When a two-year-old girl was escaping from a burning high-rise building, her mother threw her to safety, safe and sound. South African Durban during the protest.
The 26-year-old mother, Naledi Manyoni, told Reuters on Wednesday that she had been on the 16th floor when the fire broke out on Tuesday.
She ran down the stairs with her daughter.
Manioni walked to a ledge above the street and threw the toddler to the group of people below. Onlookers screamed in horror.
“After throwing her away, I looked up in shock, but they caught her,” Manyoni recalled outside the building, her daughter sitting on her shoulders.
“She kept saying,’Mom, you left me there.’ She was scared.”
“The important thing is to get my daughter out of that situation…I can’t run away alone and leave her behind,” she said, and the girl in the red coat and hood mumbled and clapped her hands.
They stood on the street before burning and looting the store.
South Africa is in the throes of one of the most serious upheavals in the post-apartheid era, which began before President Jacob Zuma He was sentenced to prison last week for failing to appear in court for a corruption investigation.
The protests began on Saturday in Zuma’s hometown of KwaZulu-Natal, and quickly evolved into large-scale robberies, arson and riots in Durban and Johannesburg, the commercial hub of South Africa.
(Reporting by Siyabonga Sishi, writing by Promit Mukherjee; editing by Cynthia Osterman)
