In early August-seven months after South African President Frederik de Klerk officially launched the ending of apartheid, violence erupted in townships east of Johannesburg, taking more than 900 lives before it subsided several weeks later.
On the surface, the ironies were rank. The end of apartheid appeared to need a scale of formal state violence that exceeded anything in the ruling party's history. The return of curfews, machine guns mounted on police vehicles, and rolls of razor wire made Belfast seem tame in comparison; and the per capita rate of deaths was worse than Beirut by the time it had reached what was to be its halfway mark.
Operation Iron Fist, initiated by the government's Cabinet after 600 people had lost their lives, sent more police and soldiers to the townships than in the Soweto riots of 1976. And the failure of top anti-apartheid leadership to mediate between fighters wrought a sense of their abandonment of "people's struggles" that will take many sea-sons to lift from public imagination.
Worst of all, the violence appeared, initially, to be a war between the Zulu and Xhosa ethnic groups, lending credence to Conservatives' belief that the southern tip of Africa needs apartheid for the sake of peace.
ACCORDING TO RESIDENTS of Kathlehong, a township outside Vereeniging to the east of Johannesburg, the violence began on August 8 when a game of dice led to an argument, and a Zulu-speaking man was stabbed to death by a Xhosa. The following day, several Zulus attacked and killed the Xhosa man.
Reprisals were carried out by hostel dwellers, who are largely Zulu migrant workers from Natal, against residents, who are predominantly supporters of the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC is wrongly construed by Inkatha, a conservative Zulu organization, as a Xhosa-led party, prompting journalists to characterize the conflict initially as yet another flare-up of ANC-Inkatha violence in the country.
While the violence took between 10 and 100 lives a day, Zulu and Xhosa leadership were hastily convened on August 21 by the central government for a truce meeting. Predictably,the talks failed to achieve peace. And clearly, there was more to the fighting than ethnic rivalry.
Daily news reports carried body counts. Local mortuaries overflowed-literally. At one point some 40 corpses lay on the pavement outside the Germiston morgue, near the worst of the fighting, covered only by grey blankets and Transvaal flies. The macabre burnings, hackings, shootings, and stabbings became normal for a while, temporarily explained away as a historical conflict between two warring factions.
But the course of events took a sinister turn on September 13, when six masked gunmen boarded a Johannesburg train bound for the East Rand, and randomly began killing and injuring people. At the next station, a second gang ambushed hysterical passengers with knives, guns, and pangas (a stick with a sword on the end). Within a few minutes, 26 people had been killed and more than 130 wounded, regardless of their ethnicity.
THE TRAIN MASSACRE, THE unanswered questions about who was supplying the arms, the rumors that spread antagonisms like wildfire, and the origin of bogus pamphlets in Zulu hostels led the ANC, the United Democratic Front, and COSATU (a coalition of labor unions) to assert that an unknown organization was orchestrating a campaign of incitement and provocation. This assertion shifted blame from a blatant Inkatha offensive to a sinister force behind the scenes in which Inkatha impis (Zulu fighting forces) were willing participants.
The case for Inkatha involvement with conservative government officials in the police and military is believed by many observers to be strong. "There are damaging questions for de Klerk," declared one independent Afrikaans newspaper. Who were the white men (with masks or painted faces), it asked, who fought with Inkatha impis? Why is there so much evidence that police were partial toward Inkatha at the cost of ANC supporters? "The question therefore is whether there are factions in the police and defense force who are attempting to derail the de Klerk initiatives." Later, the same paper alleged that Inkatha troops were trained by the South African Defense Force in, among other things, "counter mobilization and the incitement of mass violence" in northern Namibia in 1988. South African journalists and politicians continue to debate the source of the violence with an unusual fervor. The political implications are far-reaching. Public definition of the conflict will influence South Africans' perceptions of the political configuration in the country and decisively influence voting in any ref-erendum proceeding from proposals for a post-apartheid constitution. And in this, perhaps, lies the real reason for the unprecedented flare-up of a minor conflict into a regional civil war.
A "benefits analysis" suggests thatblack and white conservative forces anxious to brand ethnicity as the definitive factor in the South African psyche were ready to seize upon a community conflict and turn it into an organized civil war.
While any number of "forces" may be waiting in the wings with the motive and the means to change the scene while major politicians do the acting, "force" operations are unavoidably dependent upon opportunity. Whoever turns out to be behind this "third" (or fourth or fifth) force that has fanned community conflicts into black civil wars in recent times, the culture of violence created by vicious cycles of protest and repression, poverty, and oppression continues in South Africa's townships.
ALMOST EVERY township that experienced the recent waves of violence has a remarkably similar pattern of infrastructural problems.
Tension exists between township officials known for their wide-spread corruption and progressive organizations that, since 1985, have set up alternative civic governments. Rent boycotts, for example, that have protested the existence of the black "puppet bodies" led in many cases to local council decisions to cut water and electricity supplies during August, some at the height of conflict. Chronic housing shortages have also created overflowing squatter camps with no services, which have traditionally been razed or ignored by central government.
And apartheid's worst creation--single-sex hostels for male migrant workers whose families live in bantustans hundreds of miles away--are profligate, accommodating in each case a significant percentage of township dwellers. These hostels generally house "ethnic groups" separately; and ethnic po-litical groupings, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party in particular, have been actively mobilizing Zulu hostel dwellers into impis since early this year.
Yet infrastructural solutions are the easy part of the problem. The ravaged South African psyche will be the toughest to resolve.
A study in one section of Soweto revealed that most residents are suffering from severe depression. Methodist minister Paul Verryn, a veteran counselor in various South African Council of Churches programs to help victims of apartheid deal with psychological traumas, said he had noticed for the first time a pervading depression in his Soweto congregation. And many of the symptoms of stress disorders listed by town-ship residents are not unlike those experienced by Vietnam combatants.
"How do you heal a generation of children whose knowledge of life and death comes from seeing friends and relatives and teachers killed or maimed by shootings, burnings, stonings, and hackings?" asks one journalist. Another reports seeing a refugee woman beating her child hysterically. "No one, neither concerned neighbors nor attending social workers, could pry her off," he wrote. "What did the child do? He lost his shoe. Meanwhile, displaced people all around are clinging to small illusions of normality. Women are taking out pots, raising fires, and calling their men to eat."
The aftermath of violence is always an attempt at normality. But, as one newspaper columnist here wrote during the height of the carnage, "some wounds do not bleed; those are the worst."
Beneath the veneers of getting back to normal life and normal news, and behind the programs of community reconstruction that will swing into gear soon, there is a layer of fear, anger, and violence that will be resolved, perhaps, a few generations hence. Until then, mediation, peacemaking, and trauma programs will be among the most important vocations in South Africa.
Lesley Fordred was a staff writer for Cross Times magazine in Cape Town, South Africa when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!