Children died as mom went to church

Cape Town - A Khayelitsha woman fed her two young children and two nieces before leaving them alone to go to church.

She left the door unlocked as she did not plan to be long. But while she was out a fire broke out and the four children, aged between one and six, died.

The four young cousins were found slumped in front of their front door, the remains of the charred shack smouldering around them.

Lungiswa Vensile, her face wet with tears, could barely speak as she described her children’s desperate attempts to escape from the fire which burned down her home on Monday evening.

“They tried to open the door,” she said, shuddering. “They tried to get out but they couldn’t do it.”

Her daughters Azizipho, 3, and Zanele, 1, had been staying with their aunt and cousins in Khayelitsha’s Site B on Monday night.

Vensile was supporting her extended family with a full-time job so it fell on her unemployed sister Zukiswa Vellem to look after her nieces and her son, Alwaba, 1, and daughter, Ayakha, 6.

On Monday night, after she had cooked and fed the children, Vellem went to church. The infants were sleeping, said their uncle, the other two were glued to the TV. She later told relatives she had left the door unlocked as she only planned to be a few minutes.

But at around 8pm neighbours smelled smoke. Dressed in her pyjamas, Thumeka Fusa, a neighbour, rushed in to the street to find a tower of flames rising above the township. “People ran to help,” she said.

The flames were vicious and spreading quickly. As some tried to extinguish the blaze, most ran into their homes and began hauling their belongings on to the street to be ferried away in taxis and cars.

Fusa said fires in the township could quickly spread, destroying hundreds of homes in just a few seconds.

In the panic, nobody heard any children call for help over the hiss of the flames.

By the time Vensile got the call that her sister’s home was burning, firefighters had arrived. The distraught mother rushed to the scene, hoping her children were safe.

“I asked where are they? Tell me where my children are?” she said, sobbing on a couch in her home on Tuesday morning. “Nobody knew.”

Police said four homes were destroyed in the blaze.

Police said on Tuesday they would investigate the incident.

Cape Argus