At least two people died and two went missing Wednesday as heavy snow and rain battered South Africa's southeast leaving swathes of the country without electricity, media reports said.

A homeless man in his 50s was found dead in a cardboard box near a nature reserve in Westville town, SAPA news agency said.

In Eastern Cape a three-year-old girl was killed when the walls of her house crumbled after torrential rains.

A man went missing after floodwaters swept his car off a low-lying bridge.

A paramedic whose ambulance veered off a bridge into a river on Tuesday, was also still missing a day later.

The snowfall forced the closure of parts of the highway linking Johannesburg and Durban, Africa's busiest port, for several hours, while train services in that part of the country were also cancelled .

The heavy snow and rain played also havoc with power transmission equipment, plunging parts of the region into the dark.

The country's meteorological department forecast that the weather would improve from Thursday.