On average in South Africa over the last five years there are ten shack fires a day with someone dying in a shack fire every other day. Shack fires are not acts of God. They are the result of political choices, often at municipal level.

Shack settlements are a poor people’s solution to a lack of affordable housing, especially in cities. In eThekwini municipality, a third of the population, and around half of the African population live in shacks. This is around 920,000 people. 16.4 per cent or about one in six of all South African households live in shacks. The number of South African households living in shacks is increasing at more than double the rate of population growth and is now nearly two million.

People live in shacks for many reasons. People move to the cities from rural areas in search of work, tertiary education, and health care. People also leave formal housing to live in shacks when they can no longer afford that housing after a breadwinner dies or loses a job. They may also come to live in the shacks because they wish to escape family violence or to have their own home independently of their parents. Some people came to avoid political violence in the 1980s. However, it is hard to find work in the cities, and when people find it, they often don’t get paid enough to afford rent in formal housing. 60.7% of people in eThekwini live on less than R427 a month. Rent might be R500 a month plus bills.

Shack communities are often referred to as ‘informal’, as ‘temporary’ and as ‘camps’, but a survey in 2001 found that “over half of the household heads with informal dwellings have lived in their homes for between five and ten years and a quarter have lived in them for over eleven years”. Shack communities are not temporary. But because they are not in places that city officials call ‘suitable’, they are refused basic services and prevented from taking their proper place in the city. The lack of services is seen as a deliberate attempt to force people to leave their homes and accept relocation.