KwaMakhutha House Party Shooting Kills Eleven in South Africa

A knock came at the door of a small house in KwaMakhutha township late on the night of Tuesday, September 22. When someone inside opened it, the shooting started. A trio of gunmen pushed into the home, about thirty kilometers south of Durban on South Africa's east coast, and opened fire on the people gathered for a party inside.

At least eleven people were killed, including a woman who was pregnant, and three others were wounded, according to the Associated Press account of the KwaMakhutha house party shooting. Ten of the dead were pronounced at the scene, and the remaining victim died in a hospital. Police said they were searching for the gunmen, and no arrests had been made.

Nomusa Zulu, a member of the local community, said two of her sons were among the dead. She told the AP that witnesses described a calm evening: the victims had first gathered in the yard of the house, then moved inside as the night grew cold. "They heard a knock at the door," Zulu said. "When they opened the door, gunshots went off."

The motive remains unknown. Some of the victims were known to the police through criminal investigations, the police said, though they released no further detail, saying it could compromise the work. "Although the motive of the shooting cannot be confirmed yet, (a) feud between rival groupings cannot be ruled out," the South African Police Service said in a statement. Investigators were also looking into whether a torched car found near the house was connected to the attack.

A community living with the violence

Thami Ntuli, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal province, went to the scene and called the killings "really disturbing," according to the AP. He asked community members to come forward with anything that could help find the gunmen, and he pointed to known problems with drug dealing and illegal firearms in the area, a largely poor community where houses stand meters apart with no fences or walls between them. Ntuli confirmed that the woman who was killed had been pregnant.

The acting national police commissioner ordered a special operation to track down the suspects, with officers deployed across the area in the hunt for the shooters.

The attack follows a grim run of mass shootings in South Africa. In June, multiple shooters killed twelve people in a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg in an attack the police linked to criminal gangs, and a pair of mass shootings in December, fourteen days apart, left twenty-one dead, according to the AP. All were carried out by groups of gunmen.

The figures behind the headlines are bleak. Official police statistics recorded an average of nearly sixty homicides a day between April and June, and shootings are the most common form of killing in the country. Police and crime experts have long said the flood of illegal firearms in circulation is among the biggest problems. President Cyril Ramaphosa authorized the deployment of soldiers to the streets of some areas earlier this year to fight violent crime, a move critics described as an admission that the police were failing, according to the AP. The soldiers went to areas around Johannesburg, the city of Cape Town, and Eastern Cape province, but not to KwaZulu-Natal, where Tuesday night's shooting happened.

The violence is outpacing the response

The KwaMakhutha attack lands weeks after another South African crime story gripped the country: the Ekurhuleni killings, in which the bodies of nine women were recovered across the municipality east of Johannesburg over recent months, as GenZ NewZ reported earlier this month. That case drew an order from Ramaphosa to prioritize the investigation and a reward for information leading to arrests. It also follows GenZ NewZ's report on the Belleville synagogue shooting, in which an officer was wounded on Yom Kippur in Canada. The Ekurhuleni and KwaMakhutha cases, taken together, sketch a country where violent crime keeps outpacing the institutions meant to stop it.

For communities like KwaMakhutha, the question now is whether the killers will be found before they strike again. The police have their operation. The residents have the hope that someone talks, and little else.