The Nights the Gunfire Wouldn’t Stop
It was July 2021, and we were already well down the road toward leaving South Africa.
My wife, our two children and I had driven from our home in KwaZulu-Natal up to Pretoria. We were immigrating to Canada and needed to complete our biometrics at the Canadian embassy. It was one more step in a process that had already begun to make Canada feel real to us.
On the morning we left Pretoria to drive home, we had something very ordinary planned along the way.
We were going to buy jackets.
We knew Canada was cold—much colder than anything we were accustomed to—and there was a shop in Howick that sold warm jackets. So that was the plan: drive home to KwaZulu-Natal, stop in Howick, buy some proper winter clothing for Canada, and carry on.
But while we were driving south, something much larger was unfolding around us.
For some time, South Africa had been dealing with the fallout from allegations of corruption involving former president Jacob Zuma and the Gupta brothers. A commission of inquiry had been investigating what had happened during Zuma’s presidency. Now a warrant had been issued, and Zuma was going to be taken into custody.
His supporters began mobilizing.
My sister-in-law called us. She had friends in the police, she said, and reports were coming in that roads were being blocked. Burning tyres and rocks were being used to stop traffic. We needed to be careful.
As we came toward the bottom of Inchanga and continued in the direction of Howick, we could see traffic backing up on the other side of the highway.
Something was happening.
We left the N3 and found another way through. Somehow, we still made it to the shop in Howick. We bought those jackets for Canada and continued home.
We got there safely.
Then, the next morning, everything began to unravel.
Trucks had been set on fire at toll gates along the route between Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal. Some had been burned while they sat in queues, creating enormous blockages because nothing behind them could move.
Then came reports of shopping centres being attacked.
And then more.
And more.
There were disturbances elsewhere in South Africa, but in KwaZulu-Natal the unrest took hold. This was predominantly Zulu country, and Jacob Zuma had strong support there.
Shopping centres were looted. Stores were broken into and stripped. Entire malls were trashed.
The police simply did not have the capacity to contain it.
Within a remarkably short period of time, the world around us had changed.
I had worked in the security industry, so I was already connected with security companies and WhatsApp groups throughout our area. As the situation deteriorated, people began organizing themselves.
Within about forty-eight hours, our community had mobilized.
We created what was essentially a neighbourhood watch, although it quickly became much more than that. A control centre was established. People came in and registered themselves. We needed to know who was available, who was armed, and what each person could do to help protect the community.
The geography helped us.
Our area was hilly, with rivers and valleys, so there were only a handful of main roads by which vehicles could enter the surrounding suburbs. We closed them.
Whatever we could find became a barricade—rubble, fencing, makeshift barriers.
Then men from the community stood at those entrances.
We allowed residents through, but strangers could not simply drive into the neighbourhood anymore.
We were protecting ourselves because, at that moment, there was nobody else who could do it.
And every night seemed worse than the one before.
At home, we kept the lights off.
I would sit outside on the balcony with my son, keeping watch. I had my firearm with me and all the ammunition I possessed.
People elsewhere realized how desperate the situation was becoming. At one point someone chartered a helicopter from Pretoria to bring additional ammunition into our area.
That was the world we were living in.
At night we could hear vehicles exploding as they burned.
And we could hear gunfire.
Sometimes it went on through the night.
Automatic gunfire echoed from across the hills. Shots cracked somewhere beyond our neighbourhood, and there were moments when the place where we had lived our ordinary lives simply sounded like a war zone.
For me, there was another dimension to it.
I had served in the military.
Standing outside in the darkness and hearing that gunfire brought things back that I would rather have left in the past.
My son had gone to visit a friend, and eventually I had to go and fetch him because the area where he was staying was becoming too dangerous.
Then I went back out.
Groups of us patrolled the neighbourhood. We protected a nearby strip mall because there was still a shop there. We also helped protect Galleria, a large shopping centre close to us.
By then we understood something else.
Those shops weren’t merely buildings anymore.
They contained food.
And food was becoming scarce.
Milk disappeared. Baby formula became difficult to find. Diapers became precious. Basic necessities that nobody thinks twice about during ordinary times suddenly mattered enormously.
The elderly became vulnerable.
Families with babies became vulnerable.
People who could normally look after themselves suddenly couldn’t.
And that was when another side of our community began to emerge.
My cousins lived in Alberton, near Johannesburg. People there began gathering whatever they could—non-perishable food, maize meal, cooking oil and other necessities.
My cousin had a business with trucks. He loaded one of them, a ten-ton truck, with supplies donated by the community and sent it down to us.
The journey was dangerous.
Vehicles were being stopped and burned. Roads were uncertain. Nobody could guarantee that his driver would make it through.
But he did.
The truck arrived.
We unloaded the supplies and divided everything into food hampers. Then we began finding the people who needed them.
We went to elderly people.
We went to old-age homes.
We found families who were running out of food.
By then our community had become connected through WhatsApp and another phone application that worked almost like a two-way radio. Information moved quickly. Someone would hear about a household in trouble, and we could respond.
For those few days, the normal structures of life had fractured.
Yet another structure had appeared underneath them.
People.
Neighbours.
Families.
Men standing at barricades.
People gathering food hundreds of kilometres away.
A truck driver willing to make a dangerous journey.
Someone flying ammunition in by helicopter.
People checking on elderly neighbours.
People making food hampers.
People simply doing whatever needed to be done.
Eventually the government mobilized the military.
Convoys came into KwaZulu-Natal, and slowly law and order began to return. The barricades around our neighbourhood came down. Patrols ended. Gradually, we began moving toward something that resembled normal life again.
But it didn’t simply disappear when the roads reopened.
I can still remember my wife and daughter crying in the house because they were frightened.
I remember leaving them there while I went out on patrol.
I remember sitting in the darkness with my son.
I remember the sound of gunfire carrying across the hills.
And I remember what that sound awakened in me from my years in the military.
We had already begun the process of immigrating to Canada before any of this happened. We had already submitted documents and travelled to Pretoria for our biometrics. Those jackets we bought in Howick were evidence that another life was already somewhere ahead of us.
But after those nights, leaving South Africa felt different.
I was grateful to the Lord that the process was already underway.
That gratitude came with grief.
South Africa was home. Leaving home is not a simple thing, particularly when you have loved a place and built your life there. There was something gut-wrenching about watching what was happening around us and realizing that we were going to leave.
But those nights clarified something for me.
I could stand guard.
I could patrol the streets.
I could help build barricades and protect shops and distribute food.
I could do what was necessary to protect my family and my neighbours while we were there.
But when I thought about the future—about the generations that would come after us—I knew something had changed.
This was not where I wanted to watch my grandchildren grow up.
And somewhere among the barricades, the burning trucks, the food hampers and the gunfire in the darkness, those winter jackets we had bought in Howick began to mean something more.
We were leaving.
Canada was waiting.
