ABOUT 6,000 residents of Cape Town were left homeless when a fire swept through their informal settlement on Sunday night destroying shacks

The residents of Masiphumelele, near Fish Hoek, said it was one of the worst fires they had ever experienced.

One person was burnt beyond recognition, while another sustained serious burns.

Community leader Mpilikhaya Nyumbana told Sowetan that half the shacks and houses in the area had been wiped out by the eight-hour blaze.

"The fire started at 11pm on Sunday night. Nobody knows how it started because it started at the back of a wetland in those bushes," Nyumbana said.

"It is so wet there that we can't understand how a fire started."

He said 30 fire engines had tried to put out the blaze, but did not succeed.

"It blazed until 7am today (Monday). We found one dead person underneath a shack and we don't know who it is.

"Nobody can tell if it was a man or a woman," a distressed Nyumbana said.

ANC provincial chairperson Songezo Mjongile slammed the DA over the fire, saying because Masiphumelele did not have an internal road the fire engines had been unable to drive between the shacks and stop the fire.

"This is a catastrophe. It looks like Kosovo here. The worst part is that at 2am the fire had not yet reached the shacks and it could have been put out if there was a road for the fire engines to pass," Mjongile said.

Social development MEC Patricia de Lille agreed that the fire spread because the fire engines could not get into the densely populated area, but accused the ANC of playing politics.

She said at a public meeting yesterday that the city would help the residents rebuild their shacks and allow for fire breaks in between the houses.

Mother of three children, Nomveliso Mziba, had been given four wooden poles and four pieces of zinc by her friends and had started rebuilding her shack early yesterday morning.