DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) -South Africans rallied on Wednesday to protect their property after days of looting and destruction, lending a hand to struggling security forces as President Cyril Ramaphosa considered sending more troops onto the streets.<\/p>\n

More than 70 people have been killed in the unrest, the worst in South Africa for years, and hundreds of businesses wrecked. Food and fuel supplies are running short.<\/p>\n

Triggered by the jailing of ex-president Jacob Zuma last week, after he failed to appear at a corruption inquiry, protests have widened into an orgy of looting and an outpouring of anger over the hardship and inequality that persist in South Africa 27 years after the end of apartheid.<\/p>\n

Shopping malls and warehouses have been ransacked or set ablaze in several cities, mostly in Zuma\u2019s home in KwaZulu-Natal province, especially the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, and the financial and economic centre Johannesburg and surrounding Gauteng province.<\/p>\n

But in signs of a public backlash, residents in some areas on Wednesday turned suspected looters into police, blocked entrances to malls and in some cases armed themselves as vigilantes to form road blocks or scare them away.<\/p>\n

In Vosloorus, southern Johannesburg, minibus taxi operators, many of whom have guns, fired bullets into the air to scare off looters.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t just allow people from nowhere to come and loot here,\u201d said Paul Magolego, Vosloorus taxi association spokesperson, adding that taxi drivers had had no business since Monday because of the unrest.<\/p>\n

Underscoring the inherent dangers in such vigilantism, a 15-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet in Vosloorus, according to a Reuters photographer who saw the body. Magolego said the taxi owners arrived on the scene after he was dead.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Alexandra township in northern Johannesburg, one of the city\u2019s poorest neighbourhoods, a Reuters correspondent saw soldiers moving door-to-door to confiscate stolen items, with the help of civilians opposed to the looting.<\/p>