Gcina’s death could have been prevented at Cartrack
JOHANNESBURG – This is difficult to write because nobody wants to say it plainly. A young woman told her employer she was sick. She did this not once, but twice, in writing, with documentation from a medical professional. Both times, she was told to come to work.
Her name was Gcina Dhladhla. She was a call centre agent at Cartrack’s offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg. She is dead. I want to be careful here, because the facts are already enough without embellishment.
In the two weeks before her death, Gcina submitted two sick notes citing extreme fatigue and ill health. According to her family and colleagues, she was instructed to continue reporting for duty. She received warnings. She did not resign because, as she told her aunt in a message that has since become public, she had no backup plan and her job applications were going nowhere.
On the Friday before she died, a colleague watched her get on her knees on the call centre floor, crying, telling anyone around her that she was sick and that she had been rostered for a Saturday shift despite telling management she was unwell. “I’m sick, guys,” she said. “I’m sick and they still want me to come in tomorrow.”
She came in on Saturday. On Monday, she collapsed.
Rosebank Clinic is across the road from Cartrack’s building. Her aunt, Nomusa Dhladhla, was in Soweto when she received a phone call telling her Gcina’s pulse was dropping. Nomusa asked about the ambulance. She was told there was no reference number. She arranged a private ambulance herself, from Soweto. By then it did not matter.
Gcina was found in a toilet cubicle. She died there.
Cartrack’s director of corporate affairs, Lauren Human, said the company’s on-site first responders deployed immediately with a defibrillator, that emergency services were called without delay, and that Gcina had never been denied sick leave. The company says the family’s account is inaccurate.
I will not adjudicate between these two versions. What I will do is present what was already on record before Gcina died, because this is the part of the story that should make every working person in this country pause.
In October 2025, eight months before her death, a former employee at the same Rosebank building posted a video on TikTok. It was watched tens of thousands of times within two days. The video described a workplace that banned staff from using elevators. That locked their phones in lockers. That enforced silence in the stairwells. That had no canteen, so workers ate in a parking lot. That operated, in the words of the person who filmed it, on a culture of fear.
South Africans watching that video called on the Department of Employment and Labour to investigate. Cartrack’s response at the time was that their HR department had received no complaints. This is the same building. The same HR department. Eight months later.
On indeed, Cartrack scores 2.4 out of 5. That is 38% below the average for companies in the technology sector. The reviews are not new. They go back years. One reviewer, writing long before Gcina’s death, said this: “If you’re reading this, please don’t ignore the warning signs like I did.” Others describe being forced to work overtime without pay, management that pulls you down, a work environment that destroys your mental health, and favouritism so entrenched that your experience depends entirely on which supervisor you report to.
These reviews have public timestamps. They were written by people who put their experience into words and posted it somewhere visible because they wanted someone to act. Nobody acted.
There is one more thing I want to put on the record, because I believe it matters.
Nomusa Dhladhla told Sowetan that when Gcina collapsed, a manager from Cartrack walked across the road to Rosebank Clinic. Not to admit her. Not to arrange her care. To ask about the cost. The clinic is a three-minute walk from the building. Gcina Dhladhla never got there.
I have been a journalist long enough to know that companies respond to situations like this with statements that are legally precise and humanly empty. Cartrack has done exactly that. They have spoken about protocols and first responders and sensitivity. They have said all the correct things.
But there is a question their statement does not answer, and it is the only question that matters now.
When a young woman spends two weeks telling you she is unwell, when she gets on her knees on your floor and cries the day before she dies, when she sends her aunt a message at night saying she is drained and trapped and cannot find a way out — what, exactly, does it take for someone in authority to say: go home, rest, we will sort it out?
That question is not for the lawyers.
It is for the people who saw her and did nothing. For the HR department that received no complaints. For the Department of Labour that was called on to investigate in October 2025 and, as far as anyone can tell, did not.
Gcina Dhladhla submitted two sick notes. That is the story. All of it. And it was entirely preventable.