07 September 2023 - 05:00
“Why would you need a commission of inquiry into the Marshalltown fire?” asks Herman Mashaba, the former mayor of Joburg, after at least 77 people died last week in an entirely preventable blaze that swept through one of the city’s most notorious buildings.
“Notorious” because this five-storey building at 80 Albert Street has been synonymous with misery since it opened in 1954 as the Central Pass Office. A blue city heritage plaque explains that it “was an infamous checkpoint of the influx control system under apartheid. The ‘Dompas’, which controlled the movement of African people, was issued here.”..
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