A real exercise!

On our way to a march at the SABC, Chris (Citizen reporter) and I get a call from the office, a bus is on fire near Lenasia, so we turn around and speed off towards where this bus is, eventually we come to some traffic. Taking a chance, I lean out of the car window and call a Metro-Police officer over, I explain that we're from the press, hoping that he will tell us how far the bus is away from us, he promptly stops all the cars and ushers us through, So, now we have the highway to ourselves and I'm telling Chris how astonished I am that we got that response from the police. We come up to the scene and stop, I jump out and run to the flames, after about a minute it dawns on me that even thought this scene includes two busses and a tanker on fire, there is no injured people around, but I carry on moving around shooting, then Chris comes up to me and says "Its a play", only then do I realise that the whole incident is a exercise to test the response of the emergency services.... Guess it was also a test for us... Maybe I should have cottoned on when I seen the spray paint on the tanker "Out of Order".

Refugee camps

A lone guard watches the empty tents of the Kaserne refugee camp near Johannesburg. The old Kaserne shunting station will be used to house thousands of refugees that fled from xenophobic violence recently .

The soon to be populated Kaserne refugee camp is in an old shunting yard in Johannesburg, but at least it has a roof, and the UNHCR tents are a far cry from the ones that most of these people had recently (if they were lucky!). The whole situation is really dire, these people cannot do anything to help themselves and will probably stay in these camps for a long, long time.

Some serious rubbish

South African Municipal Workers (SAMWU) members spread rubbish on the streets of Edenvale, Johannesburg. They are protesting about working conditions and pay. Wow, these guys sure made a mess, tipping over refuse bins, emptying them all over the street and lobbing black bags all over the place.
Even though I'm really not a fan of this (especially because I live in Edenvale), I do understand why they do it. The only time the municipalities will listen to anyone is when some form of action similar to this is done.
It's the same with the government, people can talk, people can shout, people can even beg, but it seems they only listen when it becomes a problem for them...

The fire spreads

A policeman secures a scene where locals burnt down a large number of shacks belonging to foreigners in Reiger Park, near Johannesburg.

Long time dead

The body of a foreign man whose head had been severely beaten lies on Main Reef road in Primrose last night. The pipe next to him was going to be used to set him on fire.Last night, a couple of colleagues and I were driving around an informal settlement in Primrose, Johannesburg looking for pics on the ongoing xenophobic violence that has spread from Alexandra to other areas around Gauteng. I seen a few men standing around a man lying in the street. We turned around and drove towards them, the man was very injured and they were about to set him on fire, we stopped and the crowd started shouting in Zulu at us to leave, we drove away fast to get the cops, hoping to save the guy from an agonising fiery death, as we were on our way to go to where we knew some cops were, I seen about 10 policeman patrolling between the shacks in the darkness, I jumped out of the car ( it was still moving, may I add) and ran towards the cops, understandably they were on edge, having been fired at a few times already tonight, as they seen me running towards them screaming "COPS!" each one of them raised their rifles and pointed them at me, about to shoot at me until I screamed as loud as I could" PRESS!!!!"....

Must admit, that was a bit hectic.

Anyway, when we got back there the guy was obviously a long time dead, as his head seemed to have been bashed with something very big and very hard.

But at least we tried...