The African Union Commission has condemned the violence in South Africa that has left 72 people dead.
Protests against the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma morphed into looting and destruction of property in some provinces.
“The [AU commission Chairperson] Moussa Faki Mahamat, condemns in the strongest terms the surge of violence that has resulted in the deaths of civilians and appalling scenes of the looting of public and private property,” the commission said in a statement.
The army was deployed to combat the violence and thousands have been arrested.
“The chairperson calls for an urgent restoration of order, peace and stability in the country in full respect of the rule of law,” the statement added.
He said failure to resolve the crisis would have “grave impacts” in the country and the region.
Protests which began after former South African President Jacob Zuma handed himself into police to serve a 15-month sentence have descended into days of violence and looting. The BBC has spoken to a few of the people caught in the middle.
“We are on fire,” Ian – not his real name – tells the BBC from riot-hit Durban in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province.
In the last three days, he reckons he has managed an hour or two of sleep at a time. He and his team – who work for a private security company – are surviving on energy drinks as they wait and watch.
They have given up trying to stop the looting which has destroyed so many buildings since protests calling for South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma to be freed from jail began last week. Ian has heard reports of three security guards being killed since the weekend.
Now, they are just protecting the neighbourhoods where they live.
“We’ve gone to a place where we are going to watch them stealing, we are not interfering with them – don’t harm us.”
In another part of Durban, a woman is preparing to make the 20-minute drive to her family from her home in a badly hit residential area. She doesn’t know if she will make it, or be turned back by one of the blockades which have popped up on the city’s roads.
But she knows she cannot bear another night of lying in bed listening to the gunshots.
“I am so scared,” the woman – who asked not to be named – told the BBC. “It literally feels like being in a war zone with gunshots, fires and smoke going up everywhere for the last two days.”
When the smoke clears, the best view of what is happening in Durban is from the air.
Jayshree Parasuramen, traffic reporter on East Coast Radio’s helicopter, could see it all: factories burning, trucks moved to block roads and “thousands” of people looting shops and warehouses, with cars waiting to collect their ill-gotten goods.
“They formed a shield around the areas they were looting,” she explains. “So, the entrances and exits were blocked, and a lot of people crowding around that area to not allow anyone or any motorists to pass.”
The people, she said, were also “heavily armed”.
“The amount of gunshots that we could hear was unbelievable – and then petrol bombs. We couldn’t even hover around those areas because of them opening fire, and then eventually we just had to land, because of the live ammunition that they were using.”
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