EAST LONDON, South Africa – Before passing out amid the massive bodies, Simbongile Mtsweni gasped for air as a gas that felt like fire crept into his nose and lungs. “When I came to,” he said, “I was on the second floor and started vomiting when I realized I was lying next to dead people.”
Hundreds of young people, attracted by a Facebook post promising to throw a party with free alcohol and Wi-Fi at the end of the school year, flocked to a small, overcrowded tavern in East London, a city on the south coast. from South Africa.
Twenty-one of them, all teenagers, wouldn’t survive the night. Witnesses, investigators – the entire nation – are struggling to understand how a night of revelry ended with broken and bleeding young people on the floors of the tavern, called Enyobeni, in East London’s Township Scenery Park.
“We came for fun, not for corpses,” said Lubabalo Dongeni, an 18-year-old high school student, who was still limping five days after the incident.
A mass funeral was held on Wednesday where President Cyril Ramaphosa warned against underage drinking and proposed raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21.
The funeral was broadcast live on national television as the president and ministers sat within sight of the 19 coffins. Two families chose to bury their children earlier.
During the mass funeral, Dr. Litha Matiwane, an official with the provincial health department, raised the possibility that the deaths could be attributed to a stampede, while acknowledging testimonies of panicked people trying to flee the building. He said the cause of death is still under investigation.
Authorities have also said that the tavern’s liquor license will be revoked. But in the absence of an explanation as to why people died and with no publicly available autopsy results, there were plenty of targets for guilt and anger.
The permit given to the hastily built two-storey tavern with only one entrance is under investigation, the couple running it are under criminal investigation and a DJ performing there says the community is “gasping” for his blood. Speculation has run rampant about the noxious gas that filled the air, who released it, and whether it contributed to the deaths, the deadly panic, or both.
Six people who had been inside the tavern, as well as others outside, said in interviews that the combination of the mysterious gas, crowds of people and an airless room could have caused the tragedy. The dead were as young as 14, and most were under the age of 18.
Residents of the municipality are furious with the local police who spend hours answering emergency calls. Outside of East London, the episode has sparked a national debate about underage drinking and the place of alcohol in South Africa. Some people point to other systemic flaws, from the tavern’s location and construction to the lax enforcement of liquor license laws in townships.
The teenagers who were there that night are visibly traumatized.
Members of a high school boys’ soccer team were in the tavern, but a midfielder and the goalkeeper never got out. The team’s striker said he is now grappling with the survivor’s guilt.
A 19-year-old blames herself for helping her 17-year-old boyfriend get to the party where she died. When a group of teenagers recently visited the tavern to place white plastic roses at the entrance, they were overcome with emotion.
The entrance, a single brown-painted metal door, was the center of the chaos that night. The party was supposed to end at midnight on Saturday, June 25, but dozens of people were still trying to get in outside, according to videos taken with mobile phones. After 12.30pm the tavern went dark but no one flinched – power cuts are common in South Africa.
But when the flashing disco lights returned minutes later, a gas flowed through the ground floor, survivors said. Some said it smelled like pepper spray, while others compared it to tear gas.
People rushed to get out while those who were outside in the cold winter night tried to get in. At that point, bouncers closed the door, the witnesses said, and locked everyone in.
As dance music, a popular local style called amapiano, boomed on the second floor, people on the ground floor climbed over each other to get out, breaking the only two windows in a room no bigger than 350 square feet.
Brian Mapasa, a rapper who had just finished his set on the second floor, said he could hear his breath all around him. He was walking down to the exit when the door closed and the crush began. Captive people pressed against him so tightly that his legs went numb, he said.
Two people bit him as they tried to climb over him, he recalled, the semicircle of scabs on his forearms still red six days later. Mr. Mapasa said the gas tingled as it hit his wounds. He was feeling drowsy, he added, sinking to his knees.
The music didn’t stop until screams pierced the pandemonium, survivors recalled. The neon lights, bouncing off the yellow walls of swirling brown murals, illuminated bodies sprawled on the dance floor and the friends they couldn’t revive.
Some people jumped from the second floor. Only then did the bouncers open the lone door to carry some bodies out, several survivors said.
The bedroom window of Nolitha Qhekaza is located a few meters from the tavern entrance. When people jumped from the balcony, they landed on her roof. Dead and injured teens were placed in her front yard, she said. A girl with a broken leg lay on the floor of her dining room until after 7 am
In the early hours of that Sunday morning, Ms Qhekaza, a 55-year-old grandmother, called the police 10 times, from 2:25 am to 3:35 am, her call logs show.
Police and ambulances finally arrived around 4 a.m., neighbors said. As officers closed off the area, parents tried to push past the tape. Some of the unconscious victims were still in the inn, spread out on wrought iron benches or just on the dance floor – the dead and injured side by side.
Images of the scene circulated on social media. For example, some parents found out not only that their children had gone out that night, but also that they had died.
“My son was trending,” said Sidwenn Rangile, the father of the soccer team’s goalkeeper Mbulelo Rangile.
Unable to find his son in local hospitals, Mr. Rangile rushed to the morgue. At first he didn’t recognize his son’s body among the rows of corpses because the boy’s skin had turned so dark. Another victim, a 17-year-old, was similarly unrecognizable for hours after her death, said her friend, Sinenjongo Phuthumani, who was also at the tavern.
Even grieving parents like Mr Rangile have been criticized in the heavy coverage of the disaster.
“If there’s a finger to be pointed out, it should be pointed at all of us,” he said. “But it’s unfair to blame us.”
The innkeepers, Siyakhangela and Vuyokazi Ndevu, have shouldered much of the public condemnation.
The tavern, which shares a wall with several private houses, has long divided this community, where residents used their savings to slowly build their homes. Neighbors had complained of urine stains on the walls and empty bottles outside, parties that went on until eight in the morning and children throwing up in their gardens.
The Ndevus declined to comment.
Several neighbors said they met with police and an inspector from the Eastern Cape Liquor Board just three weeks before the disaster. But spokesmen for the liquor council and police both said they had no complaints about the tavern.
The tavern’s permit was granted in 2012, but the liquor council was unaware that the owner had added a second floor in recent years.
The liquor council last week filed a criminal case against Vuyokazi Ndevu, in whose name the license has been granted, for selling alcohol to minors. Police have not said whether they will file a complaint against her.
Nationally, the conversation has focused on alcohol abuse and unregulated taverns in South Africa, particularly in poor, mostly black townships. More than half of South Africans do not drink alcohol, but those who report heavy binge drinking according to the World Health Organization†
In Scenery Park, where drug use is on the rise, drinking in a tavern is popular among teens and is seen as the lesser evil, said football coach Ludumo Salman, who founded the high school football club.
Esethu Sotheni, who runs a non-profit organization for young people in East London townships, said: “I hope this will be a wake-up call as this is a reality across South Africa.”