It was these forces that were harnessed by the Inkatha political leadership and unleashed repeatedly in 1990 and 1991, in an attempt to ensure that it became a national political player. Tens of thousands of Zulus wearing red headbands and carrying spears, shields, machetes and the occasional assault rifle would surge out of the hostels and down Khumalo Street, a sea of chanting belligerence. At first they inflicted heavy casualties, until the formation of neighbourhood self-defence units evened the odds.
The conflict spawned an entire sub-culture. For the denizens, the map of Thokoza had been redrawn: Ulundi on one side, separated by the dead zone from the ANC neighbourhoods which had also been renamed. The three neighbourhoods surrounding the hostels most involved in the conflict became known as Slovo section, in honour of the Communist Party leader Joe Slovo; Lusaka section, with a nod to the Zambian capital where many exiled ANC leaders had found a home; and Mandela section.
In Mandela section, a group of young ANC fighters occupying a tiny cluster of homes in the northern-most corner of Thokoza somehow resisted the Inkatha impis. We got to know the self-defence unit there that was led by a man in his early twenties. He shared a nickname with one of the enemy hostels: ‘Madala’, they called him - ‘The old one’. He had been given the name by his fighters, most of them in their teens and still trying to balance schoolwork with warfare. From one of their bases bordering a dead zone, in a house deserted by its owners, the teenage fighters would keep watch through a brick-sized hole in the wall. The hole was large enough to fire out of, but small enough to present a minimal target to opposing snipers. The house was shared by a dozen kids and their even younger camp-followers - pre-teens who ran errands and assisted during combat. The yard would be swept clean most days when there was no fighting. The boys washed their own clothes and cooked their own meals. Racy girls would sometimes appear, especially for parties, but they were excluded from the mainstream of the fighters’ lives. Contributions from the neighbourhood residents enabled them to buy the food they needed, although some fighters took to crime to supplement the donations: Coco-Cola trucks were favourite targets for a hijacking when the boys needed money.
Some of the self-defence units earned a loyal following among the township folk, while others were simply regarded as gangsters. In Lusaka section, the fighters were proud of their heroic image. They wore bandannas and black T-shirts with ‘Lusaka Section SDU’ printed on them. They were extremely proficient in combat, silently using hand signals to communicate and moving like trained soldiers, which
they were not. They could strip and reassemble the battered AK-47s they used in a matter of seconds while under fire and they had young boys to carry ammunition clips for them. The idea was to keep the spare ammunition separate from the big machines in case they got picked up by the police or army - the scarce bullets were more valuable than the rifles themselves.
The ferocity of the fighting that engulfed townships on the Reef - the highly populated swathe of mining and industrial towns centred on Johannesburg - surprised South Africans. Various factors contributed to the volatile situation. Following the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the unbanning of the liberation movements, including the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Communist Party, political competition intensified. Decades of suppression and the liberation movement’s Marxist-influenced ideologies meant that there was no culture of political tolerance. Inkatha’s decision to transform itself from a ‘cultural movement’ into a registered political party - the Inkatha Freedom Party - and to establish a membership outside of the Zulu homeland, ensured that a climate of violence predominated. Years previously, in 1980, the KwaZulu homeland leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi had broken with the ANC when he agreed to take part in the homeland process, allowing him to gather power and a partisan homeland police force in KwaZulu-Natal province. This eventually led to open conflict with the various ANC-aligned groups inside the country, especially the United Democratic Front. The ANC by contrast refused to work within the system of apartheid, and a bloody war raged in the province for over ten years before the release of Mandela.
Within the white security forces there were government ministers, officers and foot soldiers who played an active role in helping to spark the dangerously flammable tinder that lay between the opposing sides by supplying weapons and training to Inkatha. After decades of government propaganda demonizing the liberation movements as part of an anti-Christian, Communist total onslaught against white South Africa, it was unsurprising that the average white policeman (like the average white citizen) loathed and feared ANC supporters. The
antipathy was mutual. The ANC and the more radical black consciousness Pan-Africanist Congress considered all policemen legitimate targets for assassination. Ordinary black citizens hated and mistrusted police as the arm of the law that harassed, arrested and tortured them.
Relations between the police and Inkatha, however, were a different matter. It was not uncommon to see a Zulu migrant raise his hands in a show of deference or call a white policeman inkosi - ‘my lord’. The bearded white AP bureau chief Renfrew, who might have been mistaken for a policeman on a bad day, told me how he had come across a Zulu castrating a dead Xhosa in the aftermath of a battle in Thokoza in 1990. The man with the knife had turned to him and said, ‘Please, my colonel, let me finish just this one!’
The Zulu’s attitude to Renfrew should not have been surprising; Inkatha and the white regime were using each other to gain an advantage over their political opponents - primarily the ANC. The same illegal strategies being employed by the government had been tested during the election run-up in South West Africa (as neighbouring Namibia was called while it was a South African protectorate - in effect, a colony). When Pretoria was faced with the inevitability of democratic elections, officials clandestinely set about fomenting communal violence in the hope of disrupting the elections and preventing a landslide victory for the former guerrilla movement, SWAPO. They failed, in the end, to do so, but the same regime and their covert units nonetheless redirected their energies to weakening the ANC powerbase, especially within the urban areas where the liberation movement had the vast majority of support. They stopped at nothing - from gunrunning and assassination to unlawful funding and crooked justice - to ensure that Inkatha weakened the ANC enough to upset their electoral chances. One early morning in 1990, for example, I arrived at Phola Park in Thokoza just 20 minutes after the sunrise. Xhosa warriors told me that they had killed a white policeman who had led an Inkatha attack on their shacks. The policeman had had black camouflage paint on his hands and face. He had lain in the grass for hours before the police managed to retrieve his body. I had just missed a picture that
would have proved the third-force theory. The first I had heard of the term ‘the third-force’ was in an ANC press conference in which they accused covert police and/or military units of provoking and indeed committing violence to disrupt black communities. It had become clear that there was a lot more to the killings than just the ANC and Inkatha attacking each other, and more than just police breaking up riotous situations.
One time in Soweto an army lieutenant complained to me from the top of his armoured vehicle that the police would not let him disarm an Inkatha impi that was rampaging through an ANC neighbourhood. Another then-inexplicable example of suspicious police behaviour was when I had raced to the scene of an explosion in Soweto, only to find white plain-clothes men, obviously cops, who threatened to kill me if I entered or if I took their pictures. They were wild, and clearly a law unto themselves. I complained to the uniformed police spokesman who was there, ‘You heard them threatening me, I am going to lay a charge!’ but he just kept walking me away from the house, he was clearly not going to side with me against them. Even though he was black, he was assisting his murderous colleagues. It was only years later that I discovered that the white men had been a part of the notorious Vlakplaas police unit responsible for assassinations, and that the explosion had been the sabotaged earphones of a Walkman tape-player exploding and ripping through the head of an ANC lawyer. Their real target had been their former Vlakplaas commander, Captain Dirk Coetzee, then being protected by the ANC in Zambia after he had spilled the beans on government hit squads. But Coetzee had not accepted the parcel mailed to him and it had been sent back to the return address, that of ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, who, of course, had nothing to do with the sending of the booby-trapped Walkman in the first place. The tape inside the Walkman was marked as containing evidence on hit squads. He died as he pressed the play button. I never did get a picture showing illegal police or third-force activity. None of us ever did.
In this houses closest to the Zulu area of Thokoza, residents’ lives
were tossed about like flotsam on an angry sea. The war advanced street by street, encroaching ever further into previously safe sections. Homes were burnt, windows broken, everything of value looted. Gardens were overgrown with weeds. These abandoned houses became front-line bases from which opposing sides sniped at each other, and soon one could hardly find a wall, iron gate or fence on Khumalo, Tshabalala and Mdakana streets that did not have a bullet-hole in it.
I had photographed much mayhem in Thokoza, but I had not been aware that I knew someone who had lost a loved one there. To find out that one of those many ‘violence-related incidents’ had happened to the woman who cleaned my house every Monday was disconcerting. Joyce’s granddaughter, Mimi, had lived on the very edge of that dead zone in Thokoza, in Nkaka Street. Just days before her death in August of 1991, Mimi had called Joyce to ask if she could come and stay with her in Soweto, some 30 kilometres away, as parts of the giant township were still untouched by the violence that had completely engulfed Thokoza. Joyce was delighted. Mimi was her only granddaughter and the apple of her eye, and she longed to see her again. The child had stayed with her from the age of one until she was four, while Mimi’s mother had looked for a place to stay, eventually finding a backyard shack in Thokoza. From then on, the child came regularly to stay with Joyce. Besides the ever-present threat of political violence, Mimi, just 13, was terrified of being jackrolled - the practice of certain criminal gangs of abducting and gang-raping girls for days at a stretch.
One such gang of thugs was the Bad Boys, a gang in Slovo section. They were small-time tsotsis, who had become increasingly brazen and dangerous in the now nearly-lawless township. They progressed from petty theft, mugging and burglary to armed robbery and hijacking vehicles at gun-point. One day in 1990, they had tried to rob the driver of a truck delivering milk to a neighbourhood store, owned by a Zulu businessman and founder of a small Zionist Christian sect, Bishop Mbhekiseni Khumalo. The bishop ran out of his store with the handgun he had bought especially for thugs like the Bad Boys, and fired at the fleeing tsotsis. One of the shots hit a woman in the street, killing
her. The Bishop claimed that the Bad Boys had killed her, but there were many eyewitnesses to the shooting. He remained unrepentant and grew increasingly belligerent, making the neighbourhood turn against him. The incident had happened at the time, in July 1990, when Inkatha, having changed into a political party, had begun a recruitment drive. The Bishop, a Zulu, asked for Inkatha’s protection in return for promoting membership in his area. The Bishop and his new henchmen - well-armed and blooded veterans of the political conflict in KwaZulu-Natal - became known as the Khumalo Gang, and led a campaign of terror to force people to join Inkatha or leave the area. In the prevailing atmosphere, audacious groups, like the Khumalo Gang, planned and committed assassinations of opponents with impunity and ran their territories like fiefdoms, exploiting the traumatized community even further. The Bad Boys themselves were quick to take advantage of the anarchy, and jackrolling was their pastime. If the gangster saw a girl they desired, they would wait for her to come out of school, or even take her right out of her home. They would keep the girl at their hideout and repeatedly gang-rape her until they grew bored - which might take a day or a week. They would then drop her back home, telling her parents that they had enjoyed their daughter and would come back for her some time.
One day, when Joyce returned home from work to her own backyard shack in Soweto, she found her niece waiting for her, looking very disturbed. Joyce grew nervous, guessing there was bad news. When she heard that Mimi had been killed, Joyce began screaming to drown out the words.
Joyce decided to go to Thokoza immediately, even though it was getting dark and there were very few minibus taxis around. She had to use a series of taxis to get to Thokoza. Once there, it was difficult to get one to take her all the way to the place where Mimi lived because the taxis stopped travelling by six in the evening. She found a taxi and pleaded with the driver to take her, explaining the situation. He reluctantly agreed to go as far as Natalspruit Hospital at the top end of Khumalo Street, but no further. Taxis belonged to associations clearly
affiliated to either Inkatha or the ANC and the driver would have had to drive through Inkatha territory to take her to her destination. She was now stranded over two kilometres from the house and the streets were eerily empty. People were too scared to be out after dark, so Joyce began to walk, both fearful of what she would find and of her own safety as she stealthily hurried along the dark streets that passed through the dead zone. She finally reached the darkened house, where Mimi’s mother Eunice and her surviving daughter had joined the landlady in hiding for fear of a further visit from the gangsters. In the gloom, Joyce heard how her granddaughter had been killed.
Mimi had been sick in bed with the ’flu and, at about eight o’clock that evening, Eunice sent her elder daughter to the shop to buy a tin of soup, because that was all the sick child would eat. On the way back she passed a gang of thugs that she recognized as members of the Bad Boys gang. They called out to her, telling her to come to them. The girl decided to make a run for it as she was close to home. They chased her but she made it home ahead of them and slammed the shack door shut behind her. Her mother was watching television with the landlady in the main house, unaware of what was happening in the backyard. The boys banged on the door, saying, ‘She is our girlfriend, we want our girlfriend; she is running away from us.’