I live in Avoca Hills on the north side of Durban. Choosing to live here seven years ago was a no-brainer for me. It was the perfect area for personal and practical reasons.
Avoca is less than 10km from my ancestral home in Dube Village in Inanda and is also close to many key amenities and locations in Durban, such as KwaMashu, Phoenix, the Gateway mall, King Shaka International Airport, the lovely beaches and the city centre.
Avoca is also not too far from one of the main scenes of looting and destruction, the Riverhorse Valley precinct, which flanks Queen Nandi Drive off the N2 northbound.
The firms and storerooms that were looted and gutted this week were built just a few years ago and I had the pleasure of seeing those businesses create some much-needed employment opportunities.
I know many people who were proud to wake up and go to work in these businesses, no matter how meagre their income. Some of them rent dwellings in nearby Quarry Heights, a settlement at the bottom of
Avoca, close to Queen Nandi Drive.
Our aunts, mothers, sisters, fathers and brothers will wake up tomorrow with no place of employment to go to. What do they do to survive? Some will join the criminal elements to keep their families alive. And as they do that, who will suffer?
On the other side of Avoca, as you go further north, I have sisters and mothers who were proud to wake up and eke out a living at the Bridge City Shopping Centre, built a few years ago to cater for the Inanda, Phoenix, KwaMashu and Ntuzuma area. In a matter of minutes, this monumental infrastructure was rendered useless on Sunday night.
Mothers who feed as many as 20 people in a single household will have no employment in Bridge City tomorrow and I don't know how long they'll be without a job and income.
Opposite Bridge City is the Bester Shopping Centre, which has a huge taxi rank and two major hardware stores that were looted and gutted. Same story: brothers and friends who work there won't have their jobs tomorrow.
In my village, we had a shopping centre off the Inanda Heritage Route called Dube Village Mall. It shouldn't have been called a mall, but its owners and shoppers fancied it as that.
It had, however, great potential, with a Shoprite surrounded by many small businesses, and a BP garage at the entrance.
The Bhambayi settlement is a stone's throw away from this "mall", but looters rendered it unusable on Sunday.
I count more destruction on the Inanda Heritage Route, right up to the Inanda police station, better known as Mtshebheni, where police couldn't stop people from looting businesses located a few centimetres from the police station.
Private security - which has its own armoured vehicles and is hired by business people running a shopping centre opposite the shops looted near Mtshebheni - ensured that these businesses survived the mayhem.
As all this was unfolding, I kept asking myself, "What's next? Who's going to be looted when there's no shop to loot or even no fellow looter to loot?"
The destruction caused a lot of friction between different races in Durban this week and I experienced this first-hand when I woke up on Tuesday and tried to get a few items and petrol in Durban North, a few kilometres from my house.
I was not let in. I no longer belonged among that community and was told the little they still had was for themselves and anyone not from there was not welcome.
People were protecting their territories but in doing so they were doing even more damage, harming people who had nothing to do with the crime. Not having stocked up, I had to do with the little I had.
On Wednesday morning I moved my wife and three daughters to a place where they could feel a bit safer, while waiting for things to cool down.
Looting may have slowed on Thursday, with soldiers and the police suddenly back on the streets, but bread-and-butter issues had not been resolved.
Long, snaking queues, akin to those we saw in the 1994 elections, formed around the few shops that survived in Inanda. Bread prices shot up to as high as R30 - more than three times the normal price. I bought four loaves for R25 each in Avoca.
The Ohlange garage, one of the two that survived in the whole of Inanda, was the only one to reopen on Thursday. Petrol ran out the same day.
The situation near my house remained volatile. Gunfire between the police and residents in the neighbouring Duffs Road settlement went on for hours, into the early hours of Friday morning.
I don't know what to make of all of this. I have so many questions and zero answers. Only chaos is standing in front of me, and as to when and how it will end, I don't know.
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