On Tuesday morning, business owners at Soweto’s Diepkloof Mall awoke to their offices and workplaces ransacked and severely damaged. 

The owner of a small medical centre in the facility, Dr Thabile Vezi, arrived to discover that her doctor's rooms had been overrun and looted.

“My thoughts were: ‘We’re a medical centre, we’ll be spared,’ mainly because we’re servicing the community in terms of their health needs, but also because there’s nothing to loot. It’s a medical centre,” said the devastated doctor.

Soldiers have been deployed to quell the widespread unrest in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.